Red Bull design guru Adrian Newey admits to being "baffled" by the latest regulation changes he fears could scupper the team's title hopes this year.

From this weekend's British Grand Prix onwards, off-throttle blown diffusers - a system that generates downforce and in turn assists performance - have been banned.

But Newey stopped short of suggesting the FIA's clampdown, which comes after eight races of the season, has been put in place in order to stop Red Bull from running away with the titles.

At present, reigning champion Sebastian Vettel has a 77-point lead in the drivers' standings, whilst Red Bull are 89 points clear in the constructors' championship.

As the team that pioneered the device, Red Bull stand to lose more than any of their rivals.

"We'll be quite heavily affected because our car was designed around the exhaust," said Newey.

"Everybody else has, generally speaking, copied somebody else's principal - mainly ours - and adapted it to the car they had in pre-season.

"So it might be that because our car has been designed around it, it's going to be more of a hit for us, but it's very difficult to forecast."

Newey has no doubts another team could overhaul Red Bull's mammoth championship leads if they quickly adapt to the new rules and the Milton Keynes-based marque fail to do so.

"We're less than half the way through the championship (11 races remaining)," added Newey.

"So if somebody has the finish to the year as we've had the start to, then they could easily overtake us. We certainly can't take anything as read.

"But I'm slightly baffled by it (the regulation change) because it had been declared legal forever up until this race."

As the foremost designer in Formula One, nobody is expecting the wool to have been pulled over Newey's eyes.

However, he admits he has been forced to burn the midnight oil of late in order to re-design the car for Silverstone and beyond.

"It is quite a bit of work because we've had to re-optimise the car around a different set of parameters to that in which it was designed and developed up to this stage," said Newey.

"So we have had to look at the aerodynamics, how we operate the car, right down to things like whether it affects tyre life. It is quite a big change.

"Even now work is still going on, as I'm sure with every team, because whenever you make a change there is a lot of research and development that goes into that.

"It's also a difficult time of the year because this is when we are looking at next year's car as well.

"In a normal development cycle you split your resources at this time of year, but suddenly this year's resource has extra workload to cope with.

"Through the organisation there is extra load for something that was unexpected."