Daniel Ricciardo
Ricciardo remains excluded from the results from the Australian Grand Prix.

Red Bull have lost an appeal against Daniel Ricciardo's disqualification from the Australian Grand Prix after the International Court of Appeal upheld the FIA's decision to punish the constructors' champions with breaking fuel flow rules.

Ricciardo finished second in Melbourne but was omitted from the final results after stewards found Red Bull to have exceeded the 100kg per hour fuel rate during the race, which breaks regulations introduced for the 2014 season.

Team principal Christian Horner claimed the sensor installed on each car for the new season by the FIA was faulty, and forced Red Bull to regulate the fuel flow themselves.

A statement read: "The Court, after having heard the parties and examined their submissions, decided to uphold the Decision of the Stewards by which they decided to exclude Infiniti Red Bull Racing's car No.3 from the results of the 2014 Australian Grand Prix."

A full explanation will be published later in the week.

A Red Bull statement read: "Infiniti Red Bull Racing accepts the ruling of the International Court of Appeal today.

"We are of course disappointed by the outcome and would not have appealed if we didn't think we had a very strong case. We always believed we adhered to the technical regulations throughout the 2014 Australian Grand Prix.

"We are sorry for Daniel [Ricciardo] that he will not be awarded the 18 points from the event, which we think he deserved. We will continue to work very hard to amass as many points as possible for the team, Daniel and Sebastian [Vettel] throughout the season.

"We will now move on from this and concentrate on this weekend's Chinese Grand Prix."

After being punished by the FIA after the race, Mercedes called for an additional punishment against Red Bull for a clear breach of the rules but the FIA have refrained from imposing any further sanctions.

"We are frankly concerned that Red Bull have shown such a flagrant and deliberate disregard for the rules," Paul Harris QC, acting on behalf of Mercedes, said.

"There is a real risk that they will do it again. We must have a level playing field. The most effective way of ensuring that Red Bull do not flout further written and oral instructions from the FIA for at least the remainder of this season is for this court to recognise the severity of their infringement and to impose a further sanction upon them."

Though Red Bull may have lost the appeal against Ricciardo's exclusion, the ruling ends fears the new Formula 1 season could be riddled with court cases amid the introduction of swathes of new technical regulations for 2014.