Horner believes that customer cars will be a short-term solution
The Red Bull team principal, Christian Horner, believes in the fact that costumer car models could be a short-term solution regarding the difficult period that is going on among the F1 context.
Christian Horner, Red Bull team principal, expressed his opinion regarding the position of the smaller teams within the Formula 1 championship. In fact, the British, in response to McLaren's CEO, Zak Brown, who expressed his opinion regarding the budget cap for the most important teams like Ferrari and Red Bull, Horner believed that F1 should fix on the "cost drivers" instead of give too much importance to the budget cap.
In fact, he advised the smaller teams to buy whole machines and to adopt a different strategy from the one they have purchased until today, that is, to buy separate pieces.
In an interview with Sky Sport F1,Christian Horner said: “If we were to go to a complete extreme, I would have no issue at all for a short-term period, for one or two years, to say to the smaller teams -‘you know what, let’s get rid of all of your R&D costs, let’s get rid of everything, you just need to be a race team, and we will sell you our car in Abu Dhabi. Take that car!’
“And that would be the quickest way to be competitive at a low cost.
“Now that would probably deal with four of the teams. Haas you would think, AlphaTauri for sure, Sauber, probably Racing Point. They’re all trying to copy each other’s cars anyway.
“And then that leaves those teams in the middle sector – McLaren and Renault – that are the odd ones out, but it’s always going to be impossible to get a compromise that suits everybody.
“A lot of the focus has been put on the cap at the moment when it’s actually the cost drivers that are where the most emphasis needs to be.”
“If you really are serious about taking cost out of this sport, I would’ve thought – if I was Finn Rausing or Gene Haas and I had the opportunity to go and buy a Ferrari or a Red Bull or a Mercedes and just run a race team for a couple of years, that’s what I’d do.”
Drastic measures have also been taken with regard to the new technical regulation of Formula 1 in 2023, in fact Horner supports the choice by stating that there has been an "agreement" between the teams to support these measures.
On the contrary, F1 and the FIA didn’t agree with the postponement of the regulation to 2023.
“As dear old Ron Dennis used to bang on, he said ‘if you want to save costs in this business, don’t change anything’ and he was absolutely right. And that’s why I have a slight problem with introducing a complete overhaul of the car for 2022.
“There’s not a single component that’s carry over from 2021 to 2022. We’re going to be forced to go tyre testing, build mule cars, and it just seems an unnecessary pressure on the system, to put that cost into 2021.
“So I would’ve pushed the rules a further year back into 2023, but if you’re a team – for example, Ferrari are saying ‘yeah, from a cost point of view we get it, we agree, but our car might not be that competitive, we want a clean sheet of paper’.
“And of course all the teams further down the order the order think that a clean sheet of paper will change the pecking order.
“In reality it will change nothing. But it will impose an awful lot of cost drivers into the business next year.”
