F1 | "Meeting budget cap has been painful" says Christian Horner
Christian Horner spoke to racefans.net about how hard has been for his team to measure and fit facilities so the budget cap is met.
Red Bull's path to becoming the four-time world champion team it currently is has been marked by several situations of rebranding. What was once the team of world champion Jackie Stewart became Jaguar Racing in 2000 to finally be acquired by the energy drinks company in 2005 and progress into today's Red Bull Racing Team.
The topic in the statements of the team principal Christian Horner, covered the budget cap established by Formula 1 for the upcoming seasons. Horner spoke to RaceFans.net about how the team has had to settle accounts to meet the $145 million that they must not exceed according to the F1 rules, and how, unfortunately, team employees who served since the days when the team was still Stewart Grand Prix have had to leave their jobs.
“We have so many activities as well where we supply, for example, a gearbox to Toro Rosso so those manufacturing staff are included within that number. So actually, bespoke working on the team, we would probably be at a similar number now.”
“We’ve had to go through the pain of redundancies over the winter. We’ve had to resize, repackage ourselves. And that’s really tough when you’re saying goodbye to members of the team, some of which have been there for 25 years across its different formats.”
“It’s been really a very tough exercise and continues to be a significant challenge, particularly for the bigger teams. It drives efficiency into the business because it quite simply has to, and headcount is your biggest cost. Therefore, it has to be efficient, as efficient as you can possibly make it.”
Although Red Bull is one of the top teams in the category, it has been proven difficult for them to handle money under the new rules set by the FIA. Toto Wolff, Mercedes’ team principal agreed with his colleague on budget cap matters, also speaking to RaceFans.
“We are really struggling to just come in below the budget cap, and we’re talking about tens of thousands of pounds and not hundreds of thousands.”
If teams like Mercedes and Red Bull are having financial battles, the smaller teams must be facing the same and harder challenges. We'll see what the season has in store for Haas or Williams, in Formula 1's bid to bring competitiveness back to the pinnacle of motorsport.
