Horner demolishes Hamilton’s new idea to delay the F1 car

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Red Bull Formula 1 boss Christian Horner has rejected Lewis Hamilton’s proposal to legislate when teams can start working on their new cars to prevent periods of dominance.

Speaking over the Austrian Grand Prix weekend, seven-time world champion Hamilton acknowledged the championship was now in another period of one-team dominance due to the influx of ground effects currently enjoyed by Max Verstappen and Red Bull.

The Mercedes driver agreed that he has been the beneficiary of such levels of driving in the past, but believes this style of ‘super-diff’ will happen ‘again and again’.

To allow the field to converge, he therefore recommended that teams not be allowed to begin work on their car for the following season until a specified date.

He said, “When you’re 100 points ahead, you don’t really need to do a lot of development on your car. You can start earlier on your next car. With a maximum budget that means spending that year’s money on next year’s car.”

“But if everyone has time for example, if everyone knows when we can really start, whatever date, no one has a head start. Then it’s real racing in that short time period for the future car.

“Maybe it will help everyone be closer next year, maybe. I could be wrong. But something has to change. When we were winning the World Championships, we could have started earlier than everyone else.”

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes-AMG

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

However, Horner dismissed this idea before Verstappen scored his 10th consecutive Grand Prix win for Red Bull at his home circuit.

He believes that, in practice, such a proposal would be difficult to implement and the history of Formula 1 shows that the competitive system tends to converge when the rules are left alone.

Horner said:[Hamilton is] He is clearly speaking from personal experience.

“I think it would be very difficult for the police. How on earth can you say, ‘Okay, August 1st, go?’ How do you stop people from thinking about or working on next year’s cars?”

“We have a handicap system in Formula 1 by reducing the wind tunnel time that is in place. Franz [Tost, AlphaTauri team principal] Almost twice the time we have. This is a big drawback.

“Aston Martin [third in the constructors’ championship] He’ll start to feel that when he resets in the middle of the year. For us, we have to pick and choose very frugally what we’re going to commit to in the wind tunnel.

“So, it’s going to have an impact, and that system hasn’t been around for years, so we’ll see that play out, and I think the most important thing, and the history of Formula 1 shows that, is stability.

“Not messing with regulations will always create rapprochement.

You can see that convergence is really starting to happen. By the time we get to the end of 2025, it’s likely that all the teams will be so close together, then we’ll screw it all up and come back again in 2026.”

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