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Red Bull team boss Christian Horner says Lewis Hamilton is “obviously talking from personal experience” when he talks about a ban on early development.
Ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton called for a rule which would prevent teams from developing next year’s cars early in the season.
Since the ability to develop next year’s car early directly benefits the most successful teams, this rule would hit Red Bull the hardest.
Max Verstappen already criticised Lewis’ proposal and said “we weren’t talking about that when [Lewis] was winning his championships”, and now Red Bull team boss Christian Horner implies the same thing.
“[Lewis is] obviously talking from personal experience,” Horner said.
“I think it would be an incredibly hard thing to police. How on Earth could you say: ‘Right first of August, go.’
“How do you prevent people thinking about or working on next year’s cars?
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“We have a handicap system in Formula 1 through the reduction of wind-tunnel time. Franz [Tost’s AlphaTauri] team have almost double the amount of time that we have.
“That is a significant handicap, and I think Aston Martin will start to feel that when it is reset at the midpoint of the year.
“For us, we have to pick and choose very, very sparingly what are we going to commit to putting through the wind tunnel so it will have an effect and that system didn’t exist years ago.
“We will see that playing and I think the most important thing, and the history of Formula 1 demonstrates it, is stability.
“Not messing with the regulations will always create convergence and it’s just a period of time. That convergence is already starting to happen.
“By the time we get to the end of 2025, all the teams will converged, and then we screw it all up and go again in 2026 [when the new Power Unit regulations get introduced],” the Briton concluded.
