“Full impact” of Red Bull’s cost cap penalty hasn’t been seen yet – Horner

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says the impact of their penalty for exceeding Formula 1’s cost cap two years ago hasn’t been seen yet.

A year has passed since the FIA penalised the team for exceeding the 2021 budget cap by £1.8 million. Part of the team’s penalty included a reduction on its aerodynamic development allowance over a fixed period, which has now expired.

The sanction has not stopped Red Bull dominating F1 in the meantime. The team has won 19 out of 21 races held in the last year and clinched the constructors’ championship with six rounds of the 2023 season remaining.

However Horner said it won’t be possible to gauge the final impact of their penalty until their 2024 challenger hits the track. “Certainly, you’ve not seen the full impact yet because it obviously has compromised the amount of development that we’ve been able to do this year,” he said.

“Thankfully, we came out with a very strong car at the beginning of the year and we’ve been able to apply most of that development time, from quite early in the season, to next year’s car. So that’s been important.”

Red Bull was the only team found to have exceeded the cost cap in 2021, the year it was introduced, while Williams and Aston Martin also committed procedural breaches. All teams were found to have complied with the cap in 2022, and Horner said the FIA’s investigation of his team’s finances had been extremely thorough.

“The process of the cost cap is evolving,” he said. “It’s a very complex set of regulations that have evolved and the degree of scrutiny this year was phenomenal, in terms of the rigour that the FIA went to. It was a full colonoscopy that we experienced during the summer.”

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Earlier this year the FIA announced a clarification to the budget cap rules concerning its interpretation of the distinction between teams’ F1 and non-F1 activities. Several teams, including Red Bull, have divisions which work on projects closely related to F1.

“The FIA are learning as well from their side, and the rules have evolved,” Horner continued. “Of course, every company is structured in a slightly different way as well which adds to the complexity, whether you’ve got subsidiary accounts or what your reporting group is, for example, so that has a bearing as well.

“So it’s a very complex set of regs and I think the FIA have actually done a pretty decent job from what we’ve seen over the last 12 months.”

F1 will introduce an additional cap on power unit development costs when new regulations are introduced in 2026. Alpine’s interim team principal Bruno Famin said this increased the complexity of ensuring it demonstrated to the FIA that its development expenses were correctly accounted for at its Viry-Chatillon engine facility.

“Now we are implementing the PU cap as well for 2026 then it’s very difficult,” he said. “In Viry, we are working on different projects: we’re working in Formula 1, in Formula E, in Le Mans programme and trying to assign the right expense to the right project is sometimes very difficult.

“The FIA is helping us, to be honest, to trying to make it clear as we are trying to help the FIA as well to improve their process because it’s so complex that it’s quite easy to make a mistake somewhere or to make a misinterpretation of what they want but there is a constant contact communication with them and we are working together on that.”

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