Red Bull predict soaring F1 costs, highlight budget cap's fatal flaw

Matthew Scott
Friday 8 November 2019 13:00

Christian Horner says Red Bull has already started to make plans for its 2021 car, with costs across Formula 1 set to soar in 2020 as teams look to hit the ground running under new regulations.

Liberty Media's revamp will come into play in 2021, with new aerodynamic regulations and other measures introduced in an attempt to bring the field closer together and promote better racing on-track.

F1 will also impose a $175million spending cap on "performance-related costs" from '21 and beyond.

However, expenditure will remain unchecked before then, ensuring that teams currently outspending their rivals will continue to do so ahead of the first season of new regulations, prompting fears that F1's currently lopsided competition will remain in place through at least 2021, if not longer.

"You have an unrestricted and uncontrolled amount of money that you can spend on research and development across other areas," said Horner.

"For me, I stand by what I said previously. It would have been better to have introduced the cap first and then the regulations a year down the line, because then the budget cap would have constrained the amount of spend.

"Next year looks to be our most expensive ever year in F1.

"Now the 2021 regulations are clear, we have an advanced team starting to investigate those regulations.

"It makes it an incredibly expensive year because we are developing under two types of regs and before the new financial cap comes in as well.

"So 2020 will be an expensive and busy year, certainly off track and on track."