03/09/2023
NEWS STORY
Red Bull boss, Christian Horner says he is confident that F1's powers that be will not seek a means of handicapping his team in a bid to end its domination.
Over the years we have become accustomed to seeing one particular driver or team dominate - as has been the case with so many other sports - however the new breed of F1 fan won over by the likes of Drive to Survive and a relentless social media presence are not so patient and want to see their own particular favourites get a bite of the cherry.
For some time now there have been fears that the sport's owners, Liberty Media, with the assistance of the FIA, might step in and find a means of derailing the Red Bull steamroller and open up the championship fight.
Speaking at Monza however, team boss Christian Horner says he does not believe this will happen.
"The regulations are pretty stable," he told reporters in Monza. "We have three sets of regulations now: Technical, Sporting and Financial.
"The Technical and Sporting playing fields seem to be reasonably content," he continued. "The Financial one, there seems to be a little bit of manoeuvring now and again on. But I think that regulations are stable for the next couple of years.
"We fully expect our competitors... I mean, look at the jump that McLaren made recently.
"We fully expect there to be convergence, you know, even this year, before we head into 2024. I'm not aware of any draconian, significant regulation changes in the pipeline. We have that already for 2026, which will be a complete reset.
"Despite the fact that we've done a lot of winning this year, a lot of the races, including the last race, have been pretty entertaining. Or certainly, from where we were sitting, Zandvoort was. So yeah, I don't think that the sport is lacking entertainment at this point in time."
"I'm not a big fan of the balance of performance or any kind of artifice like this," added Frederic Vasseur, "it's not the DNA at all of Formula 1.
"And on the top, we have already the wind tunnel allocation, with a kind of balance, not balance of performance but balance of allocation and it's enough."
"We don't want to have any help," insisted Andrea Stella. "We want to close the gap by our own means.
"We like this challenge," he added. "That's what we want for the next couple of years.