Christian Horner on the problems of new manufacturers

The head of Red Bull Racing Christian Horner believes that the financial concessions that new power plant manufacturers that participate in Formula 1 in 2026 are insufficient. Horner fears that new suppliers (mainly Porsche, with whom Red Bull will be working with) will be in a losing position compared to the manufacturers already present in Formula 1.

Financial regulations allow manufacturers to spend $95 million per year from 2023 to 2025 to develop a new power plant, but new suppliers are allowed to spend 10 million more in 2023 and 2024 and $5 million more in 2025.

At a press conference in Spa, Christian Horner called for an upward revision of these figures to allow new factory suppliers to spend more on development: “New manufacturers will face two major challenges. Firstly, they are already ten years behind, in which we comply with the current regulations for motorcycles, and they have to catch up.

Within budget constraints, the extra $10 million a year for newcomers is quite modest when you consider that the others aren’t building an internal combustion engine from scratch, but are continuing to use their current ones.

Another problem for new manufacturers is creating their own base from scratch. We built our production site in 55 weeks and produced the first combustion engine, a major achievement. However, the process of building a base itself takes a lot of time, and in the current time frame with current financial constraints, it seems unrealistic.

We want everyone to be on an equal footing. We don’t want to take advantage of other power plant manufacturers, but we want to have the same power unit performance as everyone else.

In fact, financial restrictions are introduced in the event that if one of the power plant manufacturers is unable to cope with the task, he is given the opportunity to adapt his work, and the rest will not go far forward during this time, as we saw in 2014, when the era of V6 engines began.