Christian Horner’s Ominous Admission As Red Bull’s Cost Cap Penalty Ends

Posted on October 28, 2023 | by Charley Williams “Sometimes my genius… It’s almost frightening” is the kind of sentence we expect from Adrian Newey, not Jeremy Clarkson. And Red Bull’s ability to come into the season with such a dominant car means we may never see the true impact of its now-expired cost-cap penalty.  And Christian Horner’s admission on how they’ve handled it is quite worrying – or exciting if you’re a Red Bull fan. After admitting a ‘minor’ breach of the $145m spending limit set in 2021, the team were handed a $7m fine and a 10% reduction in wind tunnel time for a 12-month period, starting from October last year. It has been suggested by many over the past year that the penalty was not harsh enough, especially with Red Bull still having the luxury of watching other teams struggle to stay within single-digit seconds of a dominant Max Verstappen. But Horner insists that, with a few races to go, we still haven’t seen the penalty’s impact, even as the gap is certainly closing to their rivals compared to the 30-second finishing margins we saw earlier this season. Though – and here’s the frightening part – that’s because they haven’t developed this year’s RB19 since the summer break, choosing to use all the time they had working on next year’s car ???? Christian said in Friday’s press conference: “It keeps moving around behind us, and of course, you have to remember that since the summer break, we’ve really added very little performance, if anything, to the car. “With the wind tunnel restrictions that we’ve had, we’ve elected to use that on RB20 – next year’s car – as opposed to continuing the development on RB19. “That’s not to say whatever we do now we don’t learn and apply for next year, but we’ve managed to be consistent at a whole variance of circuits.” He continued: “It obviously has compromised the amount of development we’ve been able to do this year. 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. “That’s been important.” So, if you were hoping for Red Bull to start on the back foot in 2024… we’re sorry ???? Do you think the cost-cap penalty has punished Red Bull sufficiently?