Horner: Customer cars 'fastest way to competitiveness' for small teams

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner reiterated his belief that customer cars represent the most cost-effective and fastest route to competitiveness for F1's smaller teams.

The global coronavirus pandemic has left Formula 1 with a disrupted season and a crisis, its chiefs scrambling to find solutions to mitigate the potentially devastating effects of the predicament on the sport's smaller outfits.

Next year will see the introduction of a long-awaited budget cap, although its final level is still the subject of an ongoing debate between F1 and the teams.

But Horner is urging F1 to take advantage of its current quandary and adopt a bolder approach to the sport's economics.

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Among the ideas promoted by the Red Bull Racing boss is one that would temporarily allow F1's top teams to sell their cars to the smaller outfits to help them achieve significant savings in terms of research and development during the current period of financial hardship.

"Now is the time to be bold," Horner told Motorsport.com. "Now is the time to influence change. We can tick off things, but I think you've got to grab the bull by the horns, excuse the pun.

"If I was running a smaller team, the fastest way to competitiveness at a cost-effective route would be rather than trying to reverse engineer and copy your supplier team, which is happening in many cases, why not just sell them the whole car that we finish with in Abu Dhabi? Let them have it.

"Then they can operate as a race team, they don't need all the research and development facilities. It's the fastest route to competitiveness, and the cheapest route as well.

"They could operate as a race team with a decent product."

Horner believes that such a stratagem could even put a well-run team in the winner's circle.

"If they get the race team together, they could win races," he said.

"We proved that with Toro Rosso and Sebastian Vettel when we were supplying them effectively a customer car back in 2008.

"But there's this paranoia about being a constructor and what you're giving up if you're not a constructor.

"It works in other forms of motorsport, in MotoGP. So if you could buy a Mercedes, buy a Ferrari or a Red Bull after Abu Dhabi, why wouldn't you?"

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