BERLIN - Red Bull team principal Christian Horner expects
Formula One owners Liberty Media to provide assistance to financially
stricken teams if needed during the coronavirus crisis.
"It is their business, they have to decide how do they keep these
teams alive because they need teams to go racing," Britain's Guardian
newspaper quoted him as saying on Sunday.
"In order to protect their own business I believe they would help to
facilitate, which means paying, to ensure that those teams would be
around to compete next year."
F1 has postponed or cancelled the first nine races of the season due
to the global pandemic. It remains uncertain if, how or when racing
can start this year; many teams have put staff on furlough or imposed
pay cuts.
Team chiefs and F1 bosses are currently discussing cutting the budget
cap for 2021 but, alongside Ferrari, Red Bull are resisting the move.
The cap is a discussion about competitiveness, not about money," he
said. "It's about trying to bring the top teams down to a level where
the midfield teams feel they can compete.
"The reality is that whatever the level of spend there will always be
teams that run at the front and teams that run at the back."
Horner suggests an alternative plan would be allowing teams to buy
full customer cars - as was permitted many years ago - to save
research and development costs.
"We need to think out of the box rather than just going round and
round, beating ourselves up about numbers," he said.
"If this is all about saving the little teams and improving their
competitiveness, it would be a very difficult to argue against the
logic of a small team being able to take a customer car."