FORMULA 1 MOTORSPORT NEWS

‘Spending is out of control, just to find an extra tenth of a second’, says Red Bull chief Christian Horner

The Red Bull team principal Christian Horner warned that this will be a “record-breaking year” for a sport that already spends at a heart-stopping rate. The 10 teams last year invested a collective £1.6billion to get 20 cars to race around the 20 racetracks in the World Championship.

But the bill is going up at an alarming rate, marked by the Spanish Grand Prix on Sunday, which traditionally signals the start of an arms race that will force teams to spend millions just to find fractions of a second of extra speed. Wind tunnels are running 24 hours a day and staff are working round-the-clock shifts turning out components that will promise sometimes tiny gains that might be enough to outpace rivals.Red Bull, struggling to keep up with the leaders Ferrari and Mercedes, are taking two massively revamped cars to Barcelona, while Mercedes were this week making a raft of last-minute changes to Lewis Hamilton’s car for this weekend at their factory in Brackley, Northamptonshire.

Every other team will be making huge changes to the cars that raced in the first four grands prix of the season. The total bill for such radical updates is not known yet but one source, who did not want to be named, was candid in his assessment of just how much the Formula One teams were prepared to pay to stay in the game.

“Think of £100million added to the total Formula One bill for the season — and double it,” he said.

“Things are crazy, almost out of control. They are working people day and night to find a 10th of a second. The teams had already spent a fortune on the new regulation cars for this season and now they are spending like mad on updates and improvements that come out every few minutes.”

Some changes are so last-minute that team members will be carrying parts as hand luggage through Barcelona airport tomorrow to be fitted ready for the grand prix at the Circuit de Catalunya this weekend.

Horner admitted: “Budgets are under enormous pressure as the price of getting performance keeps coming because everyone is searching for incremental gains.”

Teams were already forced to pay out huge sums last year to build the new generation of wider, faster cars. Critics wonder why they bothered with the changes unnoticed by the mass of fans not steeped in the technical aspects of the sport, and fewer overtaking moves so far in the first four races of the year.

Liberty Media, the new owners, are anxious to level the playing field, but the spending war prices out the smallest teams, ruling out any chance of a Leicester City-style raid on the World Championship. Max Mosley, the former president of the FIA governing body, attempted to rein in the spending of the biggest four teams — Red Bull, Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari — with budget caps, but paid his own price when he was ousted by teams angry at his proposed interference. Liberty will face a similar challenge.

The cards are also stacked in favour of the Big Four: figures from Autosport magazine show that they were paid two-thirds of the total Formula One prize money handed out for last year, regardless of performance.

Ferrari, third in the World Championship and without a victory, took almost £140m to their Maranello headquarters, while spending a monumental £330m.

Mercedes, who spent an estimated £265m last year, were paid £132m by Formula One Management, while Red Bull picked up about £124m. Bizarrely, under the arcane payments system, McLaren received £75m for finishing sixth, compared with just £55.6m for Force India, who finished fourth yet spent only £90m.

Source: Evening Standard. Photo: Getty Images