Horner dismisses Hamilton’s rule change call: ‘Talking from personal experience’

Ahead of this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, Hamilton called for a ban on F1 teams being able to start early development work on following year’s cars in an attempt to level the playing field. 

The seven-time world champion’s plea was firmly rejected by current points leader Max Verstappen, who pointed out “we weren’t talking about this when he was winning” during Mercedes’ own period of domination. 

And Verstappen’s boss couldn’t resist a dig towards Hamilton as he picked holes in the idea. 

“Well he’s obviously talking from personal experience,” Horner replied when asked what he made of Hamilton’s suggestion.

“I think it would be an incredibly hard thing to police. How an earth could you say, first of all, ‘go!’. How do you prevent people thinking about, or working on next year’s cars?

“We have a handicap system in Formula 1 through the reduction in wind tunnel time that there is. AlphaTauri have almost double the amount of time that we have. That is a significant handicap and I think Aston Martin will start to feel that as its reset at the mid-point of the year. 

“For us, we have to puck and choose very, very sparingly what we are going to commit to putting through the wind tunnel. So it will have an effect. That system didn’t exist years ago.”

Horner insisted that the most effective way to avoid one-team dominance in F1 is to maintain a stable set of regulations. 

“I think the most important thing, and the history of F1 demonstrates it, is stability,” he explained. 

“Not messing with the regulations will always create convergence. I think it’s just a period of time before you see that. 

“Convergence is already starting to happen and I think by the time we get to the end of 2025, probably all the teams will be very converged and then we will screw it all up and go again in 2026.”