Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has hinted that he didn’t vote in favour of refuelling’s return in 2017, after admitting it did nothing to make races more exciting.
The Briton, who has a seat on the Strategy Group which agrees new rules, questioned whether refuelling is the right step, despite almost unanimous support amongst the drivers.
“I tend not to agree with it,” he told Sky Sports F1. “We got rid of refuelling for a reason, it didn’t make the races interesting.
“If you cast your mind back to races where there was refuelling, they weren’t that exciting – you just timed the pitstop, you either went shorter or longer [in the stint], and that dictated your strategy,” he said, adding: “So I think that’s still open to debate.”
Horner however was more supportive of the other changes, aimed at making the cars faster and harder to driver, which were agreed upon in an unusually eventful meeting.
“The strategy is to agree on as little as we possibly can and have some nice sandwiches,” he joked, before admitting the latest meeting had been “fairly productive” with the agreement on a multitude of new rules.
“To make the cars harder to drive, to make them more exciting and to go five and six seconds quicker [is the aim],” he explained. “To get some more downforce on the cars and differentiate them more than GP2 cars, that are only three or four seconds slower than us at the moment, and make life harder for the drivers.
“You’ll see a bigger difference in driver input because the cars are pretty easy to drive at the moment. The power unit was discussed and they’ve agreed to increase the fuel flow a bit and increase the noise, although whether that fundamentally addressed the issues at the moment is open to debate. But certainly on the chassis side some positive discussions.”
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