Haas team boss Guenther Steiner has rejected a suggestion to introduce customer cars into Formula 1 in the short-term.
As the sport grapples with the financial fallout from the coronavirus, Red Bull F1 chief Christian Horner put forward the idea of smaller teams buying chassis’ from the bigger outfit for a few years to remove all R&D costs.
The Briton also made the point that teams like Racing Point and Haas may as well back the idea as their car designs are already based on the Mercedes and Ferrari respectively anyway.
“We would then be customer teams and the larger teams could actually manipulate our performance,” Steiner told Ziggo Sport in response.
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“It would be as if we had a car from last year, they will always stay ahead of us.”
That point though makes no sense given Steiner’s own team is copying or buying in older spec parts from Ferrari anyway, so why not go all-in by buying a whole chassis from them?
Instead, the Italian thinks the better strategy would be to focus on the spending of the top teams.
“With a budget cap, we still don’t reach the budgets of the larger teams, but we are closer,” he added.