Team bosses both at Red Bull and Haas are predicting a spreading out of the Formula 1 grid as a consequence of the rule changes coming for 2019.
New wings and other aerodynamic tweaks aimed are to be introduced with the goal of promoting closer racing after complaints about how hard it is to overtake with the current designs.
There has been scepticism by some as to how effective the changes will be in changing that and Red Bull’s Christian Horner remains one of the most vocal critics.
“It’s a significant change. One thing affects another and obviously, it’s been a very costly change,” PlanetF1 reported him as saying. “Would it affect the ability for the cars to follow closely? Maybe a little but not tangibly so.
“Inevitably somebody will get it right, some teams will get it wrong. If anything, more gaps between the teams [will occur],” he warned.
“The best way to achieve close grid is stability and then the teams will concertina and converge.”
The Briton then went on to blame Mercedes and Ferrari for supporting what he described as the “rushed” and “cherry-picked” changes which were surprisingly passed by the Strategy Group in May.
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As for Haas team boss Guenther Steiner, his main concern was that the midfield outfits, already struggling to close the performance gap to the top three teams, could now find doing so even harder at the start of a new development cycle.
“Absolutely, that risk [of the top teams retaining a big advantage] is always there,” he told RaceFans.
“There are good people working at a high level and if they’ve got more resources so they should be doing better than the other ones, otherwise they’re doing something wrong.
“So I think at the beginning [of the year] the gap should be bigger between the big ones and the smaller ones because they have so many more resources to get there. And because they have more resources, they get even quicker.”