Afteﷺr being found guilty of breaching the $145m spending limit during ’s maiden title-winning campaign in 2021, Red Bull were hit with a $7m fine and 10 percent reduction in their wind tunnel time fo⛎r the next 12 months. 

Red Bull team principal Horner described the penalty as “draconian” but said his side had “b༺egrudgingly” accepted the FIA’s decision in the best interest of the sport. 

• Red Bull made 154 staff redundancies due to F1 cost cap rules

Horner has called for chan✤ges to be made to the cost cap in an attempt to raise the spending limit and has regularly highlighted concerns about accident damage impacting team’s development capabilities.

But F1 chief technical officer Symonds says he 🔴has little sympathy fo💃r such complaints. 

“I spent 42 years as an inventor in Formula 1, I always had ꦉa cost cap – we called it a budget,” he said. “And that was the amount we are allowed ♏to spend.

“When I hear certain people whinging on about the fact ‘oh, we’ve had an accident🧜, so you know, we need more money’. Yeah, I’ve had accidents as well.🍌 

“And I remember one year we had a very, veꩲry good development programme going, and we had one of those periods in Monza onwards, I can’t remember what year it was [but] 🦂it was in the 90s, and we just had accident after accident after accident.

“The budget didn’t🐼 change, ꦯso we had to stop the development programme we were working on – so I have slightly less than zero sympathy.”

Speaking towards the end 🍒of last year, Horner expressed confidence that Red Bull would stay under the 2022 F1 cost cap. 

“If I look at the 2022 rate of development, I think that other tea🎐ms have put significantly more c♉omponents on the car than us this year,” he explained. 

“If you look at crash damage alone, which again, is hugely expensive, and something I think that needs p༒ersonally looking at within the cap - when you look at the quantum of some of the crashes this year, some of which are not the fault of your driver or your team, Max Verstappen is the driver that has incurred the least amount of dam☂age this year. In terms of parts used, again, we are at the lower end.

“So one can never sไay with 100% confidence that we're comfortably within the ca🐼p, particularly after the process that we've just been through.

“B𒐪ut we feel that there are a lot of one-off costs that have been included within this. And we are confident and hopeful that with the process of these regulations being tidied up for the future, it will become less of an accounting world championship.”