After being found guilty of bﷺreaching the $145m spending limit during ’s maiden title-winning campaign in 2021, Red Bull were hit with a $7m fine an🌊d 10 percent reduction in their wind tunnel time for the next 12 months. 

Red Bull team principal Horner described the penalty as “draconian” but said his side had “begrudgingly” accepted the FIA’s d💮ecision in the bes﷽t interest of the sport. 

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

Horner has called for changes to be made to the cost cap in an attempt to raise the spending limit and has regularly highlighted c✤oncerns about accident damage impacting team’s development capabil🌠ities.

But F1 chief technical officer Symonds sa🐈ys he has little sympathy for such complai𓄧nts. 

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

“When I hear c♌ertain 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, very good development pr🀅ogramme 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, so we had to sto🅺p 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 tꩵhat Red Bull would stay under the 2022 F1 cost cap. 

“If I look at the 2022 rate of development, I think thaℱt other teams have put significantly more components 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 personally looking at within♓ theꦓ 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 damage this year. In terms of parts used, again, we are at the lower end.

“So one can never say with 100% confidence that we're c༒omfortably within the cap, particularly after the proce🍒ss that we've just been through.

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