Christian Horner has told the FIA not to "d***k" with aerodynamic rules for Formula 1 cars in the wake of the governing body's technical directive.
A technical directive was announced two weeks ago, in the wake of back pain felt by Lewis Hamilton as his Mercedes bounced violently at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend. Many welcomed the intervention, but Red Bull were against it, having fixed their own porpoising problems themselves.
Horner complained that it was "very unfair" on teams like his, which had spent their own time and money to resolve the issue. He also accused Mercedes of telling Hamilton to "b***h" about the pain in a bid to force the sport's lawmakers into action.
Data from the Canadian Grand Prix is being analysed by the FIA, as they plan to come up with a metric to limit the amount of bouncing cars are allowed to do. Any such limit is set to be introduced at the French Grand Prix later this month.
The subject is not likely to go away any time soon, and Horner has renewed his opposition to any changes for the current season – and also for 2023. "It is too late in the day to be introducing changes for next year," said the Red Bull chief.
"We haven't governed for that and the cost involved... sometimes the unintended consequences for changing philosophies, it will affect what you carry over and it will affect the design and development.
"The most important thing and biggest way to achieve stable costs is stability. The cars will converge. You can see that already, the cars are certainly looking more familiar and that will continue over the next six-to-nine months. The most important thing is don't d**k with it, leave it alone and the teams will sort it out."
He continued with a warning that the FIA is going down a "dangerous avenue" with its intervention on this matter. "It is quite complicated. That is the concern about it and over what period is the measurement taken, individual instances and all that kind of thing," Horner added.
"When you look at it from a purist point of view, it is not ideal because it seems we are giving more and more influence to the FIA to dictate more and more what your set-up is. At what point do they say you have to run a certain rear wing or a certain ride height? It is a dangerous avenue to go down.
"I understand on the grounds of safety that this is being introduced because the porpoising on a limited amount of cars is obviously at an extreme level. [The FIA] are keen to have a mechanism to control that but hopefully it is only something that will be there for this year as it is something that hopefully all the teams will be on top of and cars will converge next year. It is certainly not a precedent that we want to set."
