Christian Horner snapped back at "typical" Toto Wolff after the Mercedes chief accused his Formula 1 rival of being "frightened" of the sport's future.
Safe to say, Horner's Red Bull team is ruling the roost right now. They have won all nine races so far this year and look set to successfully defend both their titles.
The performance gap has been so large that they are already focusing their development efforts on their 2024 car. And so they will be favourites again to take the crown next year, and possibly in 2025 as well.
But that will be where their current advantage is likely to end. The 2026 season will see more new car rules introduced, most notably brand new engines that will run on 50 percent electric power.
Horner has voiced some concerns about those new power units. His warning to the F1 Commission was that they may end up running out of power on the straights, leaving them unable to run flat out at certain points during races.
Red Bull's 2026 engines will be the first they have produced in-house at their new Powertrains facility in Milton Keynes. In response to those concerns raised by Horner, Mercedes chief Wolff suggested that his rival is simply worried about his own team's progress.
"I think what frightens him more maybe is that his engine programme is not coming along, and then maybe he wants to kill it [the rules] that way," asserted Wolff. "So you always have to question what's the real motivation to say something like that."
What do you make of F1's plans for more sustainable engines from 2026? Have your say in the comments section.
Horner, however, insists that his concerns are for the sport in general rather than for his own team. And he took exception to Wolff's accusation that his complaints were made for selfish reasons.
He said: "That's typical Toto, where he's just focused on self-performance. My interest is actually about the sport rather than self-gain. As a fan of the sport, it's still too early to say who is going to have a competitive car or competitive engine in 2026.
"The most important thing from the sport's point of view is that we all have a collective ability to work with the FIA to ensure that the product is as good as it can be, otherwise we've all failed."
