Christian Horner says Red Bull don't support rival teams' request for the FIA to become involved with the Resource Restriction Agreement.
Red Bull and Toro Rosso only teams who didn't sign letter to FIA
Christian Horner says Red Bull are opposed to plans for the FIA to be brought in to police Formula One's Resource Restriction Agreement, preferring to see costs controlled through other ways.
Red Bull and sister team Toro Rosso are the only teams on the grid who didn't sign a letter to the FIA which floated the possibility of the governing body becoming involved in the process of overseeing compliance with certain aspects of the agreement.
At the end of last year Red Bull quit the Formula One Teams' Association in wake of disagreements over the way forward for the RRA, the legal document drawn up by the teams in 2009 following opposition to Max Mosley's budget cap proposals.
Horner, RBR's Team Principal, insists the World Champions fully support bids to further reduce costs in F1 but would rather not see a method for doing this devised that "relies on equivalence and apportionment".
"What I would like to make clear is Red Bull is fully behind cost control in Formula One," said Horner.
"Whether the RRA is the right route to achieve that is what we question.
"I believe that letter, from what I read, requested for the FIA to police the RRA, which in our opinion would be the wrong route.
"We believe whole-heartedly in controlling costs in Formula 1 and not frivolous spending.
Tricky
"But there are better ways of doing that and containing that through the sporting and technical regulations as opposed to a resource restriction that relies on equivalence and apportionment of time and personnel.
"That is always tricky in subsidiary companies, particularly of automotive manufacturers. So we would be totally open to any discussion that involves cost control that pursued those avenues."
Representatives from five teams - Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes, Williams and Marussia - are due to meet in Paris on Thursday to discuss the way forward for the RRA in greater detail but Horner believes the precedent originally set by FOTA is the basis from which to proceed with further cost cuts.
"When FOTA was first created there were clear and tangible restrictions in personnel, amount of engines, gearboxes, in testing, all things you can see policed and genuinely save costs," he said.
"They're the type of things that should be focused on rather than apportionment of people's time and equivalence which is, in any formula or mechanism, fraught with problems and difficulties.
"It was well intended at the time, but as with all these things, when you drill into the detail it's something much harder to police. That's especially the case when there are companies or teams which are subsidiaries of other organisations.
"For us, we would prefer to keep it simple and go on tangible, measurable items."
