Christian Horner has disagreed with James Vowles regarding F1’s cost cap and has claimed that the majority of the grid are currently overspending by around £300m.

Williams team principal James Vowles set his sights on F1’s cost cap at last weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix, highlighting how the sport’s financial regulations have hindered the British outfit’s efforts to compete with the grid’s front-runners.

Should midfield F1 teams be allowed to spend more money to catch up?

James Vowles is pushing for a change to the cost-cap rules

Speaking via Motorsport.com, Vowles highlighted how he would need to spend the entirety of a whole year’s budget in order to bring the Grove-based outfit onto a level playing field with F1’s top teams, which simply isn’t feasible.

As such, the Brit has called for F1 to loosen the restrictions of the budget cap and potentially remove some elements in order to level things out. However, Christian Horner has now disagreed with this notion and has called for more expenses to be included instead.

Christian Horner says F1 teams are overspending by around £300m each year

In a recent interview with Autosport, the former Red Bull chief highlighted his belief that “more” needs to be included in the yearly budget cap, noting that Williams managed to excel last season due to their workarounds.

Horner’s Red Bull were infamously the first team to fall foul of overspending upon the introduction of F1’s budget cap, with the Austrian constructor being slapped with a £5.26m fine and a 10% reduction in wind tunnel and CFD testing for the 2022 season.

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“In the early years there was a bedding into those rules,” he said, with quotes via Motorsport.com. “The things that we got charged with in that first year now would not be an issue, or even in the second year.

“So I think they’ve tied it up, a lot of the regulations, what I see now is that you’ve got a budget cap of just over $200m (£150m), but teams are spending $500m (£376m) or $600m (£451m).

“More needs to be included within the cap. I think the cap on the engine side, arguably, as an all-encompassing cap, is a good thing, it’s just what is that level?

“Formula 1 teams will spend as much money as they have and it’s like a balloon with not enough air in it, if you squeeze it one end, the air is going to go somewhere else.

“So you’ll now see driver retainers far healthier than they were pre-budget cap and it’s finding that right balance and I think all of these businesses now, they’re no longer liabilities.

“Even the smallest team on the grid has a multi-billion dollar valuation. Five, six, seven years ago, they would have been seen as liabilities.

“So it’s driven real value into these teams, or franchises, that a team like Haas or Williams has come up the rankings.”