Red Bull team boss Christian Horner has encouraged Formula One to present its teams with a take-it-or-leave-it set of regulations for 2021.
The expiration of commercial agreements as well as the current set of engine regulations at the end of 2020 means F1 has the opportunity to start afresh in 2021. Its new owners and the FIA are determined to lower costs and make the sport more competitive, but the means by which it plans to do so -- including a new set of simplified engine regulations -- have not received the support of all teams.
Ferrari has been the most vocal opponent of the proposed changes and its threats to quit the sport have been backed up by reigning champions Mercedes. Red Bull is in favour of a shake-up in the regulations after struggling for success since the introduction of the turbo-hybrid era in 2014, and backs F1's plans to simplify engine regulations.
Horner believes F1 and the FIA should agree on a set of regulations and force them through regardless of what the teams say.
"Trying to get a consensus between teams that have got varying objectives, different set-ups, is going to be impossible," he said. "So it's down to the commercial rights holder and the FIA to get together, come up with a set of regulations -- what is the financial framework, what is the distribution that they want to have -- put it on the table and it's down to the teams whether they want to sign up to that or not.
"Of course there will be a lot of positioning, the media will be used, it's history repeating itself and it happens every five or six years, every time the Concorde Agreement comes up for renewal. But my feeling is, Liberty, together with FIA, need to get on the same piece of paper to say this is what we want Formula One to be, this is the financial distribution surrounding it, here's the deal and laid out to the teams."
And Horner believes the best way to make the sport more competitive is to simplify the design of F1 cars in order to prevent teams spending huge amounts of money to gain an advantage.
"For me the most damaging thing over the last five years has been the introduction of the current engine regulations. I think if you look at Formula One as a whole, I think the regulations for both chassis and engine are too complicated. That drives cost, it drives complexity, it drives distance between the teams, so for me, I'd be all for simplification.
"Simplification of the power unit, simplification of the chassis, go back to basics of making the driver the biggest variable, whereas at the moment the driver is not a big enough variable. We want the best drivers competing against each other.
"I think you're always going to get variances depending on the skillset of the teams, and even if the teams have all equal budgets, you will still have teams that will perform better than others. That's competition. We see it in other formulas. For me, the biggest issue in Formula One at the moment is the regulations that dictate cost, performance and divergence in terms of powertrain."