While agreement on the raft of new chassis rules for 2017 is close, new rules on engines are not due until 2018. At this time it is hoped that the cost of engines will have been reduced along with the performance gap.

Christian Horner, whose team was at the centre of the engine row last year, is not convinced the new rules will make a difference.

"As far as the technical regulations are concerned, we're pretty close to a conclusion," he told reporters in Shanghai today. "They were basically agreed at the last strategy meeting, so I think it's just a formality to finalise those chassis regulations at the end of this month. I think most people are already tentatively looking towards next year based on those regulations anyway.

"As far as the engine regulations are concerned, again there have been some discussions recently, which again will go through the Strategy Group and subsequently onto the Formula One Commission but everything has to be fixed by the last day of this month for 2017, so I'm not expecting too many major surprises.

"It's a complex situation," he continued, "but fundamentally there were four criteria that were requested by the governing body to be met to ensure stability moving forward. Those four criteria were: a significant reduction in cost to 12 million (euros), the availability of supply or the guarantee of supply, power convergence to within a relatively small bandwidth and to address the noise.

"As we sit here now we are not anywhere near having met any of those criteria and I think unfortunately what will happen, as is often the case with these things, time will run out at the end of the month and nothing will be achieved and nothing will change. There is one more attempt in the Strategy meeting and the Commission meeting at the end of the month to discuss and table the concerns and where we're at, but failing that regulations will inevitably stay as they are."

"It is a complex agreement," agreed Mercedes Motorsport boss, Toto Wolff. "We have been given the task in coming up with solutions so that no team is left without an engine. I think all the engine manufacturers have acknowledged that, so we try to cover that. There is an aspect of price reduction, which is important to most of the teams, and we tried to cover that in the framework agreement.

"Obviously it's very difficult to make everybody happy. Christian isn't so happy. But I think we need to come up with a solution until the end of April. We need to ratify those regulations and at the moment everybody is working very hard to at least find the smallest common denominator."

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READERS COMMENTS

1. Posted by Stitch431, 16/04/2016 10:45

"This is a smoke screen of CHristian Horner as he tries to divert the attention of the fact that it is Red Bull who are adamant to have more aerodynamic downforce instead of less, which as a result will not allow slipstreaming or exciting overtaking action on track without the need of the, in my opinion, perverse DRS system. "

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2. Posted by Spindoctor, 16/04/2016 7:47

"This focus on "engine" rules epitomizes what's wrong with Formula 1.
It might be more reasonable if any, or even some of the supposed "issues" were real, but they're not.
The biggest of all the misrepresentations is that the cost and "sound" of the Power Units is somehow stifling the sport. It's impossible to know where to start refuting this.
RBR\Vettel won 4 Championships on the trot with V8s. Reverting to V8\10\12 power might improve the noises, but won't affect the racing one jot.

The reason that RBR won was because of the aerodynamics of their cars, which trounced all others despite all having similar V8 motors. Once an engine formula has settled-down, it's largely aero which separates the winners from losers. Every 1/10th of lap-time gained by aero tweaking costs a small fortune. Only those with deep pockets (and\or a genius designer) will ever win championships.

"

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3. Posted by Ro, 15/04/2016 18:48

"Unless all the teams, drivers and sponsors get together and vote to get rid of these battery-charging engines that are not fit for purpose for everyday's consumer use and return to normally aspirated v10 that sound great and bring equality, F1 is gonna go down the drain. Pull your fingers out teams, and vote with your feet, then the FIA will relent and bring sanity back to F1"

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Horner pessimistic on engine rules

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