F1's hybrid rules just "marketing blurb"

Newey has long been sceptical about the switch to turbo hybrids from 2014, and says he has seen nothing in the past three years that has served to change his mind.

He thinks it nonsense to suggest that talk the arrival of hybrid technology was essential for helping make technical advances that would benefit consumers in the future.

"On the engine side, my personal opinion, which I'm sure will be a very controversial one, is that all this blurb which a few manufacturers would like to put out, that it improves their road car product, if that is the case then those manufacturers in the future, five years at the most, should be demonstrably ahead in the automotive sector of their rivals," Newey said in an interview with Sky.

"Somehow l suspect that will not be the case, which tends to say it is marketing blurb."

Resource restriction

Amid a renewed focus on the possibility of a budget cap in F1 in recent weeks – with new owners Liberty Media having floated the idea – Newey says he is totally opposed to the concept.

However, he thinks that a better route would be to create clever regulations that meant teams did not have to spend so much – even if it meant imposing strict limits on aerodynamic development.

"Is F1 a technical showcase for motor manufacturers, of their engine prowess for instance, or is it a spectacle that involves man and machine?" he said.

"Depending on who you are, you are one way or the other. My personal view is that it should be a battle of drivers coupled with the creativeness of engineers. That means it shouldn't purely be battle of resources, which is what it has tended to become on the engineers' side.

"It would be entirely possible to come up with a set of regulations that would reward creativity more than simply the number of people.

"A budget cap is very difficult to implement but you could come up with resource restrictions, certainly on the chassis side most of which aerodynamic driven.

"You could restrict research resources much more heavily than we do, perhaps scrap wind tunnels altogether, be much more restricted on the CFD runs, and if you restrict the resources there wouldn't be [any] point having so many engineers because they couldn't feed it through the funnel."