Christian Horner suspects teams such as Mercedes are overplaying the dangers of their cars bouncing at high speed to force a rule change.
Lewis Hamilton hobbled away from his Mercedes car with back pain after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where he spent much of the race being violently bounced around in his cockpit when driving down Baku’s long straight.
McLaren’s Daniel Ricciardo compared the sensation to someone bouncing his head like a basketball.
Hamilton’s teammate George Russell has said F1’s current cars are a major accident waiting to happen due to how badly they bounce around at high speed.
Mercedes is struggling for competitiveness this year and is off the pace of the leaders, which Red Bull boss Horner believes is the main reason Hamilton and Russell have been so vocal about the issue.
When asked Sunday evening what he would do if his drivers were struggling with an uncompetitive car, Horner said: “I’d tell them to bitch as much as they could on the radio and make as big an issue out of it as they possibly could. It’s part of the game.
“You can see it’s uncomfortable, but there are remedies to that. But it’s to the detriment of the car performance. What’s the easiest thing to do is to complain from a safety point of view, but each team has a choice.”
Horner is not sympathetic to the situation, suggesting the remedy lies in how teams set up their cars.
“The easiest thing is obviously to raise a car. The team has a choice to do that.”
Horner pointed out several other teams, such as Red Bull, are not affected by the bouncing.
“I think if it was a genuine safety concern across the whole grid, then it’s something that should be looked at. But if it’s only affecting isolated people or teams then that’s something that that team should potentially deal with.”
He added: “You have a choice where you run your car, don’t you? And you should never run a car that’s unsafe.
“But, I think that’s more for the technical guys because there are certain cars that have issues, and there are some cars that have very few issues.
“It would seem unfair to penalise the ones that have done a decent job versus the ones that have perhaps missed the target slightly.”
Toto Wolff suggested Sunday that Hamilton’s back pain might rule him out of this week’s Canadian Grand Prix, although the seven-time world champion later tweeted “see you next week” to his followers, suggesting he intends to race as planned.