Mostly, Red Bull had to cut people from the testing department, as the international body implemented the in-season testing ban, due to become mandatory as of Melbourne. Horner admitted having cut “in the region of 20 (jobs)”.
“As with every team in the pit lane there has been a slight contraction due to the reduction in activities. Obviously when you are not going testing your test team effectively becomes redundant in many aspects. We now have just a race team and if the individuals have not moved into other projects, such as a show car project for example, then there will inevitably be a few redundancies,” said Horner at the unveiling of the new Red Bull RB5, at Jerez.
“Probably to a much lesser extent than other teams simply because we didn't have the size in the first place. But every team in the pit lane will be facing a downsizing to some degree greater or lesser because of the reduced activities. When you look at the calendar now compared to 12 months ago when the cars were running pretty much every week, now there are more holes in the calendar and that in turn controls costs,” added Horner.
Speaking about controlling costs, the Red Bull manager also revealed that his team has started looking into in-house production of certain parts, especially since a high number of suppliers is no longer needed to satisfy his team's needs throughout the season.
“You're using less components because you are not doing anywhere near the mileage. So inevitably your supply chain comes down and it enables us to do more production in-house with a lower overhead than going in-house. As a business, we have become more efficient by taking on more internally, which has worked very well for us,” concluded Horner.
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