Red Bull's Christian Horner labels F1 Strategy Group "inept"

Formula 1's rulebook has come under fire in recent months, with the sizeable penalties being handed out to McLaren and Red Bull in Austria for engine infringements reigniting the debate.

Rather than having the Strategy Group - currently made up of Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren, Williams and Force India - to discuss the regulations, Horner said F1 should call upon the expertise of someone without vested interests in the paddock, such as ex-Mercedes chief Ross Brawn.

"The Strategy Group is fairly inept and I think that it needs the commercial rights holder and the governing body to decide what they want Formula 1 to be," said Horner.

"Then they should put it on the table to the teams, and say 'this is what we want the product to be, these are the rules, there's the engine formula'.

"The results of the sporting working group are the penalties that we're seeing in Austria, that have become too complex.

"The work of the technical working group is the engine rules that we have.

"Maybe you need an independent, somebody that isn't currently involved, somebody like Ross Brawn, that understands the business, understands the challenges, to write the specification for what a car should be, what sort of technical regulations should be.

Horner, whose Red Bull team has suffered a string of failures with its Renault power unit, criticised the way the current engine formula was formed.

"Unfortunately, I think when you let a group of engineers with no clear directive about either cost or what the product needs to be, come up with a set of regulations, of course they're going to come up with something highly complex and highly sophisticated," he said.

"I think perhaps we've just gone too far with it and it's too complicated, we need to bring it back to basics."