Reintroducing customer cars in Formula 1 has been proposed because big teams want to “manipulate” the performance of their rivals, says Haas team principal Guenther Steiner.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner last week suggested allowing teams to sell old designs to rivals in order to reduce the smaller teams’ costs.

But Steiner suspects the proposal is intended to prevent smaller teams competing with their richer rivals when the budget cap comes into force next year.

“I think that plan [at] the moment is not actually relevant any more because all the smaller teams have found a way how to work,” he told Ziggosport.

“To be honest, we don’t want to get more money. We just want that the big teams work on a smaller budget so we can be more competitive with them. Therefore they say ‘now we should have customer cars’ so the big teams manipulate our performance.”

Teams like Haas would have no chance of competing with front-runners if they were forced to use an old chassis design, said Steiner. “It’s a year-old car, so they make sure that they stay on top of us.”

“They now just try to put something in place to make sure that we cannot get too close to them,” he added.

Haas uses Ferrari’s power unit, gearbox and some suspension parts but Steiner believes they would be less competitive if they had to use a complete Ferrari design from the previous season. “A year-old Ferrari, I don’t think it would be faster than our car this year, to be honest.”

The start of the new F1 season has been on hiatus for over a month. Steiner added Formula 1 is making “good progress” with plans to begin racing later in the year. “There is a good prospect that we go to race in Austria in the beginning of July,” he said.

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“I believe [in] it because Austria a good place with the virus in the moment, their cases are going down. Red Bull owns the race track so they can do, not what they want, but it’s there so they can host it. It’ll be good publicity, obviously, so I think it will happen.

“There’s a few things to be sorted out still basically with the health and safety, they need to check people going there, that they are healthy, that they don’t carry the virus. FOM is working on that and I think when they get that all figured it out, they will announce it. Hopefully next two to three weeks FOM will say something official to everybody and stop the speculation and we look forward to go racing again.”

He expects “some of the races” will have to take place behind closed doors, “but I think we will have some of the races with spectators – I don’t think that there will be a whole season without spectators.”

However F1 must think carefully about whether holding two races at the same track is a good idea, said Steiner. “We need to first make one and then see [if] it is good for the people to see two weekends on the same race track. I don’t know about that.

“I think if we get two races in July, then maybe three in August, I think we have a good start. And then I think we can go to Asia because by then Asia should be free of the virus or [have it] under control anyway.

“So I think that would be a good plan and I think FOM is working on that one. And maybe they want to throw a second race in Silverstone. But I think first you have to see what is coming after July.”

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2020 F1 season