“This week it’s Red Bull, the next week – or even Sunday – it could be another team,” Horner said. “I think when you’ve got a variance or an inconsistency in a sensor like this … an aircraft for example has three sensors. If there is one that is showing a drift then they will believe the average of the other two and I think we need to look at a more robust system.

“The biggest thing out of this – irrelevant of the hearing – is we need a better way of measuring and monitoring the fuel. Or get rid of it totally and just say ‘You’ve got 100kg, that’s your lot’.

“I think that would be the easiest for the FIA and probably for the teams. The fuel flow restriction is really only for qualifying because you couldn’t go to stupid revs in the race if you’ve got that limitation of fuel. So in many respects I think personally it would be easier to get rid of it and say: ‘You’ve got 100kg, use it how you like but that’s all you’ve got’. That would be very easy for them to measure in and out at the end of the race.”

However, the FIA later clarified that the reason the fuel flow was restricted in a race situation is in order to prevent large differences of speed between cars on the straights.

“Engineers are engineers, so if you have 100kg for the race you try to be the fastest for the race,” FIA head of powertrain Fabrice Lom said. “So let’s say – to start simply – you have a 50-lap race you have 2kg per lap roughly to start with. So with this 2kg you want to do the best lap time, you don’t want to be slower than the others, you don’t want to please the FIA, you want to be fastest.

“So if you have no fuel flow limit then what is the fastest thing is to use a huge boost at the start of the straight and then lift off … Then if you go a bit above your 2kg per lap – you can do 3kg one lap and 1kg another lap – so at one point one car will do [full power and lift] and another car will do [gradual acceleration], you will have a huge and we think very dangerous difference of speed during the same lap with a driving style which is not really Formula One-like.”