the mclaren letter is interesting. It calls out red bull as cheats and asks for real punishment Theres a long line of teams out to make a point here that they stayed within the limits. theres 3 teams looing sheepish cos they couldn't fill the paperwork in right but this is trivial. What we know is a minor breach took place and red bull are the only team to do so. We don't know how much that is bar its <5% and we "don't know" what they over spent on. for me it doesn't really matter wat they over spent on as they didn't cut back to keep the cap. Wolff is calling out a number now, 5million. how does he know this number? where did he get it an why? The public doesn't have this number. Again that smells off and suggests that the likes of mercs are deep in bed with the number crunchers as some serious breaches of confidentiality ae going on. That for me is more serious than just not telling us what the punishment will be right now. Wolff is then seeking to pressurise he FIA by saying it will overspend next year and pay whatever fine red bull get, now quite the same message that mcclaren is giving is it? Oh they could so we can lets all get busy cheating. seems par for course with Wolff TBH. I would rather see tams ac like mclaren than mercedes TBH. maybe thats a bit of loser talk for mclaren about not exceeding caps but its better than blowing up the sport so mercs can look good. We all have to see that the mercs have form for this. When RRA was killed off it was down to the same old story. Red bull and ferrari ignoring it and mercs deciding to spend anything and everything and they did and we got 7 years of borefest acing as a result. the second a genuine cap comes in mercs fall off the pace again ad start talking about breaching caps to get to the top. Well guess what will happen to caps? bye bye. IMO the mercs want 2021 points deductions from verstappen., anyhting less and mercs will say they are breaching the regs to the 5% cap level. the issue i have is that while mercs are whinging and bleating the whole point of what we should be alking about is lost. Who much did red bull cheat and what should a fair 10 team penalty be for cheating. I go back to mclaren spygate. this was cheating on a team v team basis and mclaren were excluded from 2007 championship results and fined 100mil year? Hamilton won the world championship in 2008 but since then mclaren have been frankly also rans, brawn, red bull, mercedes, redbull. My question is do we really want to slap on a massive fie and break red bull. and if so what kind of sport do we want to see after we do? single team dominance is BAD IMO so we have to balance all aspects and be appropriate with the action to prevent others doing the same. I'd be happy with forcing red bull to take the punishment and not be able to race a car or something in a few races to ensue they ae under budget by the same aunt they were over budget this year. (1,2,3,4,56, or 7mil)
If 5% over is deemed to be punishable by a fine, then the FiA are basically setting a new cap, and any team that can afford to exceed that cap and soak up the fine will do so. Why wouldn't they? They're not going to stick to the cap on principle.
^^^^exactly this. The top teams appear to be awash with money and particularly RB have continually complained that the cost cap is too low. If the only punishment is a fine, there is absolutely no incentive for these teams to comply. I pretty sure I read that £5m, which is the value of the minor breach, equates to half a second, which is huge in F1.
Some teams claim 5mil =0.5seconds. In reality only the right parts going on a car with that time to unlock will gain. Ie red bull or.mercs and to a lesser extent ferrari (who would waste it arguing)
Maybe if a team breach the cap by under 5% then they have 10% less (maybe more) CFD and Tunnel time for the next 2 years! That way any gains from the overspend will be penalised. The punishment has to be a deterrent otherwise teams with money will just buy their way out of the cap.
in the end: its the same old argument. Is the cap set where big teams can protect their status as big teams and the others can spend that much OR is this a purely communist 145million that all teams are now able to spend exactly the same. look at Williams the supposed minnow of the teams. they have no issue with the cap and can spend to that. the sport must be AFFORDABLE to get us more tams 10 is not enough and teams must be able to survive year on year out of the tv money and sponsorship. however do we REALLY want something different to football where a team can generate twice the cap in revenue but not be able o spend it to go fast? Really? well if we do then the punishment for exceeding the cap has to be really harsh or tams will just break it and pay the fine.
I am in a real quandary over this. We know that RBR won the WDC through an error of the race director not adherring to the rules. We now know that RBR overspent to achieve a shot at the World Championship. For Max to retain last years title is wrong but can you really go back and undo? Could Merc take this to court, I think they could and could win. Here is the thing though. The FIA have got to be tough to stamp this out. It is not fair on all the other teams. I too was thinking of the McLaren/Ferrari situation and comparing. In the spirit of fairness Red Bull should be excluded from last years championship, it will be controversial but will send a signal to all in the paddock. The FIA know this but are fearing the consequence. 7m is roughly 1/20th of the budget = roughly 1 race. They should lose the points from one race, presumably the last as they may be in budget in all the others. But the race attendance costs maybe be 5M which would say a 7m overspend may benefit 4 races or more. Points from the last 4 races perhaps should be deducted. They can't afford to fudge it. I was of the opinion of turning a blind eye for the first year with a small penalty but the problem with that is it is unfair on all the other teams who adhered. The rules of the CAP were put in place,and made clear. RBR are going to overspend this year too, that is obvious I would say. I really do blame Horner for this, he is letting his own team down who are working really hard, are undoubtedly a well rehearsed team. Horner's own judgement, in my opinion, is flawed by his ambition and character.
The funny thing is we all seem to forget that mercs suddenly increased speed of engine and took several new engines to catch and pass red bull but somehow kept the budget. I do have to wonder about that. From nowhere merc passed the field at Brazil. (Well not nowhere but it was a massive massive advantage that's vanished this year) Now we have merc making insinuations about red bull bringing a new floor over summer break and setting up this red bull will breach the limits this year. We simply don't know who will be under or over budget. Imo red bull might well embarrass the fia by simply not turning up for the big paid.finale race. There's a case to be made that red bull can walk the two championships and walk off the pitch and say **** you and your sponsors
This is another stupid thing about this regulation, how can you have a fixed budget for the year, but not a fixed set of rules?
I wonder how much car damage costs come into this. I think Verstappen was pretty high on the leaderboard for that. I wonder how much they budget for damage in a year
I dunno. It'd be a fairly massive loop.hole and massive advantage to the merc and ferrari teams wouldn't it?
Seems we’re starting to see some confirmation in the Motorsport press now, that the catering, redundancy/sick pay and spare parts clarification are the cause and that the figure is 1.8mil. Whilst that’s obviously money that could therefore not have been spent on the car if allocated against budget, it is more palatable/understandable than some of the other theories around. If this is the truth of the matter hopefully a sensible “honest mistake” punishment will be given and we can all move on, with what is a clearer, if in my opinion, still a very flawed set of regulations. On another note, I really struggle to understand how Mercedes could have known about some of these these from cost estiming, especially redundancy/sick payments.
From what I read redundancy payments are not included in the cap. The problem I have is that it's irrelevant what the overspend was used for as how can they say it was free lunches when that money came out of the same pot as the money for cfd/tunnel/parts production/new floors, new wings etc - it's all the same money that makes up the budget cap. Horner could have said we spent too much on upgrades but he tries to wriggle out of it by saying it was free lunches.... I agree that the regs are flawed and they where supposed to be tested in 2020 but Covid stopped that. If they had been tested then maybe this mess wouldn't have cropped up. On the one hand, as you say first year and mistakes/miss-interpretation has happened maybe they should be lenient. The problem is they then create a precedent for year 2 which I suspect Red Bull will be budgeting to the same interpretation as for 2021 so are likely to overspend this year too! As for Merc and their statements it doesn't seem right that they come out with so specific info when they shouldn't be privy to that - seems a bit iffy - then again why would they make public statements based on 'stolen' info? I still think that Red Bull should be punished with a cfd/tunnel time reduction for the next 2 seasons. The time to take points away from drivers/teams is long gone, much as I would like Lewis to have won his 8th deducting Max points after all this time is just too late and would make FIA look even more stupid. Hopefully FIA get their act together and publish the punishment asap.
I do get your point here, but F1 teams are full of “racers”, if Horner had said inside RedBull, we have a design for a new x, which we think could be the difference between beating Merc and not, the staff - in the main, if not in totality - would have said “let’s drop the lunches then”. Leaving aside the culture, the economics of potential bonuses would make that worth going for in the eyes of many. If these are the topics, you’d think the majority has to be the unused spares. I can’t see sick pay and lunch being much in excess of $0.25M and the spares have been clarified during the season, which is an acknowledgement that it wasn’t sufficiently clear to start with and means the goalposts have shifted since the money was spent. I would have lower tolerance for this year, because there has been some time to adjust since the clarification, although I do also imagine RB might argue that they would have planned differently if things had been clear earlier. Ultimately this year will be less contentious I guess because it’s not close and people can’t project that the outcome might have been different.
