According to James in the article, no they can’t. Hopefully the FIA can be convinced to relax capital expenditure regulations for smaller teams at least.
Not really, smaller teams could never catch up without the cap since Mercedes is spending 4-5 times what they are a year. With the cap they can almost catch up, but it’s hard to make up for 10 years of teams spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
It’s better with the cap than without it but they are still so far behind that you’d need to allow them a larger yearly infrastructure budget cap than the winning teams in order for them to catch up.
For example, Mercedes has a fancy as fuck wind tunnel they built 5 years ago when there was no cap for say $300 million. Williams couldn’t afford to do that, so now that we have put in the cap Mercedes has a lasting advantage that Williams doesn’t
Even with the capex limits, the smaller teams should slowly catch up to the big teams infrastructure wise because the teams with better facilities have less room to improve when spending the same amount of money. Problem is that the smaller teams don’t have the overall budget to invest in facilities, etc.
The current capex limits are more harmful to teams like alpine, Aston, McLaren and Audi/Sauber who have the money needed to upgrade/build modern facilities but are hamstrung by the spending limits
That makes sense. In regards to Aston though, were they able to build their new factory and start their new wind tunnel because they started before the caps came into effect? In that case a rival mid field team like Alpine really is in a tough spot.
According to James in the article, no they can’t. Hopefully the FIA can be convinced to relax capital expenditure regulations for smaller teams at least.
Well that would be odd in a way, since the smaller teams are the ones that wanted budget caps in the first place.
Not really, smaller teams could never catch up without the cap since Mercedes is spending 4-5 times what they are a year. With the cap they can almost catch up, but it’s hard to make up for 10 years of teams spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
It’s better with the cap than without it but they are still so far behind that you’d need to allow them a larger yearly infrastructure budget cap than the winning teams in order for them to catch up.
For example, Mercedes has a fancy as fuck wind tunnel they built 5 years ago when there was no cap for say $300 million. Williams couldn’t afford to do that, so now that we have put in the cap Mercedes has a lasting advantage that Williams doesn’t
Even with the capex limits, the smaller teams should slowly catch up to the big teams infrastructure wise because the teams with better facilities have less room to improve when spending the same amount of money. Problem is that the smaller teams don’t have the overall budget to invest in facilities, etc.
The current capex limits are more harmful to teams like alpine, Aston, McLaren and Audi/Sauber who have the money needed to upgrade/build modern facilities but are hamstrung by the spending limits
That makes sense. In regards to Aston though, were they able to build their new factory and start their new wind tunnel because they started before the caps came into effect? In that case a rival mid field team like Alpine really is in a tough spot.