I knew Williams was underinvested, but wow. They need like 3 Ryan Reynolds to catch up.
wasn’t the total investment at that point 200M?
Can they catch up with the current budget caps?
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.
Which at the moment is basically a permanent debuff for Williams. I’m all for a cost cap to introduce equality up and down the grid, but if teams cannot make the investment needed to catch up, that is a problem.
It’s not entirely true that previous capital expenses are a permanent buff/debuff. The capital resources Mercedes have all have a finite competitive lifetime, and are going to become progressively less of an advantage over time. The next capital project Williams takes on, if they do it effectively, will result something more effective than what big teams already built due to being newer and being built on more modern tech.
It’s true that right at this moment, big teams are flush with up to date capex projects from the pre-cap era, and so can focus their resources on car development rather than capital projects… where small teams have tough prioritization decisions to make. But that won’t last forever, and within a few years those big teams are going to have a painful experience of reintroducing capital projects that reduce their car development budget.
I’m sure this is frustrating for team-principals that are in the thick of an infra rebuild, staring at competitors who are starting with the job done. But 5 or 10 years from now, the steady rate of capex refreshment will be what matters, and the one-time pre-cost-cap injection will no longer mean much. And realistically, this is the most the cost-cap can achieve. You can’t delete the advantage from 30 years of massive spending overnight… all you can really do is stop the bleeding and let time run its course.
I imagine they would have to sacrifice a season or two to catch up on the equipments game to compete in the later ones.
