2021 Cost Cap Rumours and Speculation

[GrizzleBoy]

FIA waiting for Max to become WDC in Japan then they will announce it. Max missed in SG hence it postponed to Japan. IF Max could not win here, then the result will be postponed further.

It does beg the questions: if the RB18 has been designed and developed over budget, should Max be allowed to win the title? Isn't the car effectively illegal and has been so for all of the season?

Now those are the bombshell questions.

Exceeding the cap on 2021 would have no implications on the 22 season.

Page 26 of the link in first post

One of the penalties is reduction of cost cap, which if contraventions can only be identified in the next season, then they must affect the next season.

[101FlyingDutchman]

I still have the less conspiratory view that it is simply a complex task to review this. With the cost cap teams have been diversifying their activities to other racing series and also outside racing. How do you properly separate the developments for different activities on a technical level, and properly allocate the cost to the different activities? E.g. a suspension department can explore different suspension concepts on the F1 budget, and use the lessons learned on their LMDh project. Or they can explore concepts for the LMDh project, and for much less budget quickly arrive at an optimum for the F1 project.

Diversifying brings a lot of benefits. There is a lot of synergy in developing for multiple racing series in parallel. It adds experience to the team and knowledge will flow between series. So a bigger player, active in multiple series, will still have a benefit over the smaller team who is only active in F1, even if both are on the same F1 budget. So diversification in a way is a loophole in the budget cap, even with proper accounting.

With the introduction of the budget cap there has also been a transition, and especially in a transition it is hard to quantify, and thus police, exactly what shall be allocated to what. So for now I buy the complexity excuse used by the FIA.

Think you’ve nailed it there

[Just_a_fan]

FIA waiting for Max to become WDC in Japan then they will announce it. Max missed in SG hence it postponed to Japan. IF Max could not win here, then the result will be postponed further.

It does beg the questions: if the RB18 has been designed and developed over budget, should Max be allowed to win the title? Isn't the car effectively illegal and has been so for all of the season?

Now those are the bombshell questions.

Exceeding the cap on 2021 would have no implications on the 22 season.

Page 26 of the link in first post

Exceeding the cap in 2021 will obviously have an implication for the 2022 season - the 2022 car was designed and partly manufactured in 2021 at the same time the 2021 car was being developed.

The cap applies to spending from Jan 1 2021 to Dec 31 2021, not to the car being run during the 2021 season.

[101FlyingDutchman]

It does beg the questions: if the RB18 has been designed and developed over budget, should Max be allowed to win the title? Isn't the car effectively illegal and has been so for all of the season?

Now those are the bombshell questions.

Exceeding the cap on 2021 would have no implications on the 22 season.

Page 26 of the link in first post

Exceeding the cap in 2021 will obviously have an implication for the 2022 season - the 2022 car was designed and partly manufactured in 2021 at the same time the 2021 car was being developed.

The cap applies to spending from Jan 1 2021 to Dec 31 2021, not to the car being run during the 2021 season.

My initial inclination is that the penalty depends on where said overspend is from. Is it because the money was spent on upgrades then for me that’s more “severe” in terms of gaining an advantage then having 1/2 engineers that RB thought that they had been correctly allocated to RBPT but are now part of cost cap calc. The whole situation is mega intricate. Teams are massively trying to re-arrange their organisations, presumably to make maximum use of everything and optimising the budget to gain performance on track. RB is not alone in that. Errors/update to guide lines/re-wording of agreements & legislation is surely going to happen in the first year something this complex is brought in.

I’ll be the first to want teams severely fined for doing the “wrong thing”. I have no issue with it. But there is a large area of grey here that really we cannot judge on as we don’t have all the information to make that assessment. That’s for the FIA to decide.
I’m glad an overspend of $10m wasn’t identified as it would make a total mockery of everything that they’re trying to achieve.

Fwiw I’m no red bull apologist. I think every team will try to optimise resource to the absolute limit (and more than likely beyond eg teams will try and get a competitive edge in that grey area).
So I’m waiting to see what the FIA says before shooting both barrels

[RZS10]

One thing i have noticed (media, here and elsewhere on the internet) is the weird focus on the word "minor" implying that the breach wasn't bad as in "oh it was just a minor breach" when the penalties are almost identical for a minor and major breach:


The only difference is that a complete DSQ from the competition and/or the championships is not on the table for the minor breach, the penalties seem to be listed in escalating order, at least to some degree.

The mitigating/aggravating factors which can apply for 2021 are those:


It's fair to assume that the only way to get the red ones (=exclusion) is a complete disregard for the cost cap and/or some massively fraudulent accounting, which leaves the other penalties for a scale from 0 to 5% or zero to 7.250.000 (?) dollars - or in other words: the 5% are not the threshold for the point deduction etc.

At the low end sits the public reprimand or the lowest possible penalty which probably should only be given for an insubstantial breach with the mitigating factors of voluntarily disclosing the breach and then fully cooperating with the authorities.

Anything that isn't close to zero should theoretically instantly fall into the category of point deduction and possibly reduced testing and a lower cost cap for the following year, especially when the 7.25m are supposedly a lot more than even the major teams have available for upgrades during the season and you have a team boss arguing that even a breach situated at the bottom end at 0.2m on a scale between 0 - 7.25m can decide championships - and that is just 2.76% of the "minor" category breach.

So yea ... the differentiation between the categories is really weird when both carry almost the same penalties and the choice of words is a bit unfortunate because it implies the wrong thing, imho.

p.s.: does anyone know what "quantum of breach" is supposed to mean? just the sheer amount?

[Andi76]

Without saying that any team has broken the budget cap, i want to say a few things about it :

Usually when such rumours came up in the past, they were true. Its a fact that people within an industry (of course) know much more than the people outside of it. Thats just natural and logical.

When the budget cap was first talked about, i always said that i do not know how the FIA should be able to really make sure they can monitor it. Everyone who has ever run a company knows there are tricks to get around financial restrictions.

If any team has broken the budget cap and there will not be massive consequences, i agree with Ferraris opinion that this will "kill" the budget cap. One team can easily sacrifice one season to win the championship in the year before. For example Ferrari, who have not won a WDC since 2007. They would probably welcome the opportunity to be able to throw in an additional100 million dollars, win the championship in 2024 and happily accept a minor penalty for 2025. They would probably even do that if the penalty would mean they are not able to be better than P9 or 10 in 2025. Or a team like Aston Martin. They would definetely exploit such an opportunity to win their first championship even if it means that they cannot win it in the following year or even be last in both championships.

So the only way to save the budget cap is indeed severe consequences, and not only for one year. But as it also is ridiculous if we now have to wait untill Octobre of next year untill a championship is finally decided, the penalty of a disqualification for the year of the rule-break itself is not desireable. The disqualification has to be for the year when the rule break is noticed and severe consequences for another year is the only way to make sure no team would accept a penalty in one season to win the championship in the season before(if there aren't, a team could still take the decision to "trade" one championship for the following season).

So in the case of Red Bull, if its really true that they broke the rules, they have to be disqualified for 2022. And there also must be severe consequences for 2023. These consequences must either be financial(exclusing from price money or something like that) and/or windtunnel, Cfd limitations for next year(having 20% less than the most restricted team).

I think such severe consequences are the only way to make sure that no team would ever sacrifice one season for another. But they are also absolutely crazy and because of that, there is no way the FIA will implement them, i think. But this in consequence means, if you really think about it(and there was a rule break), that the budget cap is already dead. If a team really did break the rules in relation to the budget cap, i do not see any possibility of how the budget cap could survive.

[Stu]

This thread has been locked & cleaned (6x entire pages of pointless bickering and ‘whataboutery’ have been removed); it is now unlocked in anticipation of an adult discussion whenever the results of the annual audit have been published.

[chrisc90]

Thanks Stu.

Does anyone have any idea what time we expected to get any results? Or even hint at what’s happened.

Penalty wise in expecting if any have gone over to be a financial penalty or a reprimand.

[organic]

Thanks Stu.

Does anyone have any idea what time we expected to get any results? Or even hint at what’s happened.

Penalty wise in expecting if any have gone over to be a financial penalty or a reprimand.

If anyone has gone over cap less than 5% I'd expect financial penalty and dock their wind tunnel/cfd time by a sizeable chunk. Considering how clueless everyone was last time, I expect not even FIA knows what time this will come out today

On Wednesday they told us at 9.50AM to expect news about the financial audits within the next couple hours, so I'd expect again to hear about it in the morning

[e30ernest]

I'm expecting this to come out while the teams are still in planes back to Europe.

[Just_a_fan]

I'm expecting this to come out while the teams are still in planes back to Europe.

That would be a classic FIA move.

[organic]

[Big Tea]

No one has a cert yet.

Sorry, I thought FIA had said 'all but 3' were OK, my mistake there then

[Sieper]

Not that I know, in fact the original Paddock rumor was 3 teams. After that people started to talk only about AM and RB. Who team 3 is?

For me there are 3 big spenders in F1, Ferrari, with huge TV money bonus awarded always for being the historic team that they are, Mercedes, who for a decade have been the big spender (when there was no cap) and redbull. As far as I know Mercedes still employs the most FTE. Toto in his own words talked about letting go 40 employees but then they would still employ the most staff.

And that is problematic to me, are they better at bookkeeping, or is all this “paddock talk” just hot air? Today we should get some more information on the proceedings.

[basti313]

For me there are 3 big spenders in F1, Ferrari, with huge TV money bonus awarded always for being the historic team that they are, Mercedes, who for a decade have been the big spender (when there was no cap) and redbull.

Absolutely. If you try to put logic on it, the logical breach is by the three teams that had to cut budgets to 1/3.
But I currently feel, hope it still stands in one hour, that we are just talking about administrative issues. These can hit anyone.
And this would fit the timeframe that they can not release the certificates, they are arguing which costs are under the cap, which are not. If this is really floating they may need to recheck even the teams that already went noisy on the cost cap. I feat it is not a simple and clear "team xyz broke the cost cap by abc$".