El Scorchio wrote: ↑25 May 2021, 13:10
Are you suggesting that the cap should be on R&D and new/upgraded parts rather than manufacturing identical replacement parts? If so, completely agree and I don't think it would be impossible to manage or police even if it put more work on scrutineering.
So for instance (irrespective of grid penalties etc.) a new gearbox or suspension parts which are identical to the old/existing/damaged one is free of budget cap, but if they wanted to replace with a spec that hadn't already been used on the car at some point, it would come out of the budget?
In an ideal world, I would say all teams can spend the same maximum budget X on
all performance-related activities (so, pretty much anything except marketing?). That would really make it a sport - with equal conditions, who performs best? (who makes the best choices in resource allocation, and who utilizes those resources to the maximum). That would include both design
and manufacturing. Now, of course we do not live in an ideal world, and 'unexpected write-off' of parts, sometimes outside of your own hands, is an issue. Having some opportunity to manufacture copies out-of-cap would be a resolution to that. But I am also OK with keeping it in budget; every team will need to anticipate for some unexpected damage, and that is part of the game, too. But in any case I think that with a cap on budget in place, a cap on parts is no longer needed. Teams are already punished budget-wise if they want to introduce a new part, whether that is because of an incident or because of innovation. If a team wants to change their ERS systems 5x due to upgrades, fine with me. It means they have less funds available to upgrade other things.