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WHAT IS GOING ON AT THE FIA?

Author

James Lamb
October 12, 2022

FIA Budget Cap findings - Every Little Helps

After a 10-month wait and a further delay over the Japanese Grand Prix weekend, the FIA’s findings into the F1 Budget Cap for the 2021 season were released on Monday and the rumours that surfaced in Singapore were indeed correct. Two teams were found to be in breach of the Budget Cap rules; one in a procedural breach and one in a procedural and minor overspend breach. These teams were Aston Martin and Red Bull respectively.

Aston Martin will most likely get away with a fine, like Williams did earlier this year, as their offence is understood to be related to a number of administrative accounting problems rather than a breach of regulation, but Red Bull could be in line for a harsher penalty for actually going over the cap.

This is not a good look for the FIA. Even if Red Bull only overspent ever-so-slightly and it wasn’t contributing towards performance, it is inevitably going to raise questions that the car to win both of the driver’s championships in the Budget Cap era is the only one to break the rules. That would be a big shame for Max Verstappen and F1 if his first two titles have an asterisk next to them.

This whole saga begs two big questions for me:

Why is there a two-step tier system in the rules between a minor and major breach, which sets out two sets of punishments?

Surely, it should be a hard stop at the $145 million mark. Why are there concessions if you only break the rules in a small way? Surely you have still broken the rules. Especially when a minor breach of under 5% can be up to $7.25 million. As Martin Brundle mentioned on the YouTube series from Sky Sports F1 Any Driven Monday, that could be the equivalent of a B-spec car for some teams. If used on performance, that money can go a very long way.

The second big question is: why are the rules ambiguous enough for a team to interpret what goes under the budget cap differently to the FIA? Why is there not a simple list that says ‘This is what goes under the Budget Cap’? Were the teams not run through this by the FIA? By Christian Horner’s account, they interpreted the rules to mean some areas of the business were not under the cap, while the FIA thought they were. Was there no communication from both sides on this to clarify?

I appreciate that F1 teams are massively complex organisations and this is the first time in the sport’s history that a budget cap has been enforced, but this is F1, if you leave anything up to interpretation the teams will exploit it for their advantage.

One thing that can’t be ambiguous or up for interpretation is the rules, otherwise, it's anarchy.

We will need to get all the information on this to understand fully, but the sheer fact that it happened and we only hear about it 10 months later shows serious flaws in the system that the FIA needs to sort out over the winter. I agree with some voices out there that it should be an ongoing process, not just one invoice at the end of the year.

Let us know how you think teams that have breached the cost cap should be punished.

James Lamb - Motorsport Writer

The Battle at the Bottom

Now that the Driver’s Championship has been wrapped up and the Constructors is looking like it's going the same way, I thought I would highlight some of the other good battles that may have gone under the radar in the F1 world.

The one I want to focus on today is the battle for 6th in the Constructors. This fight is between 4 teams: Alfa Romeo (52), Aston Martin (45), Haas (34) and Alpha Tauri (34), who are only separated by 18 points. As they are usually fighting for minor places in the points, this can feel like a big gap but with the way races have been going recently, this 6th spot and a reported extra $17 million, which gets more valuable with each passing day at the moment, are still very much up for grabs.

As we head into the final four races of the season in the USA, Mexico, Brazil and Abu Dhabi there is still room for the weather to become a factor in helping these teams score some big points and push them up the table.

As Martin Brundle says, if the midfield battle was for the Championship, we would have a blockbuster every year and this year is no exception. Personally, my money is on Aston Martin, that clever rear wing will come in handy, especially in the USA and Brazil.

James Lamb - Motorsport Writer

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