Formula 1 postpone budget cap meeting

Jamie Woodhouse
Budget cap meeting delayed.

Budget cap meeting delayed.

Formula 1 have delayed a meeting which was designed to discuss the posibility of lowering the upcoming budget cap until next week.

The budget cap is set to come in for 2021, even though the new regulations have been pushed back until 2022, with a limit of $175m for a season.

However, there are major exemptions such as driver salaries, wages for the top three executives in a team and engine costs.

A deal has been reached in principal to now lower this cap to $150m with the same exemptions, but the top three teams are concerned over talks to lower it even further – McLaren CEO Zak Brown has warned that Ferrari and Red Bull are playing with fire over the cap.

Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull are concerned that the challenges which lowering the cap would present have not been fully considered.

The three leading teams of Formula 1 have sent extra analysis and ideas that the governing body want to consider further, as reported by the BBC.

The meeting will now therefore take place next week, but the time has not been confirmed.

Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto has already suggested having different budget caps for the different teams in the sport.

Speaking to Sky Sports, he said: “We are fully aware of the difficulties of some teams and we are fully aware we need to address costs for the future of F1 – reducing costs is the first driver of making sure each single team is surviving.

“We are discussing a budget-cap reduction but we should not forget in doing that exercise that we’ve got different structures, and different assets.

“There are teams which are constructors like Ferrari and other top teams where we are designing, developing, homologating and producing each single component of our cars.

“Other teams are customers, buying some parts, and do not have the same structures. So when discussing a budget cap we must not forget we have different situations, and it’s important we found a common ground which is suited to the different situations and maybe the answer is not a single budget cap equal for all the teams.”

Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull are the clear highest spenders in the series, so if the cap was to be reduced to $125m then that likely would mean a lot of staff would need to be made redundant.

There are also laws in Italy regarding redundancies that Ferrari would have to satisfy.

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