Steiner: Teams must stop ‘crying’ about budget cap
Guenther Steiner says increasing the budget cap would cause problems for teams.
Haas principal Guenther Steiner believes increasing the impending budget cap would cause problems, so stop crying about it.
As part of the overhaul to F1 in 2021 teams will be limited to spending $175million per-season, with certain costs such as driver salaries and those of the top executives excluded.
That figure is a starting point and it may well be increased over time, but Steiner feels that will only benefit the top teams, and such teams must not “cry” about the cap after they have accepted it.
“We said we’d stick with what we got,” Steiner is quoted by GPToday.net. “We are quite conservative with these things. We’re going to do what we’re doing and try to do it as good as possible.
“The next thing is, the teams, when it increases and it gets decreased again, they are the ones who cry about it. You knew it was coming, if you have no wish and just do what is convenient at the moment, maybe that doesn’t work.”
Ferrari have already said that they will boost their 2020 budget significantly in preparation for 2021, and Steiner knows it will be difficult for the big teams to reduce their spending to meet the cap.
“What it is mainly, we are not going to make the gap bigger,” he said. “The big teams need to come down quite a bit.
“Already for them, it’s a difficult task to do. But the best thing to do is not increase the budget because then you make the gap even bigger.”
But if the budget cap was to increase in the years after 2021, then Steiner was clear that this would have a large negative impact on the smaller teams.
“There would be no point in being here if the gap is two seconds,” Steiner stressed.
“If you think about it, if you have got a $300 million budget and increase it by 5% for a big company, it’s not a lot of money.
“But for us, the 5% is 10% and we can’t do that. The bigger their budget gets, the bigger the percentage number for us gets.
“It’s a very good step in the first place, but we need to see how it works, we need to see all the nuances and go from there.”
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