“Bandwagon” F1 teams prompted collapse of Williams capex push, says Wolff
“Bandwagon” F1 teams prompted collapse of Williams capex push, says Wolff
I can't see how you would ever get to a solution on this. Im a Williams fan, to the point that I don't really care that much for drivers, I just want the team to do well, but at the same time, Williams has been in the sport longer than most, and the fact that they have messed up their investing into the team, means that it is their problem, and I don't think they should get any preferential treatment for it.
Make your bed....
The issue here is under the current regulations they can't catch up. They will be behind forever in their facilities and that's not good for the sport.
The cost cap in F1 is very new and still needs adjustments. Providing teams that fell behind in facilities a better option to catch up is needed.
The reason the current approach failed was because they were looking for a one-time exemption rather than a proper rule overhaul.
I assume we will see something similar to car development where teams that placed lower in the construction championship will have a higher budget for facilities available. But how exactly this should look like is difficult.
I wonder if they could take the average cap ex of say Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull over the past 10 years and then work out on a team by team basis how much cap ex allowance over the next X years they're allowed to spend too reach that. So Williams might get the biggest allowance, followed by Haas and Sauber, but teams like McLaren and Aston might not get anywhere near as much. That would obviously be on top of whatever the base expenditure is now.
I know jack shit about finance though so this is probably way off base!
The cost cap was implemented to maintain the status quo. That's the only way the big teams would agree to it.
James Vowles described it as the team in previous years being in survival mode, they weren't able to think forward because they were always thinking about how they survive the current season.
I think James mentioned that their allowance for this year was £7m and they used that on a system that could track the production status of everything in the factory.
He also mentioned that without their own fabrication facilities, etc. they would need to pay 3x the cost when using external suppliers.
At the end of the day, the cost cap is new, and will need to be tweaked over coming years. AM had perfect timing into when their investment came, and Williams will not have that benefit. It sound perfectly fair to me to take what the bigger teams have been able to spend and average that out for the other teams.
What negatives for us viewers can their be? I'd love to see more teams fighting at the front.
Mercedes using it's political leverage to help it's customer team.
Standard stuff
Correction shareholder using political capital to help themselves. Toto Wolf owns part of Williams at least before the Dorilton acquisition.