Which at the moment is basically a permanent debuff for Williams. I’m all for a cost cap to introduce equality up and down the grid, but if teams cannot make the investment needed to catch up, that is a problem.
I knew Williams was underinvested, but wow. They need like 3 Ryan Reynolds to catch up.
wasn’t the total investment at that point 200M?
Can they catch up with the current budget caps?
According to James in the article, no they can’t. Hopefully the FIA can be convinced to relax capital expenditure regulations for smaller teams at least.
Even with the capex limits, the smaller teams should slowly catch up to the big teams infrastructure wise because the teams with better facilities have less room to improve when spending the same amount of money. Problem is that the smaller teams don’t have the overall budget to invest in facilities, etc.
The current capex limits are more harmful to teams like alpine, Aston, McLaren and Audi/Sauber who have the money needed to upgrade/build modern facilities but are hamstrung by the spending limits
That makes sense. In regards to Aston though, were they able to build their new factory and start their new wind tunnel because they started before the caps came into effect? In that case a rival mid field team like Alpine really is in a tough spot.
I imagine they would have to sacrifice a season or two to catch up on the equipments game to compete in the later ones.
