Modern F1 has an extreme amount of simulation behind it that just didn’t exist last century. Whether you can make a car that is good or not is a factor of budget you can spend on engineering teams, wind tunnel time, etc., instead of what whacky idea you can come up with that makes the car better.
Budget caps introduced this year will hopefully start to level the playing field once the 2022 regs kick in.
From what I see, budget caps and limits on testing reach the opposite of levelling the field: they make it harder for slower teams to catch up. So these days whoever makes the best car after big regulations change wins with little challenge until next change of regulations. First RB, now Mercs.
Not to the degree seen in F1 since the start of the turbo hybrid era. Scrappy underdog teams could score wins with creative, out of the box thinking that was possible with a small budget. Today the only time you see a team with a budget less than Mercedes, Ferrari or Red Bull winning is because of some act of god during the race.
Seems to me that should be ok to have a class where teams can throw money at it without real limits. Sure, that shouldn’t be everything, but if they want F1 to be the fastest, fanciest stuff possible, restricting investment to improve competitiveness doesn’t seem like a great move.
That’s kind of the running joke in the world of F1 fans, you have Mercedes, Red Bull, and I guess now Renault (because Ferrari is doing really bad this season) in F1, everyone else is F1.5.
The problem is there’s only so many manufacturers that have the desire to spend that much money. Especially on what is obviously dead-end technology wise, so it’s nothing more than a marketing spend that requires them to actually have a chance at winning to be worth it.
Honestly I’d buy the rumors that Mercedes was debating pulling out of F1 if the new cost caps didn’t mean the team will run at a profit instead of a ~$30m expense after sponsorships and prize money are taken into account. Hell, they just won the Formula E championship the first year they were a manufacturer branded team, and they know electric vehicles are the way forward.
That's because of the emphasis on reliability, made worse by limits on components and a scoring system that makes it much harder to catch up after DNF. In the past a quick but unreliable car could get to some high place thanks to luck.
Quite. Most innovation over the history of F1 has come from the lower-funded teams (Brabham, Lotus, Williams), and is quickly banned if Ferrari or Maclaren can't make it work. Ferrari and the other well-funded teams have the money to eke out ever-diminishing returns; Lotus and Williams have to rely on "making turbos work", "ground effects", or "introducing aero", or "dynamic suspension", not to mention strangled-in-the-crib tech such as CVT or fan-assisted aero.
Budget caps introduced this year will hopefully start to level the playing field once the 2022 regs kick in.