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This is all in the name of reducing expenses of course, but it has the opposite effect.

I always thought it was more like, Ferrari will always spend gobs of money and a small player can only spend a tenth as much- the amount of money spent will not change- but how can we narrow the gap between the high budget & low budget teams, such that a really awesome low budget team has a chance of catching a high budget team napping.



Budget cap kicks in next year heading into new regs for 2022.

Ferrari and Merc spend $500m approx. Budget cap is $175m with exceptions like driver salary, top leaders salary, PU.


And this has resulted in teams spending silly money this year and last to "beat" the new caps.

New wind tunnels, new factories, expensive software projects. All ploughed ahead this year so they don't have to go on the books after 2022.


Wow. What are the outlays of other sports teams for a season? NFL, in what, mostly player salaries?


NFL averages about $250m/team. That’s just player salaries and not coaches/trainers/physios etc


No idea about the NFL, but top football (soccer for you Americans) clubs (Barcelona, Bayern München, etc.) have budgets in the 0.5B EUR range.


Ferrari is currently #6 out of 10 teams so whatever they're spending it's not working.

https://www.formula1.com/en/results.html/2020/team.html


For those who are not following - Ferrari "cheated" last year with their engine and have a secret "agreement" with FIA to cut out thr cheat which also meant apparently rebuilding a lot of the PU. They should be back on pace in 2022.


Part of the agreement is that Ferrari engineers are helping the FIA to police the other engines.

The engineers on the payroll at the FIA don't have the time/resources/knowledge to judge the legality of these insanely complex powertrains.

All manufacturers were forced earlier this year to provide detailed info about their Energy Recovery Systems, rumors are that Ferrari suspects the Mercedes ERS to make use of loopholes so Ferrari lends their engineers to the FIA to research the data provided on all engines.

Close some of those loopholes with a Technical Directive (Basically a clarification of the rules, which takes immediate effect) and you can slow down your opponents with immediately.


Source? I find it hard to believe FIA would give Ferrari privileged access to other teams data.


Teams give FIA the data and Ferrari gives pointers and other help. The sensitive data is not shared with Ferrari.


But then Mercedes cheated THIS year and nothing happened. Ferrari simply lost the politics game.


If you are talking of DAS - they spoke with FIA through development process and was ok'ed.

And DAS is made illegal from next year.

Are you saying Ferrari worked with FIA for their sensor cheat last year as well? BTW, none of us on the outside even know what they even cheated on and what the agreement is etc. The theory is that FIA knows there was cheating with the sensors but doesn't have the necessary evidence to prove it.


To me this is the main problem with F1 as a sport. In football and basketball you can see most of the important strategy play out on the field.

In F1 you are always left guessing which hidden aspect of the engineering is affecting the outcome of the race.

Making everything open source wouldn’t change anything, but at least from a fan perspective you could really delve into those cool engineering bits. Right now we are left guessing at what the Ferrari engine was doing and how it worked.

The things that are actually resulting in the wins/losses are not even not visible, they are secret! What other sport is like that?


They are not really secret, there is specualtion, there is copying and eventually there is details.

The whole thing came to this end because RedBull guessed what Ferrari were doing.

Perhaps that is why I love F1 over any other sport. I love the technical aspects, the need to push into gray area etc.


How so? Do you mean there toe in steering setup? If so I don't think that's really cheating as it's a loophole in the rules rather than a contravention of the rules.


Yeah, and exploiting loopholes in the rules is as old as F1. You follow them to the letter, gain an advantage, hopefully win a championship, and then the FIA specifically bans what you did for future years.


For me this is F1. If someone wants to create a competing racing class with standardised chassis and engines then that's fine too. But it isn't F1.


That is precisely the reason budget cap will come into effect from 2021.




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