Ross Brawn, Formula 1’s new managing director of motorsport, wants budget size to be less influential in deciding performance.
Since taking his post on Monday, the former team boss has outlined various areas he believes the sport must change. One has been the current inequality between the teams at the front, spending hundreds of millions per year, and those at the back struggling to survive.
Part of his thinking, in trying to address that issue, is to produce regulations which reduce the investment-to-performance ratio.
“The situation at the moment is that the return on investment, in terms of performance, is still steep, so the more money you invest the faster you go,” he told ESPN.
“As long as you get a competent team like Mercedes doing it then that is what happens.
“What we really need to do is reduce that slope and find ways within the technical regulations of rewarding less for heavy investment. That’s the concept, achieving it is more difficult.”
And Brawn admits achieving that goal will take time as there is no silver bullet.
“The idea is to have a process going on all the time of chipping away and getting back to where we want to be — there won’t be one solution where we can say ‘if we do that we can halve the slope’.
“But every decision that’s made, we have to take that into account: are we giving more scope for heavy investment to go further or are we reducing it?
“We just need to keep thinking about it and making sure that all the discussions that happen are going in the right direction to pull the slope down.”
Despite the previous attempt failing due to opposition from the top teams, Brawn is also keen to fully analyse the possibility of a budget cap.
“Budget caps have been discussed; people say that they don’t work, but they have never actually been tried,” Brawn said.
“I would still like to have a discussion about budget caps and control, and see where people stand on that and if we feel it could be a solution.
“That, for sure, would then bring a limitation to what people can do. But maybe it’s nirvana; maybe that is something that can’t be achieved because of the range of teams in different countries and different considerations.
“I’m not saying that we have to have a budget cap, but I think we should certainly discuss it because that does address many issues.
“You’ve got all the nuances to it, because do the drivers come into the budget cap or not and so on and so forth. But a huge amount of debate went on a few years ago and I think that could be picked up again to just see if that is a solution that could work.”
