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Lewis even said as much, it's a balancing act, learning for next year, progress for this, which also helps next year, but then again Redbull gets to use resources for next year if they are that far ahead

So a holding pattern that will result in the best team maintaining momentum, I bet 2024 will be more or less the same

That's a pretty good guess because they've just got a clear advantage they can keep rolling into next years development. Hate to say this but I think the only way that you would kind of catch up the rest of the teams is if you graduate and raise the cost cap towards the end of the pack. You would probably put it in bands to discourage people from having bad performances just to get one slot lower. Having a little more wiggle room in money for the constructors would probably bunch everything together a lot quicker

A luxury tax then. You break the cost cap by this much, you owe the teams that didn't. Not F1 not the FIA, the other teams.

RB, Ferrari and Merc would just break the cap every year if you gave them that option while the poorer teams (Haas, Williams) couldnt afford it. Goes against the whole idea of the cost cap.

But the poorer teams get more money from the luxury tax. The poorer teams like Haas aren't competing even with the cost cap

The luxury tax would have to be extremely aggressive for the smaller teams to benefit, I'd think like 300% or more tax on every dollar overspent to have enough to share with the other teams to make a difference.

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Oh, well I guess that does make sense, if not it'll just be abused. Does it still get abused at that rate?

I'd go extremely harsh, the tax is [number of teams] *overspend, the money goes to each team. If you go over by a factor of 2 you have to pay every teams budget for the year

I think what would go a long way to making clear to everyone that breaking the cost cap isn't worth it ( I don't really think it is atm but many people think RB got of lightly) is that your next years budget cap is lowered by 3-4 times what you went over. That's the default penalty, On top of other penalties you get. It's hard to argue that would be worth it for any team.

… But I was told the penalty RB got was gonna hurt! Like, it's only a matter of time before the other teams catch up, right? Any day now??

the cost cap kills the sport

Luxury taxes are the worst, any franchise which has them never reaches parity. If mercedes has a luxury tax, guess what red bull will too. The engineers poached from red bull who went to aston and mclaren? They probably get their salaries matched by the incoming offers. Rb’s current dominance can only be overcome with a new design which is faster, currently every other team this reg period is lagging in understanding and as a result we see this positive feedback loop of dominance. I don’t work in f1, but I’d wager the only way you’ll see red bull get dethroned is if you directly attack their concept with a reg change. Every team runs a cockpit further forwards than them, and they’re one of only 2 teams to use front pullrod suspension. These attributes aren’t responsible for they’re dominance but they might be easier to penalize: allowing for more complex suspension might force red bull to repackage their front suspension to make use of the advantage, only collateral would be mclaren. Maybe allowing more aggressive diffuser profiles relative from your sis placement to your rear axle may give other concepts more of an advantage etc Changing the rules between seasons should happen more often if dominance like this happens, not less imo. In the last 20+ seasons the only ones where virtually no reg changes between seasons resulted in closer fields was 2003, every other time the field closed it was down to something being banned or added. 2012, 2017 and 2021 wouldn’t be as exciting if the rules remained the same from the previous year, but you know what you get when regs are stable and dominance is steady? 2001-2002, 2015-2016, 2019-2020.

Spot on

I’m not on board for this constantly changing Formula. It would result maybe in a different one of the top 2 teams dominating every other year. The expense would be enormous and other than Mercedes and their bottomless coffers. But in defense of your point, 2003 had the tire wars to make things close. It was Michelin, not McLaren, Williams and even Renault, who turned the tables on Ferrari that year.

> Mercedes and their bottomless coffers. How is that an issue with the cost cap? All the teams have more or less the same budgets nowadays.

Cost cap prevents people from increasing enough to catch up. I would rather have luxury tax. Yes rich teams will go over budget but that means more money for poor teams

And the poor teams become dependent on the welfare payments, never allowing them to compete with top teams otherwise they move out of their comfort zone. Plus I feel the whole notion of “catching up” with a lack of cost cap is misguided: red bull will spend just as much as mercedes to maintain their advantage, they won’t suddenly keep spending $140m while mercedes spends $500m. Plus, only 2 teams can spend over $400m, that makes competition so much worse. Removing the cost cap now would do nothing for the sport, only hand the championship back to mercedes. We are seeing personnel leave the top teams for midfield teams now, it would be so much harder to do that with a luxury tax system or no cost cap period

its a 3 prong approach * cost cap + * luxury tax + * minimum spend tax E.g 100m cost cap. \- luxury tax: you pay 1x penalty at up 50m, and 2x at greater than 50m to 100m. 4x at 100m+ \- minium spend 50m. for every spend you are below the spend, you pay minimum spend tax equal to the amount you are below 50m. This pretty much guarantees that even the cheapest teams spend at least 50m. in your example, if mercedes wants to spend 400m on development. It will cost them $1.35B (400m + 950m luxury tax) Even mercedes isn't that rich. But it enables competition, and still gives a team opportunity to strategically overspend a bit to catch up.

It seems to me the “poor” teams aren’t exactly in the realm of competing for WDC/WCC as it is, so I’m not sure this potential drawback should be so concerning.

Last years big rule change did the opposite though, it made Mercedes design obsolete and took away any edge Ferrari had. The big 2021 rule change also was a bit blatant just against the winner. I think the current ideas are valid but the cost cap should also go up from #1 to #10. If the bottom teams can't afford to go above it that sucks but at least they get more wind tunnel time. I'd rather have Williams and Haas one second off the pace than none of the teams being able to catch up because they aren't allowed to do the work.

> Last years big rule change did the opposite though, it made Mercedes design obsolete and took away any edge Ferrari had. tbf it's literally only because the cars were dangerous to drive at times that they were able to keep up in any way. Red Bull just fundamentally has a better concept from day 0 2022.

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Ahh yes, nothing settles arguments like "STOP BEING SALTY". If you don't want to argue that's fine, you don't have to press the reply button.

You can say it wasn't… but the floor was FAR from the biggest contributor to downforce for that set of regulations. If they wanted to reduce downforce, they could've done it by addressing the wings instead.

That’s fair, but at the same time I think it’s better for there to be attempts to shift the field rather than just letting it runaway (if it gets to that point). So I’d vouch for changes to be made from season to season if it means 1 or 2 teams runaway again, so long as a balance can be discovered between rulesets and teams below the established top can realistically capitalize on the change; if they don’t know how the rules fundamentally work then changing the rules won’t do anything, but if their realm of expertise is shifted to a certain area of performance or if their concept needs a little more help then that could be better than just randomly changing the regs for the sake of doing so. It doesn’t help that some midfield teams are perpetually in a rebuild-state making rule changes worse for them; rule changes would have to be announced at least a full season beforehand in order to give catching teams enough lead time, but not enough for the top team to capitalize. Either way I feel even when rule changes backfire it’s better than letting a broken nose heal on its own. Only way a hands-off approach works is when there’s a good balance between teams to begin with, and if the rules are open enough for paradigm shifts to occur naturally.

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How does luxury tax lead to layoff

Hard to say with how little wind tunnel time red bull is getting so their development is somewhat limited.

Not necessarily. The CFD reduction the higher up you go, should close up the overall gap between teams. This just takes a little while to work. As we can see, already most of the teams qualify in a total of 1s 2nd place to 20th place which is a very small margin. If we take out the freak of nature that is Max, the gap is very small. The cost cap at the same time doesn't let rich teams like RB, Merc and Ferrari to spend their way out of a problem. In previous years, no matter what curve ball the FIA tried throwing at Mercedes, they could just outspend everyone and be first again (as we saw in 2021 where they were much stronger in the second half than in the first half).

Cost cap will always be a good thing, I agree with that and people thinking the cap’s the problem are misguided, but it’s more the regulations basically tailoring to red bull’s aero strengths unintentionally which currently is creating this gap imo. No one knows how to create a floor as effective as them, and other concepts had either lower design ceilings or were gimped by a technical directive (the f175’s concept sounded like it hinged on a flexible plank that was amended after td39, so imo that’s more on ferrari but still). The rules were always about making development about the floor, but currently red bull’s concept seems to be the only way to go about getting performance at the moment, kind of like how mercedes benefitted indirectly from simplifying the front wings in 2019 and it carried over to 2020 because they had time to fortify areas of the w10 to make it stronger. The rb20 is probably already 90% there in the rb19 but red bull will save massive changes for next year since midseason upgrades are less cost effective than during winter where sweeping changes to the chassis make more sense to do. So that’s why I said what I said - it’s not the cost cap, but red bull’s inherent knowledge of ground effect / floor sealing + their built-up advantage that will allow them to allocate more development to the rb20 because they have such a massive advantage currently

True, they had the benefit of Newey who was around during the last ground effect era. But I like how they set up the regulations so that we get as close a field as possible in the long term. I think all the pundits (and if I remember correctly even Newey) said that if made to work properly, Mercedes' zero pod route had the potential to be unbeatable. But it turned out that the operating window of the concept in the real world is very narrow which is hard to hit from weekend to weekend and from track to track. Red Bulls concept turned out to have the widest operating window, hence why everyone is going in that route now (which honestly was bound to happen with the winning concept. If Merc were dominating again, all other teams were going to start going the zero pod route)

Mercedes is also aware that Max wasnt even pushing, aside from a few laps here or there. When Max was on old tires, still pulling away from everyone on new tires, that was a sign. When Max went way quicker for faster lap than he had been. Also, RBR was the only team to show up to Spain with 1st ICE, Turbo, MGU K, MGU H ect...... Max and that car together are scary fast

Toto also said they could have closed the gap to 15 seconds but the race was so in the bag they chose conservation of tires. Have to wonder how much extra pace Redbull has You're correct though, Lewis went to say the Redbull was fast post race and corrected it to Max because it is only Max

Toto said the gap between Max and Lewis was effectively 15 seconds because Lewis was held up by Sainz in the first stint. He didn't say Lewis had pace in hand to bring the gap down from 24 to 15 seconds. That would suggest the Merc could lap faster than the RB, and that simply wasn't the case.

Oh sorry I misunderstood that. Got a little lost in his Austrian accent.

They can't. Yeah Hamilton was 19 seconds ish behind and really let go the lady couple of laps. Yeah he could driven more aggressively and gotten it to 15 only if Verstappen chose not to respond. If they both went flat out, RB was like 0.7s a lap faster

>When Max went way quicker for faster lap than he had been. This one doesn't mean much, because he set his early in the race (full tank, Medium instead of Softs). >Also, RBR was the only team to show up to Spain with 1st ICE, Turbo, MGU K, MGU H ect...... They may have shown up with the old ones, but they changed to 2nd for Spain, so they were one of the few cars with new components.

They still took all components farther than anyone elss

Didn't realise that was your point.

Point is that components are lasting longer, which would indicate less stress

Yeah, to clarify, in the context of the rest of your post it seemed like you were saying that's the one they used in Spain. The Honda doesn’t lose much over time. That was also the case in 2021 and 2022.

Doesn’t always work like that. Ferrari had the best car first half of last year and have even regressed compared to their own car from last year. Not saying this will happen with RB, but it’s not a guarantee they keep progressing in the same fashion.

I love it when people try to make an argument they know is flawed. Ferrari got forked because of TD39. But hey let’s leave that vital piece of information out. I mean your point isn’t wrong, but using this example is as flawed as it gets.

I’m just pointing out that things can change quickly and favour one design more than the other. It’s too easy to assume that RB will keep on trucking. Thanks for telling me my point isn’t wrong and also how flawed my argument is. Lol

Red Bulls wind tunnel and budget cap penalty applies to next year. It’ll be a lot closer then people are making it out to be. Aston jumped a lot over one winter, whose to say Mercedes can’t

Good spot on The Race a while ago that RBR gained the most of anyone over the winter (except AM), so the idea that RBR are approaching a ceiling or plateau may be naive.

How anyone would know "where" the plataeu is before a team actually reaches it?

I’m assuming that we’d start to see their performance gains slow as they hit a point of diminishing returns. But if RBR is still pacing/outpacing competitors then it *could* suggest they’ve yet to maximize the car.

Or they’re governing output… wouldn’t be the first time in the last decade a team has done that.

> I’m assuming that we’d start to see their performance gains slow CORRECTION: You're *hoping* their performance slows. When Mercedes was dominating, their car kept getting faster and faster right until the end of the technical regulations.

Diminishing returns is a thing. They _will_ eventually get to a spot where they're making minor improvements despite working hard at those improvements, while other teams make large improvements and start catching up. Now whether they fully catch up or not is another matter but eventually the gains their rivals make will be larger than the gains they themselves are making.

Only if the regulations remain the same. If they change, RBR has the runway to make changes more comfortably than other teams.

If they change a major contributor to RB's performance, they'll have to go back to the drawing board from zero like everybody else.

Yeah, and hopefully the field will converge quicker than before (due to reduced wind tunnel time + cost cap).

If anything, due to those factors you mentioned, it will take longer to reach a convergence. Less time and resources to explore different ideas and develop those that work.

Depends how you look at it. I think the fact that you can't spend perpetually more than competitors in addition to relatively less wind tunnel time will outweigh those factors you mentioned. But we'll see in the next two years I guess.

It *is* naive. They never plateau'd before the cost cap, while having unlimited cfd/tunnel time and spending 400+ million per year, they're not going to do so with those limited to 1/3rd or less.

First time I've ever seen someone write a good thing about The Race. You doing ok?

Not trying to be controversial here, but how is it right that a team caught going over the cost cap and be punished for that, be the team who gains the most over the winter...

The punishment applies to this year, not last year.

It started in October last year.

Yeah, so obviously they didn't run out of wind tunnel time by the winter and this will be felt some time this year.

> Yeah, so obviously they didn't run out of wind tunnel time by the winter and this will be felt some time this year. Yeah, we're more than 1/4 done with the season, and the gap doesn't budge; it's the opposite. I don't know if everyone claiming the penalty "will be felt" really believes this. Especially with Horner now bragging about the fact their advantage remains.

The punishment was too light and it won’t affect them because they are already too far ahead. I might be wrong but I think they will start upgrading their car after the summer break.

Then the other principals should’ve set different rules. They were punished accordingly. And don’t kid yourself, it was under 2m, it shouldn’t be overly harsh

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Worth noting that was an inclusion of a rebate they didn't recieve because they weren't entitled to it.

No, it was a tax right off they were entitled to, but didn't apply themselves.

400k on its own, no… but if teams respect the budget cap, they'll want to give themselves some room to absolutely ensure they won't be over the limit. So RB's advantage for not caring if they went over the line, is definitely more than 400k. I don't believe its a coincidence that the one team who went over the cap is the one that's dominating.

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The punishment was fine, it's just that redbull are so far ahead of everyone else (or better said: everyone is so far behind of redbull) that it didn't made much difference.

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Bitter lemon logic because Mercedes built a piece of shit again lol

> the fact that they are far ahead should not influence the penalty. It was the other way around… they knew for a long ass time they were gonna be over the budget. In that case, it makes sense to accelerate development as much as possible before the penalty kicks in.

... And push themselves more over budget?

Why would it push them over the budget after their development time gets dinged? They'd just be pushing it forward.

It really wasn't too light, and a 400k overspend didn't give them a full second advantage. I doubt any team will go over by 400k and accept the 10% windtunnel+CFD time reduction. If no teams want that trade, then the punishment is fine. You also shouldn't punish teams differently based on their car's pace.

It was a calculated risk. They know what they are doing.

I get that the development for this year's car was mostly done last year, in general development is done a year in advance. With that said I think punishment should focus more on the now rather than the long term. Because i guess teams could exploit it to make massive gains in a year and just coast for a year or two after when punished. But you'd hope FIA punishments would be proportional.

But the massive gains aren’t made because of the breach. The breach was 400.000 and in 2021. That has little to do with gains made between 2022 and 2023

How would you exploit it to make massive gains exactly? There are tiers to the breach with escalating punishment options. So yes, the FIA punishment is proportional. If you think $400K was the reason for the gap then I don't know what to tell you.

Limitting the resources they have (wind tunnel time) does not prevent Red Bull from still doing a better job. Besides, I doubt 10% WT time for a 400K breach is a deal any team would want to take. We'll see at the end of this year I guess, whether a lot of teams suddenly start overspending or not will tell us whether the teams find the penalty worthwhile or not

> I doubt 10% WT time Doesn't it end up 7% cause of how they calculate it? RB lost more time for coming 1st in the constructors than they lost for breaching the rules.

So the penalty was 10% of THEIR wind tunnel time. However the way the wind tunnel time allocation for constructors is visualized by having P7 as the benchmark (100% WT time) and the grid being scaled from P10 (115% WT time) to P1 (70% WT time). The penalty was RB losing 10% of their WT time so instead of having 70% of what P7 would have they have 63% of what P7 would have. 10% loss compared to their own WT time without a penalty, 7% loss compared to the benchmark of P7 in the constructors

Yeah I know. Point being it's kind of a screwy "punishment" because their punishment is less because they came in first.

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They got less punishment because they came in first because of how it's calculated. I really don't care about the naming scheme or the hoops people want to jump through to explain it differently. They hilariously enough would have had a greater punishment if they were 2nd or lower. It's a really halfbaked way they calculate it.

It was only a little bit of drugs in his system, maybe we should add 3grammes of lead to his shoes for a few races. That’ll do it.

Like I said, if you think 10% WT time for a 400K breach is a lenient penalty then end of this year more teams will be breaching the cost cap, if teams do not think it's worth it they won't. Time will tell

At this stage I wish part of the penalty also included giving all the teams 400k more to spend just so that everyone sees how actually useful the 400k is :')

In a year like 2021 that could have made the difference between winning or losing the WDC. I wouldn't be opposed to a team also having to pay what they overspend to other teams on top of the other penalties they got. Though I'm sure someone could think of some downsides to this.

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Obviously it went to 2021. The cost cap for 2022 is going to be reviewed this year.

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They won’t because the penalties for breaches will now be higher. I have a hard time believing that RB couldn’t do the maths - it was deliberate in my opinion, and some creative accounting after the fact doesn’t change that. I don’t think the breach equates to the difference in their performance this year, they’ve just done a good job, so my comment was slightly tongue in cheek.

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I don’t have anti RB narratives. What are you on about? Reality is they broke the cost cap; that is not up for debate and is not an anti RedBull narrative. I’ve also said they’re doing a good job irrespective of the cost cap breach. That is not an anti RedBull narrative either. My opinion - and I stress it is my opinion - is that they knew what they were doing. They’re not that stupid. Which is also not an anti RedBull narrative.

Firstly the full effects of the punishment won’t have really kicked in yet. It started in October and years car would have been mostly complete well before that. It will be small refinements that happen after that point and it will be upgrades that are affected. Time will tell if the other teams outdevelop Red Bull as a result and if next years car is affected. Secondly Red Bull only got a wind tunnel and CFD restriction. Their budget cap wasn’t reduced so the money they save on less aero and CFD testing they can spend elsewhere to improve the car. That negates some of the effectiveness of the penalty. Thirdly just think if Red Bull are this good under a penalty imagine how far ahead they might be without a penalty.

Right? This is a meritocracy. It's not like the FIA goes doling out upgrades equally. "You get 0.4 this week Mercedes, because AM had that last week" Red bull has the most sound concept and their upgrades reflect that. Both Mercedes and Ferrari have (or maybe had in case of Merc) glaring issues in their concept and their development reflects that. So even with the penalty, Red Bull are still on the right track.

Because they are a competent team? Its not like they sat there all depressed because of the penalty.

By virtue of understanding the regs and how to spend their limited wind tunnel time the best? Assuming they didn't break the cost cap again it's completely fair.

It's right because of the fact that they did it on merit even with the penalty.

Yet here you are.. being controversial. They went over the costcap, but not by an amount that's significant enough to be able to 'blame' all progress on the amount they went over costcap with. Besides, the costcap penalty goes into effect this year (less windtunnel time). The answer is that they probably had the best car to continue development on. Last year the car was too heavy (for instance)... so big gains could've been made with relatively simpler changes.

400000 does not give that kind of advantage ..

They breach by 400000 but they had a 3.7M cushion over the cap limit that means they forgot to include 4.1M in their submission. You can do a lot of stuff with 4M

This is not true at all mate. It was a 400.000 overspend, not 4 million

Yes they breach by 400.000 after the review by the FIA but in their official submission they were 3.7M under the limit. So to go from 3.7M under the limit to 400.000 over after the review that means the FIA found 4.1M that RB forgot to include in their original submission.

Sure, but they only overspend by 400.000 AM also forgot to submit some spending but they remained under the cap when it got added. I don’t see that as an issue as clearly teams weren’t trying to hide stuff. I mean if you really want to hide it FIA would never find certain spending by letting accountants check your books.

Yes it does. It's an entire new floor, or a new front and rear wing, or a team of engineers. It's pretty much an entire set of upgrades that other teams didn't get.

So it doesn't even cover the Hungary crash, in case you still don't realize the overspend was in 2021.

Mercedes likely spent more than 400k to on their W14B upgrade (completely new suspension layout, floor, sidepod design) and they estimated that it’d be worth about 2 tenths a lap. Which is half of RB’s current advantage while cruising in front after they overspent that much in development two years ago. Not a single reputable source claims that RB’s advantage is solely due to them overspending by ~400k, because it’s extremely unlikely.

Lol no, that's not how that works. 400000 Won't even come close to the cost of the development of a part. And physically making (manufacturing) one single front wing (excluding development of said front wing) will cost anywhere from 150k to 200k already.

Got sources for that, because that ain't what Pat Symonds says.

plenty of sources to be found if you're not lazy. But here, let me help : [https://www.motorbiscuit.com/most-expensive-pieces-formula-1-car/](https://www.motorbiscuit.com/most-expensive-pieces-formula-1-car/) and if you really want it right from a team, sift through Mercs youtube channel. As they once made a video about it.

No it doesn't. 400k in development terms is nothing.

Because they had the best concept and understanding of ground effect cars. They basically nailed the regs. The rb18 was still a very basic car, too heavy because they started development very late in 202q and probably also didn't have the budget for lightweight parts. It was in hindsight quite logical they would make such a big step from 2022 to 2023.

The optics are unfortunate, yes. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny and is in reality a non-issue//there's no implication among people with an understanding - but the plain fact is that to laypeople, the team who were punished for going over the budget cap are the team who have failed to win about 2 races over the last 12 months. Everyone, F1 included, look a bit daft for RBR's overspend.

Well they didn't breach the cost cap by much, but if it was effective it was the right call from RB. They get a leg up and then have a lot of knowledge to keep staying ahead, at least for the first couple of seasons. The punishment that you talk about should start to have its effects for next year, but Red Bull are far enough ahead that this won't affect them.

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Because they’re not Mercedes ;)

Maybe Horner’s playing it up to underline their achievements even more but it seems like they’re genuinely surprised they have no close competitor this season. It seems they thought for sure at least Ferrari would be right back up there with them and instead they went backwards and underwent a concept change.

I forgot who said it in Red Bull, but they talked about how they didn't feel like they did anything special over the winter. It's just that other teams collapsed and barely improved.

They had huge advantage last season and the changes in regs actually made them even better, as it seems they last almost no speed nor tyre life, so they could just continue as planned. Meanwhile Ferrari that was already struggling with the deg got shafted. Also since following is now more costly in terms of tyre degradation RBR having huge DRS gain due to aero efficiency means they pay less for having to go trough field. I don't see any team being able to get close this and next season, baseline design of Redbull gives than way too much room to work with. Unless Mercedes gets it right with next year car. I wouldn't put much faith in Ferrari.

Looking at Ferrari and Mercedes and the amount of money they spent till now, I doubt breaching the cost cap would have allowed them to be any closer to RB by now. It's quite clear that RB's original concept have a higher ceiling and they were very clear about the development direction, which has allowed them to remain ahead of competition consistently!!! Merc meanwhile wasted a year and some months with their zero pods, while Ferrari will always be Ferrari, with their wind-tunnel running hardly correlating with real life. Neither of these facts would have changed massively if they had breached cost cap themselves!

I think red bull’s concept survived raising the ride height the best. I think last year the three concepts were equal, but red Bull with the downwash gives the best performance with a higher ride height. Merc and Ferrari are catching up while Red Bull had natural progression

It begs the question whether Redbull was expecting a higher ride height change regulation, or would the RB be even more of a rocket with a lower ride height than it is now?

I think that they just carried over their experience and had a very sound method of sealing the floor and once things changed, it wasn’t a big deal to bring it back. Ferrari and Mercedes maybe were hoping to use that air to do other things and now are having to back track

Why are we talking cost cap here?

Because thats the main factor limiting teams like Mercedes/Ferrari from making gains on Red Bull. Toto even said himself, that back in the day, they would throw money at everything and they would come out on top. They now have to be very careful with what they throw money at, due to the costcap.

What am I reading, this doesn't make any bloody sense in any way shape or form. If there was no cost cap then the very first thing Mercedes would have done is keep the haemorrhaged staff to AM and RB, had multiple development streams and been much more aggressive in bringing various floors and are modifications. The big glaring weakness of the cost cap is that it has worked to cement the leaders gap to the rest of the pack from day one because all the teams are spending the same exact resource points. Eventually RB will plateu and the other teams may get closer but they will still be miles away from refining the final product whereas rb will already be planning for the season after.

Clearly u read my point wrong. I am talking about cost cap breaching as has been the case for RB, not the current world without cost cap!

Only if you're assuming a minor breach. If we instead assume that Mercedes breached the cost cap by spending three times the actual cap, it would certainly have an impact.

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I think its pretty understandable that Ferrari and mercedes might take a few weeks to get their heads around their dramatically new cars. The idea is that they have more room for development, not that the single upgrade package would match red bull. I think it's actually quite foreboding that mercedes was this fast so soon after the change.

Mercedes was 2nd in Barcelona last year as well. I wouldn’t get excited just yet.

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No shit...they have had one race

I wish he'd of taken Ferraris offer as Team Principal, would have took a few Red Bull personnel and likely equalised all the top teams.

Theres no chance in hell Horner actually planned to go to Ferrari

Nah Marko said because of the money Ferrari offered RBR had to massively up his pay.

Maybe it was a clever little tactic from Horner lol If not, they must have offered him an ungodly amount of money for him to even consider it, seeing the state of RB Vs Ferrari

It was probably a bluff, i imagine if Marko says they can't pay him that much Horner would reply "ah, was worth a shot, i'm not going to Ferrari anyway"

You have to also remember that Spain typically has larger gaps between the field than other tracks. They can optimize the cars a lot better here since the teams know the track so well. Typically the best car also has the highest ceiling and it's easier to achieve it here thanks to the data that the teams have of this track. E.g. in 2017 Hamilton and Vettel lapped everyone bar Ricciardo who was close to being lapped as well. Also everyone outside the top 10 was lapped twice. In 2018 everyone outside the top 8 was lapped twice. Then in 2020 Hamilton lapped everyone bar Verstappen and Bottas. So all in all, it's not as gloomy as it may look. Actually looking at Russell, Mercedes are closer to Red Bull compared to last year. He finished 32 seconds behind Verstappen both years but this year started from 12th compared to 4th last year. Hamilton obviously had the contact last year so we don't know how he could've gone in a normal race last year.

My thoughts: The RB is the fastest car on the track. That being said, Max is a generational talent, in the fastest car. It takes both. You put me in that car and I finish 20th if I don’t crash into a barrier.

I have a friend who thinks we could beat Lance Stroll with 3 weeks of training. I think it'd take me nearly that long to muster up the courage to really stamp on the breaks.

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The amount of salt in this thread lmao.

Can’t really fault people on here for being salty. This season sucks and there’s a pretty good chance that it’ll be the same next year.

Depends on the team you are rooting for. :)

Not really. We want racing, not just to watch a team fly off, even if its one we support.

You want racing? You get racing. Just not at the front. It's not all about the frontrunners which only make up a small percentage of the grid. The midfield is close you know

That is not how sports work. Let's be honest here this is the speech one has when one's team is not winning. If you like a team you want them to win as hard as they can, maybe even break a few records along the way, it's human nature. On the other hand there are 20 cars on the track. Plenty of racing there even if one team goes ahead.

Having a cost cap made everything worse in the grand scheme of things. No one will ever catch up now.

I'm so sick of reading this terrible take everywhere.

If there was no cost cap, Mercedes would be able to show up with a completely new car concept instead of a b spec. Cost cap just limits how much resources a team can put in. RB will always stay ahead now as they can spend the same amount of resource and time to improve their current car that is already far ahead. It’s the exact reason why they were able to move even further ahead this year.

No, a key part of the cost cap is that the top team _cannot_ put the same amount of effort into improving their current car. Money, yes, but resources, no - that's the entire point of the scaled development time. Without cost caps yes, Mercedes might've thrown money at the problem and had a plan-b ready to go early on, but Red Bull and Ferrari would also throw money at their cars and... who knows where we'd be. Maybe RB would've still settled on this concept early on, then had a few hundred million extra to spend on it while Mercedes developed two cars simultaneously. Then we're still in a situation where there's a clear best car, and now they can pour money into keeping that lead. The old budget-based hierarchy was terrible. What if, in an uncapped world, Mercedes _did_ manage to make their zero-pods design work, and it was clear best-in-field, but it took $400million to get to that point? What then? Ferrari and RB would be obliged to open the cheque book to try and mimic it, but the other 7 teams on the grid would have no hope of ever being competitive. The cost cap isn't watertight but I can't believe people have already forgotten how unfair the pre-capped era was. Aston's rise has been one of the highlights of the season but they'd be nowhere if the top teams were free to spend half a *billion* a year.

Aston did.

The Aston that just finished behind the Mercedes?

Oh come on, let's not act like we knew AM was going to get podium after podium this year.

They improved but they didn't catch up to RB which was my point, and the point of this article and top level comment. At best we have RB then 3 teams (2?) capable of taking the spot 30ish seconds behind RB depending on how hard RB actually push. People point at AM as evidence teams can catch up in a cost cap era, but at their best they were marginally better than teams who are incredibly far back.

If AM can get this close after one winter, I expect Merc to be able to fully close the gap given the aero restrictions for RB and RB likely to have a diminishing rate of gains.

But AM started improving a year ago. They didn’t get this close after one winter.

Aston was working on the 2023 car since 2021. They spent the entirety of 2022 with the underdeveloped shitbox to focus all resources for this one. They had a big advantage in dev time due to their low standings. And after all that, they're still easily close to a full second adrift of Red Bull. There is no chance Mercedes can close such a large gap when they're limited to having only 20% more development time (assuming 2nd in the WCC and counting RB's cost cap breach penalty, it's 63% for RB and 75 for Mercedes).

Only twice for now. Let's see the next couple of races to name a pattern. I would say mercs need to confirm the pace over the next races.

Red Bull will dominate for the next 4 years or so. Current regulations make catching up far to arduous.

Breaching the cost cap still paying dividends.

Brilliant move on their part then.

Oh yeah, for sure. Given the fact that the penalties were already known for minor breeches, i was amazed that only 1 team breeched it. The benefit far outweighed the penalty

Merc breaching the costcap would only have them gotten it more wrong. That team made a colossal error and they will be paying the interest till 2026.

Yep if you get the concept wrong in the cost cap era you are toast. Rb won't be getting dethroned untill 2026.

I should think the fact nothing has changed says more about the people that think it was a defining breach.

Horner: “It’s less of a cap and more of a top hat. There’s a little bit of extra room in there if you can find it.”

If £400k gave redbull such an advantage can you imagine if Hamilton hadn't caused £1.8m in damage in Silverstone or bottas hadn't gone bowling in Hungary? Seems like you are almost implying that Merc wouldn't have been able to compete without crashing out their opponents 🤔

Go back to twitter

True, but man I'm getting tired of hearing Horner open his mouth

I can say the same about your comments too

Im actually curious to see what the ceiling will be for the Merc concept, they said it would be different to red bull but we gotta wait and see next year when they bring the proper chassis.

Why is you getting downvoted 😄😄

The overall gap between the field and Red Bull may not have changed much, but the double podium from Mercedes shows that they're definitely closing their own gap.

Wait uhm what, doesn't the book " how to be a dominant team for dummies" say: you always overstate how close your rivals are. Maybe he read Sun Tzu, The Art of War; appear weak when you are strong and strong when you are weak. One can only hope .

Horner is confusing Red Bull with Max. The canary in the coal mine for Red Bull is Checo, and it wasn't an easy race for him last weekend

How was Checo the canary in the coal mine?

His performance and results will be the first to suffer if other cars start to get close, because he doesn't have Max's skills to get 100% out of the car. If Merc starts regularly beating Checo on weekends that he isn't awful, then they've definitely made noticeable gains into Red Bull's lead.

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What are you on about? Pretty clear you've not read the article. He's making some factual statements, and probably was asked about this.

Can you quote the parts you take issue with?

Then he'd have to actually read the article first...

Did you read the article? None of what he said was incorrect other than maybe the reference to Bahrain.

Ofc he didn't read the article, why do that when you can be outraged by a headline

> crying wolf Heh

I mean it was never meant to close the gap. The baseline for the b-spec was to be the same as the plateaued no side pods concept so that there’s actual development runway. Just give it some time but no doubt Merc will remain on their back foot as RB pivot to 24 development either now or very shortly