While The Great Contract War for 2023 driver seats rages on, it has quietened down with the FIA’s final decision to deny Herta a super license (good decision), and the return to the fan and driver favourite night race, The Singapore Grand Prix. Known for its horrendous heat and humidity, last Sunday was hit with a torrential downpour that delayed the start of the race and left drivers with only one clear goal for the race: survive.
The Singapore Grand Prix continued its infamous streak of consistent safety car appearances every year the circuit has been on the calendar with three appearances last Sunday that kept the grid bunched up for amazing mid-field battles. Far in the distant lead, Red Bull’s Sergio Perez and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc were having an amazing battle for first. Ending with Perez standing on top of the podium, Leclerc in second, and Carlos Sainz taking third, scoring good constructor’s championship points for Ferrari. Max Verstappen’s seventh place finish means that he couldn’t clinch the driver’s championship in his worst end result so far in 2022.
Red Bull has jumped from controversy to controversy between races as allegations that they and Aston Martin went over the 2021 season’s $145 million budget cap have turned the Silly Season’s already dramatic off-the-track year into a full-blown argument between Red Bull and their rivals, Mercedes and Ferrari team principals before last weekend, leaving the FIA with a very crucial decision to make hopefully before round 18 this weekend, on Oct. 9 at the Japanese Grand Prix.
After months of speculation led by Ferrari and Mercedes, the FIA have led many to believe that a decision as to if they will investigate Red Bull’s and Aston Martin’s alleged minor breaches and spending over last year’s cap will go forward today, or over the Japanese Grand Prix this weekend.
Team Principal of Red Bull, Christian Horner’s original statement was that he was “certainly not aware of any” over-budget spending, and has defended his team’s allocation of funds last year. Claiming that his team’s budget was submitted last March and it’s the FIA’s job to declare any breaches. As well as saying that the reason why this process has been delayed until 2022 is due to the FIA’s immature process of scrutineering.
Since then, Horner has said that other teams’ comments on the matter have been “hugely defamatory” and unfair, threatening to take action against Ferrari’s and Mercedes’ comments over Singapore.
Mattia Binotto, team principal at Ferrari, and Toto Wolff, team principal at Mercedes, have certainly questioned and commented on Horner’s lines of reasoning behind the potential breach. Their main concern is that any budget overspends that happened in 2021 could also be happening into 2022, and have been spent on the new regulations and cars this season.
Keep in mind, a ‘minor’ over-budget breach is a relatively small amount of five per cent which equates to around $7.25 million. F1 is a sport where every penny is scrutinized, fully calculated, and planned to where it would best be spent. Even before 2021, when there were no budget caps, having a significantly lower cap makes every penny all the more crucial.
“We’re using used parts, we are not running what you would want to run, we are not developing what we could be developing,” Toto Wolff told Sky Sports after Free Practice on Friday, Sept. 30.
“It was a huge, mammoth project to make the car. I don’t know how many tens of millions we had to restructure, reprocess in order to be below the cap, and if someone has been not doing that or pushing the boundaries, every million is a big disadvantage.”
Not only in tenths of a second off the team’s lap time, but Wolff also equates the cost to roughly 70 engineers and analysts, detailing that entire teams of employees were laid off in 2021, and more in 2022, to stay under budget that other teams went through as well. But throughout this, Red Bull has been able to make consistent upgrades to its cars.
The 2021 and 2022 budget caps were specifically introduced for equal footing in the competition across all teams. The new caps as well as the regulated development time on bigger teams add to the equal playing field, that all teams and team principals agreed to. 2022’s budget and the following year’s caps are only supposed to get smaller, which means the FIA has to make a crucial and clear decision on how it will handle this situation that will define how teams view the budget cap regulations. The teams, even ones that bring in a lot of money like Red Bull, have to know that the punishments will fit the magnitude of the crimes, and a breach in the budget is a massive one. With this being the first time a breach is a question, this decision will either reinforce the regulations or blow the principle of having a budget cap and harm the vision of a more equal and competitive championship.
Teryn Midzain is an English Major with ambitious goals to write movies and a full-time nerd, whose personality and eccentrics run on high-octane like the cars he loves. More importantly, Teryn loves sports [Formula One], and doesn’t care who knows. When not creating and running deadly schemes in his D&D sessions, Teryn tries to reach the core of what makes the romantic and dramatic World of Sports, the characters and people that make the events so spectacular.