The budget cap will prevent the loss of teams according to Ross Brawn

The question of seeing new teams arrive on the starting grid in F1 regularly comes back to the table over the years. But in this period of crisis resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, the prospect of certain financial difficulties accumulating was clearly possible for certain teams.

Problem facing which the FIA and Liberty Media responded quickly, reinforcing the expected measure of cost control via a budget cap from 2021, lowered from 161 to 145 million euros. A choice which clearly makes sense in the current context and which would have even more virtue than the simple hoped-for leveling of the forces present.

« Once you have set a budget cap, you can always adjust it, analyzes Ross Brawn, Motor Sports director of Liberty Media during an FIA e-conference. Before this pandemic happened, we said that if a crisis ever arose in the future, we could adjust the budget cap to account for it and would all accept that the ideal level would change.

Without the possibility for these teams to communicate to their management and to the manufacturers that: “Look, F1 is vital, it’s important and it’s going to cost less in the future”, I don’t think that we would have kept the number of manufacturers or large teams that we have »

The announcement of the budget ceiling was well received by McLaren or even Renault, who had confirmed the extension of his involvement in F1. The question always arises around the future of Williams, the board of directors having recently indicated that it was studying all possible options for the future, including that of a potential sale.