F1 spending 'must be policed by the FIA'

F1 News

Date: 23/November/2013

The only way to seriously reduce costs in Formula One is for the FIA to police spending in the same way as the technical rules.

That is the view of Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn, responding to fears that the new engines being introduced for next season will add $20-million to the already stretched team budgets.

“It is challenging next year, but we all have to remember that if we cut the budgets in half we would still go racing,” said Brawn, speaking at this weekend’s Brazilian season finale.

“It’s not that there’s insufficient money, it’s that we all want to compete at the highest possible standard, and that means that we push the budgets as hard as we can.

“If everybody’s budget tomorrow was reduced by 50 percent, it wouldn’t make any difference.”

Turning to the previous ill-fated ‘Resource Restriction Agreement’ (RRA), Brawn explained that the self-policing nature was its undoing.

“The RRA was a structure that could work, but not with self-regulation from the teams themselves,” he said.

“It was a system that had to be policed, we believe by the FIA, but we couldn’t get enough agreement within the teams that that should happen, so it failed on that basis.

“Whatever system we have is going to affect the competitiveness of teams and therefore it has to be controlled by the sporting body. Any attempt to have self-regulation of something so important as budget and resource is futile.

“If you look at the technical regulations, we push the boundaries all the time, quite rightly, and then we have a governing body that taps us back into place, and also a governing body that we can get a reference from.

“Unless you have that same process with financial control, it can never succeed.”

Brawn added that attempts to cut costs through technical regulations alone will never solve the problem.

“Attempts to change the technical regulations to reduce the costs have historically failed. They can push it back a bit for a while and then the teams find something else to spend the money on so the budgets never really change.”