F1: 'Many teams' will break budget cap

(GMM) Ferrari has joined Red Bull in pushing for an emergency increase to Formula 1’s $140 million team budget cap for 2022.

Red Bull’s Christian Horner has warned that most teams will completely run out of money prior to the season finale due to rampant inflation.

And his counterpart at Ferrari, Mattia Binotto, agrees that it will be “impossible” for most teams to stay under the $140m mark because of price increases.

“Six percent inflation was not foreseeable and is very high,” he told Sky Italia in Monaco.

“Many teams will break the budget cap if it stays like this. Then the entire value of the measure will be questioned.”

“And even laying off people, firstly, I don’t think the right choice.

“It’s already summer, by the time you organize it, and you do it the benefit it can have is not sufficient to cope with the excess of prices and cost we’ve got.”

Some smaller teams including Alpine, Aston Martin and Haas, however, are staunchly opposed to bowing to their bigger rivals’ push for more legal spending.

Ferrari, though, sides with Red Bull, “as do many other teams”, said Binotto.

“I’m sure a lot of us have issues with the budget cap,” he added. “It would be a shame for a sport like Formula 1 to be dictated by a spending cap.

“All we can do as F1 is take our responsibility and expand the budget cap.”

“What I was trying to point out last weekend when I was asked the question was it would be the equivalent of [having] to miss numerous races to get anywhere near getting costs under the cap,” said Horner.

“All the major teams are going to breach that $140, cap this year. What we don’t want to end up doing is there’s a 5% threshold for a minor breach. What is the penalty for a minor breach?

“What we don’t want to do is end up playing a game of chicken. That’s to say, does he [Ferrari] go to $4.9m over, do we go to $4.7m over and that be one upgrade that could be the differentiating factor of this world championship?

“What we do need is clarity, and clarity quickly because it’s not right to be held to ransom by a couple of teams that perhaps aren’t affected because that was never the design of the budget cap.

“The budget cap was there to limit the top teams from a spending frenzy. None of us could predict when we come up with the budget cap figures – which if you remember were reduced by $30m from where they were originally set during the pandemic – nobody could have even contemplated world events that are driving inflation.

“We don’t even know what that inflation is going to be in the second half of the year. We’re all seeing the cost of living rising, we’re seeing utility bills going through the roof. Where is that going to go in the next six months?

“So we do need the FIA to take early action on this because we’re coming up to the mid-year point and there’s only so much you can do.

“And we have a responsibility to our employees as well. We’ve reorganized, we’ve reshaped, we had to say goodbye to many long-time employees through redundancies last year to get down to a point that was commensurate with the cap before inflation came along. I don’t think it’s right that pressure should be put on mass redundancies within the sport.

“Hopefully, common sense will prevail. It is a force majeure situation, it is a situation that none of us could have foreseen that has driven these costs up, and pragmatically we just need to come to a common-sense solution.”

Incredibly, however, Ferrari test driver Marc Gene has broken ranks to actually criticize Horner and Red Bull for pushing for more spending power.

“I think Horner is a master of politics,” the Spaniard told the DAZN broadcaster. “He is using that now as they have already spent a lot on developing the car and he wants to have even more.”