All-purpose open-wheel (F1, IRL) racing thread

Consuming too much of the product while crunching the numbers, right?

 

Red Bull skates on the cost cap penalty with a 10 percent reduction in development time and a $7M fine. Mercedes should be planning to overspend by $6.99M this season. FIA rendered the cap meaningless.

 

The cap is hardly meaningless. Red Bull was over by $1.4 million and that was partly because they screwed up a tax credit. If they applied the tax credit correctly they would have been over by $400k.

Given how badly Red Bull had to slash their budget to get down to $145 million, I'm not going to lose sleep that they were $400k over in the first year. The penalty was appropriate.

 

You’re buying the “tax credit” excuse? OK, fine. Fact is, they went over by $1.8M. Maybe they should have paid an extra accountant $400k to scour the books to find that tax credit that every other team was well aware of.

Minor breach. Every team in the paddock should overspend by $6.99M. Red Bull showed it’s worth it.

 

Sigh.

The "tax credit excuse" was discovered by the FIA. Red Bull had the tax credit listed as an included cost. It should have been an excluded cost. With the tax credit wrongfully included they were over by $1.8 million. With it properly excluded Red Bull is over by $400k.

Before the cap Red Bull had an estimated annual budget around $450 million. They had to slash that to $145 million in the first year of the cap... and they missed by $400k.

Part of the penalty is a 10% reduction in wind tunnel time in development of the 2023 car, which is pretty damn significant, particularly since it will already be getting less time than Ferrari and Mercedes (and everyone else) based on this year's results.

In short: Red Bull fucked up the accounting and is paying an appropriate price for it.

The last few years, every single thing that happens in F1 gets turned into a "death to the FIA," bring-the-pitchforks situation. It's just tiresome.

 

Using the $400k overage, that's .2758 percent over budget. But the $7 million fine is 4.83 percent of the budget. That's egregious and hardly appropriate.

 

I don’t have a problem with it. You have to punish them for going over budget. I don’t think Red Bull is sweating the fine nearly as much as the wind tunnel penalty.

 

On one hand, I find myself reading about this and tapping into my desire that Horner, Verstappen and Red Bull be kicked down into karting. On the other, the entire concept of cost caps seems a bit anti-innovation. Compared to other racing series, F1 has always been an engineering competition as much as an automotive one, and it's not like we're ever going to be able to get back to the era of privateers going out and winning races either. If they wanted to correct costs, maybe they should have let teams run V12s against the hybrids and see how that works?

 

He’s right.

Ferrari unhappy with “very limited” impact of FIA F1 penalty against Red Bull

 

I get what you're saying, but I'm more with bigpern on this one. Cutting 2/3 of a budget and "only" missing it by $400K or $1.8 million, whichever figure you want to use, is impressive. Then again, they DID miss the budget. I imagine Ferrari and Mercedes had to come off a similar high and they were able to make it within the cap. So like bigpern said, if breaking the rules is only a relatively minor financial hit and the on-track results you got don't get changed, why wouldn't you fudge the numbers to gain .2 seconds?
To me, the hard part is not knowing what money equates to in terms of speed. We know Red Bull overspent last year, but how much faster was their 2021 car as a direct result? Was it enough of an advantage that they wouldn't have won races and ultimately the driver title without it? And then looking ahead to the 10% wind tunnel penalty for next year: how much speed will that actually cost them? Is the 2023 car pretty much developed by now and thus the penalty won't hurt much? And how will it be policed? Does the FIA use technology that tracks wind tunnel usage, or is it an honor system?
If it was any other team, it wouldn't be as big as an issue. But because last year's title was so controversial, and the winning driver's team wasn't fully within the rules, it just adds fuel to the still burning fire.

 

I missed the presale for Vegas this morning. Pretty bummed about it. People have already listed them on StubHub. Ugh.

 

I got my invite yesterday but the tickets were basically $2K. Um, nope.