How a £ 1 million crash highlighted F1 money pressures

After an exhausting GP in Emilia Romagna for Mercedes, one of team boss Toto Wolff’s greatest frustrations was the possible consequences of Valtteri Bottas’ serious accident.

It wasn’t the lost points that the Austrian was concerned about, but the potential impact on the future development program for the W12 that was triggered by the cost of the damage. After dismantling the wreck at Brackley, the team estimated that the final bill will be around £ 1 million.

It’s an extraordinary notion that the mighty Mercedes should fret about paying for defective parts – engineering chief Andrew Shovlin even highlighted the front wing that Lewis Hamilton poked into the tires – but the episode shows how the top is under pressure -Teams in this new era are available to the FIA ​​financial regulations.

Requests to spend less than $ 145 million on the development, construction, and operation of their cars in 2021 had led to significant changes for Mercedes, Red Bull, and Ferrari, the top three financiers. They all had to cut staff, transfer employees to other projects and thoroughly rethink the way they work. If you spend too much there will be penalties, just like any other form of rule breaking.

“We had to go through the pain of layoffs over the winter,” said Red Bull’s Christian Horner. “We had to resize, repackage, and it’s really difficult to say goodbye to members of the team, some of whom have been since 25 Years are represented in different formats.

“It was really a difficult exercise and it continues to be a huge challenge, especially for the larger teams. It increases the efficiency of the business because it has to be very simple. “

A large element of this cost saving is the fact that fewer parts are made and used during the season. Wherever possible, the parts have been redesigned to last longer and have more racing weekends.

In fact, Mercedes quietly put more steel, and therefore less carbon, into the W12’s suspension for cost reasons – the change added some weight, but it gives the parts a longer life.

The team also repurposed its W11 chassis as a W12 chassis instead of creating a number of new examples – Bottas 05 crashed for the record.

More than ever before, new aero parts need to earn their place on the car in CFD and in the wind tunnel before going to manufacture, and there is a greater focus on controlling production.

It doesn’t make sense to have half a dozen outdated Bahrain spec front wings when a new version hits the market a few races later.

However, if you lose a pair in a day, as Mercedes did at Imola, you may have to build unplanned add-ons of the current version to ensure you have enough spare parts in stock.

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All of this reflects how smaller teams have always been run because they just didn’t have enough cash flow. As recently as three or four years ago, a fighting force in India had to justify the cost of every nut and bolt. However, it’s a new experience for teams that traditionally could reasonably spend what they had to spend.

It also explains why the qualifying sprint negotiations between teams F1 and FIA dragged on for so long. Three additional races, which by definition have a high risk of contact if the drivers try to get the most out of the new format, offered the prospect of additional costs.

“We’re really struggling to get below the budget cap and we’re talking tens of thousands of pounds, not hundreds of thousands,” Wolff said in Bahrain before an agreement on sprints was reached.

“That’s why we really want to support Stefano [Domenicali] and Ross [Brawn] with the idea because I think it’s worth trying.

“But we just don’t have the margin to try and then find out there’s an extra £ half a million or more that we need to find within that budget cap because that could mean looking at people again, And that’s not where I even wanna go anymore “

“We support this in the hope that if it works it will generate future revenue, future interest and future benefit for the sport,” Horner said.

“If you divide $ 145 million through 23 events, you are gross [seeing] What it takes to run a Grand Prix car, and of course to add effectively, although a shortened race only adds more cost than we obviously need to use parts, etc., etc.

“And so there just has to be a reasonable allowance that takes that into account because as Toto says we are currently looking for savings of £ 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 to make sure we hit the cap.

“And suddenly having such a variable is something that just needs to be considered. We would like to support it, but there has to be accommodation. “

That has now been achieved and the teams have been promised additional income from the sprint races. There is also some kind of insurance policy that will help them pay for accidental damage.

The accident costs at any other point in the season must still be borne by the teams. So should they let it happen?

Of course there is a contingency built into the budget. But this in F1, and everything is taken to the very extreme so that the wobble space is as tight as possible. Teams often end a season after losing a wing or two, but without a crash of the magnitude that Bottas suffered last weekend, forcing them to ditch parts that have only completed two races and for which much more was planned.

“Our drivers have been incredibly good at getting through the season without breaking much over the past few years,” said Andrew Shovlin on Sunday evening. “And for sure, the bill will be huge in terms of carbon and metalwork.

“So we’re going to look at what we can actually save and get the cars back together for Portimao. But it’s pretty worrying when you have incidents like this.

“If you have a bunch of such major accidents that cause significant damage and that was bad for us because we also had a front wing with Lewis, then that will definitely exceed our allocation for what we have available to for the Output parts.

“In an ideal world, you bring it to life, you don’t break it, whatever you break, hopefully it’s the end of life or something that will soon be out of date. But that’s definitely not the case here.

“So it’s really a cost cap factor, and the money has to come from somewhere. If it becomes a major problem, it can ultimately drain your development budget. So we have to be aware of what happens next.

“We are very overwhelmed with the cost cap. And what we have always feared is a total depreciation of a car. Now this isn’t going to be a total write-off, but almost, and that’s not something we really wanted. “

Marshals clear Valtteri Bottas’ damaged Mercedes W12 car from the gravel trap

Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images

Mercedes sent the remains of the car back to the UK for further investigation. The first signs suggest that the chassis may eventually be brought back into service, while the genset – not part of the cost cap, but significant in terms of future network penalties – has also survived.

Much more was grouped together, however, and items intended for later use were removed from the shelves in stores.

Currently, Mercedes does not have to change its development plan immediately. It’s a moving target anyway as the team doesn’t know how the battle with Red Bull will play out or how long it will take for upgrades to be made. The ongoing 2022 project will inevitably require more and more attention.

What caused the crash is incorporated into the above contingency, which was taken into account when the team was planning. Another major crash over the course of the longest F1 season ever could result in a real squeeze by the end of the year.

Another complication is that the cap allows for a full season of 23 races. There is a reasonable chance some will fall by the wayside in the coming months, and again the cap will be cut back to reflect this – but only if events are canceled with a reasonable warning and the teams have not yet spent any money directly spent . Lost races also mean lower income for F1 and therefore for the teams.

The most painful prospect for the teams is that the cap will drop to $ 140 million next year, in the first season with the new regulations, and to $ 135 million in 2023. Until then, all the greats like McLaren, Alpine and Aston Martin will be strong against it.

As a result, teams are getting more and more nervous about the cost of crash damage. While in the past a big shunt in qualifying caused observers to speculate about fines or a pit start after changing the chassis, we will now think about the financial consequences.

It is also worth considering how cost considerations can affect future driver decisions. Given the limitations, will a top team now take the risk of hiring a rookie or even someone in their second season who is still on a steep learning curve and struggling to impress?

The cost cap has added an intriguing element to the sport, and while you might find it frustrating to have your favorite team’s hands tied, there’s a bigger picture – without it, there was a good chance we wouldn’t have 20 cars on the grid in the coming years. And as Wolff’s frustration makes clear, he’s already on the top teams and closing the bars.

It also adds an extra edge to the relentless struggle between teams. F1 used to be a downright spending war, but now it’s about who can use their money efficiently. And who is smart enough to submit a final 2021 bill to the FIA ​​that is as close as possible to $ 144,999,999?