F1 cost capping

There's been a lot said recently about the proposal to apply budget restrictions in F1 because a lot of teams can't afford to compete anymore.

I think that's been part of F1 since it's inception and the highly competitive nature of sport will always drive costs up but there must be a limit to how much sponsors will put in before it's no longer cost effective.

From the inside as an engineer the scale of spending is even more apparent and shocking than the spectacle you see each weekend. For example at Prost we spent £15, 000 making two ratchet tools to remove the nose box. Why? Because we could it's as simple as that.  The tools were beautifully designed and made and no consideration to cost was ever given to it. Now that was in a back of grid team that went bust 6 months later,  so imagine the attitude that a top team would be taking.

I don't want to see a slow down in development ir a reduction in staff obviously because that would hurt people like me. I'd like to see a reduction in waste and therefore the cost in that. We made some carbon rear wishbones for Jaguar. 5 sets to a new design proven to be better in the wind tunnel.  They had to be done in a rush to get to the Australian GP. The day we finished them they updated the design because further wind tunnel testing had proven another design change was even better. So all 5 sets were scrapped and we started again to the new design. 

The process for making a carbon wishbone calls for lots of tooling specific to each design. You have to make aluminum patterns,  carbon moulds off if these patterns,  then wishone halves out of these moulds and then bond them and final machine them. The aluminum for the patterns is already many thousands of pounds and machining time is 90 per hour or more and they take days to machine. The waste of 5 sets of wishbones like this is possibly close on £100, 000 today.  And it's pure waste which is just accepted.

So my cost capping rules would first look at finding ways to ensure parts are homologated in such away as to prevent design and manufacture of endless new parts that subsequently don't get used.