15/01/2008
NEWS STORY
Days after Honda admitted that it was in favour of budget capping as a means of limiting expenditure in F1 - thereby, seemingly, taking the sport another step towards Max Mosley's vision of a Utopian/Socialist one-make series - BMW Motorsport Director Mario Theissen has revealed that he too is in favour of such a move, certainly in preference to other proposals being considered such as the (severe) limiting of windtunnel usage.
"Cost reduction certainly is desirable, we support that," said Theissen yesterday, at the launch of his team's 2008 contender. "The idea of a budget cap, I think at a first glance it looks quite attractive. We should at least spend some time on evaluating it, how it would work, what would be the cap, what would be included and how to police it.
"I would certainly prefer a budget cap over limitations in specific areas," he added, referring to last months proposals which included restricting teams to one windtunnel, and even placing restrictions on how that might be used.
"It would not be equal," he said of the windtunnel proposal, "because all the different teams come from different baselines. "Secondly, it would be almost impossible to police and thirdly, I think the challenge is to spend our resources in the way you get the most performance out of it.
"If some team decides to spend a lot of money on drivers, it should be possible for another team to spend a lot of money on a computer or a wind tunnel," he said. "And then on top of that, if you really want to limit the use of expensive tools you should start with tools that are not common in Formula One, not with a tool that is already there with every team."