04/05/2023
NEWS STORY
Seeking to claw its way back to the front of the grid, Mercedes boss, Toto Wolff admits that it is only now that the reality of the budget cap is beginning to bite.
Whereas previously the German team, like its wealthy rivals, would have thrown money at the problem, now every single penny has to be accounted for, and as a result, as previously suggested, the cap that the teams so readily accepted is now beginning to bite.
No more is this being felt than at Mercedes as it seeks to fend off Aston Martin, far less overhaul Ferrari.
"The cost cap gives us so many constraints," admits Wolff. "In the past, we wouldn't even know what a front suspension costs. Today, we need to take the purchase price of the aluminium, then factor in how much it costs to machine, how much you need to write off from the aluminium you don't need.
"You have to price up every bolt that goes into the suspension," he continues, "the carbon that you bought as a raw material, then cut it and put it on. You also have to add in the energy costs of the composite room; the overheads that go into it, and in the end comes out the product.
"This is super complex," he adds in a masterpiece of understatement. "It's gone so far that we have cost analysts and engineers that need to decide whether buying a kilogram of raw aluminium is worth the performance gain on the other side.
"That process is so difficult and painful because people that are so creative and should have carte blanche to do something can't because somebody is telling them whether or not it's feasible in the cost cap era. And that's why it's so important that everybody adheres to the cost cap because you're overshooting every 10,000 metres."
However, another factor to be considered admits the Austrian is time.
"It's taking much longer because the administration is a process," he says. "Our finance department has grown from 15 to 45 people, and that's quite sizeable."
Nonetheless, he believes the sport went down the right path with the cap.
"I think it was necessary for Formula 1, and if you ask me 'cost cap, yes or no?' I'll take it every single day of the week because it's important to make the sport sustainable.
"So we need to adapt, and as Mercedes, we have spent a lot of time and effort in being compliant to the cost cap and have all these assessments, tools and time clocking, and I mean, literally everything.
"That's going to yield advantages for us going forward because others need to go through the same painful process."