James Allison, Mercedes technical director, explains which impact of the budget cap has hit his team particularly hard
Additional delays between a Formula One team’s wind tunnel testing and the manufacture of a new part is one of the biggest impacts of the cost cap, according to Mercedes technical director James Allison.
The introduction of the cost cap for the 2021 season was intended to increase competition between Formula One teams by reducing the financial advantage of the top teams. While this effect has helped keep the midfield very close so far, it has also limited the development scope of the current generation of cars and made it harder to overcome a failed start to the season.
The impact on components with long lead times has been minimal, according to Allison, but upgrades introduced during the season have resulted in a greater delay between testing and production. As a result, teams have moved to bundle their upgrades into packages, causing further delays to parts developed first.
“If you think of most of the performance coming from the wind tunnel, the wind tunnel is always the enabler that the car ends up following”,
“The lag between what you see on the car and what the wind tunnel does is how quickly you can feed wind tunnel geometry into the design office and how quickly it can be implemented in manufacturing.”
“In the old days, when there were no cost constraints, you could get these things out of the wind tunnel pretty much every other day and people would be busily designing them and then busily building them, which meant that the time between the tunnel and the track was only ever a couple of weeks.”
“Nowadays you can afford to do two or three major upgrades in a season and that’s enough to speed things up in between.”
“Instead of finding something in the tunnel and bringing it to the factory, you find something, find something, find something, find something and say, ‘Okay, this is big enough now to put in a package we can afford.’ We’ll make it and put it in the car.'”
“And that means the car lags far more behind the wind tunnel. It doesn’t change the gain rates in the wind tunnel. They’re always the same. But the car catches up with the wind tunnel less often and lags it more. So that’s the effect.”
Allison adds that financial constraints have made it difficult for Mercedes to put resources into longer-term projects, such as improving the team’s processes and personnel. This is something the Williams team, led by his former colleague James Vowles, has been vocal about because of the restrictions on capital spending.
“The other way it’s impacted is that it’s harder to find the resources, the staff and the hardware to invest in improving capabilities,” Allison says. “It’s very easy to get stuck in the same way of doing things, because improving the way you do things costs money and time.”
“When you spend all your money and all your time on those few upgrades and you build a car for the new year, it’s hard to improve the mousetrap. The machines that make the car, the drawing office that draws the car, and the methodology in the factory – it’s much harder than it used to be to invest in those things. “
