Williams has been stuck at the back this season
Williams
Few people in the Formula 1 paddock have been as consistently supportive of the cost cap as Williams boss James Vowles until on Friday at Sepang he delivered the harshest verdict on it yet.
The cap has made the sport financially healthy, he argued, but it has failed at two of the three things it was meant to do.
“We wanted long-term financial sustainability, and I think in that goal, not just have we achieved it, but we’ve exceeded it,” Vowles said.
“The two others, though, that went with it were sporting equity and, effectively, compression of the field… Those are the three goals of cost cap, and those two have failed.”
He backed it with numbers: “If I take the last 15 years of the sport, the five that we’ve been in as cost cap right now, currently the top four teams score 83% of the points. Before that it was in the 70s,” he said.
“We have made the situation worse, where the top four are the top four and all the rest of us are fighting over, ballpark, 17% of the points. Number of times on the podium used to be 10% of the time, now it’s 5% of the time.”
Vowles reckons the cost cap has, for the most part, failed
Williams
His conclusion was straightforward: the cost cap has made it worse, not better. “We have a two-tier championship. That’s not me telling you that. That is just what is on the table right now in terms of points score.”
Vowles is well placed to describe the budget cap mechanism, having gone from the sport’s most dominant team, Mercedes, to one of its weakest.
“I’m probably unique because, it’s not a compliment, I went from the best team to the worst team,” said Vowles, who left Mercedes to lead Williams in 2023. “What I hadn’t appreciated or realised when you do that jump is just how little exists.”
His point is that a team rebuilding from a low base spends its capped budget on things a front-runner already owns.
“I’m not spending money on the car,” he added. “I’m spending millions, tens of millions actually, just on basic systems, so you just know where a part is in the factory.
“So that’s not going to the car, it’s not going to a front wing, it’s not going to an upgrade.”
The result, he feels, is a bind.
The Baku upgrade was mostly about 2027 for Williams
Williams
“We’re caught in a cost cap trap, because if I do anything short-term, and I always talk about investing in the future, now you understand why. If I do anything that’s about this year, I will slow myself down in the future, and I can’t do that.”
He put a figure on the inefficiency too: “Just to build a car that had four wheels pointing the right way with bodywork that roughly looked like a Formula 1 car is about 30% more expensive with myself compared to what I remember from a previous team. Inefficiency of tools, what you have on the external supply chain, there’s about 100 things that add up to it.”
Williams’ own 2026 season shows the trap that Vowles highlights in practice. He said the Baku upgrade which finally brought the Williams down to a competitive weight, was a case of “forward investing” for 2027 and that “we left quite a bit of performance in the tunnel at home.”
After Friday’s first practice at Sepang, he was resigned about the car: “It’s a handful, there’s no doubt about it, out there. So the balance wasn’t together in terms of how the car was, which is a fear I had after Baku. Baku, it’s very easy to get a balance, easier to get a balance there. It’s got plenty of other issues.
“Malaysia, I think, is probably on the extreme of exposing it. The reality behind it is we’re too far away here, which is what I was fearful of, and it’s still exposing those weaknesses. Those will not be addressed this year.”
The easy reading of Vowles’ argument is that the cost cap locks in the existing competitive order, but the harder question is how much of Williams’ position is the cap’s doing and how much is what came before it was even introduced.
Vowles is candid about the second part.
“First and foremost, I own the mistakes that we made this winter, and we need to detach that from that question,” he said. “So we have gone backwards. We had a car that was overweight.”
Vasseur doesn’t quite agree with Vowles’ views
Grand Prix Photo
Elsewhere, he described the cost as “20 years, in my case, of underinvestment that I can’t really do in the cost cap.
“Before the cost cap, Williams weren’t spending really any money at all. So, I’ve, roughly speaking, tripled the expenditure.”
And that is the tension between the two points in the case: If the cap froze Williams in place, the story is about the cost cap, but if Williams was simply underspending for two decades and has now started to catch up, the cap is the arena in which a rebuild is happening slowly, not the cause of it.
Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur, sitting alongside Vowles, has no sympathy for the framing, and his objection is historical, saying the cost cap has allowed the entire field to compete without having to worry about going bankrupt.
“What we have to keep in mind is that before the cost cap, 2018, 2017, 2016, for sure the business in general was much worse, but we had also five or six teams in bankruptcy or almost in bankruptcy,” Vasseur said.
“And it’s not just the fact that the business is going well, it’s the fact that we are sending the message that everybody can compete, right or wrong, but this is the message. And this is also attracting new investors in the business.”
Vowles accepts the premise, but still believes change is needed in order to have a more competitive field.
“Even last year, which was a great year, the gap on points between us and P4, between us and Ferrari, was 238 points. It’s not a small amount. It’s an absolute gulf, and we were on the podium three times.
Only the top four teams have scored podium finishes this year
Grand Prix Photo
“The solution isn’t to take cost cap away. As I said before, we have a brilliantly financially stable sport now as a result of it, but we do need to think about what mechanisms we have in there to make sure we’re all playing with the same tools and the same mechanisms, because today we’re not.”
Vowles wants off-track allowances linked to the on-track results.
“The solution I think we need is something that anyone in this room can understand, which is either championship points-linked, because it gives you the scale, or championship position-linked, and a simple mechanism that allows us, over time, not next year, allows us to shrink in together.”
Vasseur, however, pointed out that something similar already exists: “We have it on the wind tunnel,” he said, a reference to the sliding scale that gives lower-placed teams more aerodynamic testing.
Vowles called that “a step in the right direction” but said he was after something broader.
The problem is separating a team that is behind because it lacks resources from one that is behind because it is badly run, and Vowles acknowledged how hard that is.
“There’s a way of doing it, but it gets very complicated,” he said, floating a system in which a team is credited for the infrastructure it lacks. “It’s not transparent, it’s not visible to the outside world, and that sort of thing concerns me
When Franco Colapinto took out Lando Norris and Pierre Gasly in the Azerbaijan GP, stewards applied F1’s rules correctly, giving him a 10sec penalty. But shouldn’t a crash that takes out two other cars come with a heavier sanction?
“What you’re more looking for is an amount to try and correct these issues that is not so much that you suddenly leapfrog to the front… it should still be that someone like Mercedes, if they do a better job, they should still win a championship.”
Alpine chief Flavio Briatore offered a different route, attacking how the cap is administered.
“I believe the idea of the cost cap is very good, but the administration we have with the cost cap is tremendous,” he said. “At one point, I don’t know if it makes sense to have one budget cap, whatever is the number. Others want the drivers included. In this moment, whatever is the number, maybe the big team have 300 million, 400 million, the small team have 250, 300, but put everything in the budget cap.
“With this, we don’t have more, ‘This is inside, this is outside, this is inside, this is outside.’ At one point, I believe we need to decide what can we do with the budget cap. For me, the best is to put everything inside the budget cap, whatever is the number.”
Vowles and Briatore described two distinct problems, the former saying the cap is too rigid for teams starting from a low base, and the latter arguing it is too leaky and too complicated, whatever the size of the number.
Vasseur, running the team generally considered to have F1’s biggest budget, sees little wrong with the current mechanics, as you would expect.
And even with the FIA writing the formula, any points-linked mechanism would have to decide which teams are short of resources and which are simply short of ideas, a line every team would contest.
