In its determination to level the playing field and create a sport where all the teams have a chance of winning races - if only once or twice a season - Formula One Management is looking at various scenarios.

Paddy Lowe however, believes there is only one feasible solution, the introduction of a cost cap.

Asked, from a technical point of view, whether he preferred the introduction of a cost cap or restrictive regulations that would make a spending war almost impossible, the Briton was in no doubt.

"I prefer a cost cap, or some sort of cost constraint," he said. "A constraint on the input side.

"We have done a lot of experiments over the last 10 or 15 years by trying to control the output side," he continued. "They haven't been entirely worthless those manoeuvres, for instance the elimination of routine track testing has allowed us to not need whole test teams and cars to support those and people to sort those. That has been effective.

"The control of aerodynamic testing, restricting the number of wind tunnels you can use, that's all been good," he added.

"But I think the problem with continuing down that road is that if you really want to reduce the leverage of your spend, in terms of lap time, significantly you end up having to make the cars too similar. You end up with a lot of standardization and effectively dumb down the cars themselves and the innovation with the cars and to be effective it would be too detrimental to the product that we all enjoy as spectators.

"So I think the only real way to solve it is to control the spending at the input end of things, for which one of the solutions would be a cost cap."