04/02/2025
NEWS STORY
Adrian Newey reveals that a side effect of the budget cap is that people are leaving the sport for better paid jobs elsewhere, even other motorsport disciplines.
First introduced in 2021, after many, many years of trying, the cap is intended to prevent 'spending wars' and level the playing field.
While there are a number of exemptions, including the three highest paid staff on the payroll, this means that for the remaining staff pay is effectively frozen, especially if a team seeks to move up the grid.
As a result teams are not only finding it hard to recruit staff but also to retain those they already have.
"There needs to be a way of controlling the cost for teams, or certainly the benefit from spending more in Formula 1 to make it simply an arms race where the team with the biggest budget wins, that I fully agree with," Adrian Newey tells Auto Motor und Sport.
However, and in F1 there is always an however...
"The cost cap does come with a lot of hidden penalties," he continues, "one of which is it actually means Formula 1 is no longer the best-paid industry.
"So for instance, at Red Bull, at the start, if we lost people, it would almost invariably be to another F1 team," he says. "Now we're losing people to tech companies because they pay better. We're losing people to WEC teams because they pay better. We're struggling to get graduates because Formula 1 can't afford to be the best-paying industry anymore, so it has a lot of, let's say, unexpected penalties to it."
Consequently, now with Aston Martin, Newey, undoubtedly one of the greatest talents to grace the sport, having won titles with Red Bull, McLaren and Williams, feels the financial rules need revisiting.
"What it means is that you've effectively now got an engineering budget, and therefore the fear that spending more will mean you'll disappear has theoretically disappeared, at which point, surely you free up the regulations rather than make them ever more restrictive. But unfortunately, it's not what's happening."
Many of those titles came while the sport was still tearing itself apart as the powers that be sought to introduce a budget cap, so naturally it comes as no surprise when Newey is asked which era he enjoyed most.
"The one with the most freedom, that's easy!" he replies.
"When I first got into Formula 1, I had on my desk at work a copy of the 1973 Technical Regulations, and it's about three or four pages, now we have this bible and that's before you put all the technical directives in. It's so prescribed now, and I think it's a shame."