Formula 1 instituted a cost cap in 2021 to help bring teams closer together in competitiveness. Despite that, Williams team principal [autotag]James Vowles[/autotag] maintains that there still remains an element of financials that is keeping teams from drawing too close — the facilities that are already there.
Vowles spoke to RacingNews365 on Monday about his desire to increase spending on Capital Expenditure for lower-end teams such as Williams, maintaining that it’s hard for them to abide by the cap and get better when the infrastructure and facilities that teams like Mercedes and Red Bull use are already superior after being built up before the cost cap.
Vowles said that lower-end teams like his have been trying to hold votes to get more money to upgrade their facilities, but that top-end contenders are trying to prevent that from happening.
“It’ll be no surprise that everyone at the back of the grid near enough all unanimously had their hands up for most of these votes and the ones at the front and the grid did not,” Vowles told Racing365.
Vowles said he tried to stress to these teams that making the grid more competitive will be good for the sport as a whole.
“This is about for the greater good of the sport and I really do believe this. I appreciate I have more to gain than others,” Vowles said. “But you need it to be that on any given Sunday, you don’t know who’s going to particularly win. Certainly, that dominance doesn’t exist the way it does at the moment.”
Williams currently sits at seventh in the World Constructors Championship with 11 points. Vowles said he understands he has the most to gain from such votes, but that he hopes a resolution to the problem can come sooner than later.
“What I’m hoping out of all of this is it’s undoubtedly agreed in that room Williams — amongst all the peers — is the one with the least amount of facilities and that means rectifying,” Vowles said. “We’ll have another go at fixing that and seeing if we get other people’s mindsets to modify.”
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