This year, Red Bull got into a major controversy when the FIA found it breaching the 2021 cost cap by over $2.2 million. The Milton-Keynes-based team was attacked by all of their rivals on the grid, except AlphaTauri, as they are their sister team.
On the other hand, Red Bull maintained that it didn’t gain a competitive edge by overspending in 2021. They state that they spent that amount mostly on catering and wrongly reading about their employees’ sick leaves pay.
Nevertheless, FIA penalized Red Bull with a $7 million fine and a 10% reduction in their wind tunnel time, which could affect their aero development.
📰: Red Bull have decided to halt some of their upgrades for 2022 due to the budget cap infringement of last year and the consequences it caused, the team will now shift full focus to 2023.#F1 pic.twitter.com/wO7P830ePr
— F1 Naija 🇳🇬 (@f1_naija) November 3, 2022
Cost-cap lower than F1 prize money doesn’t make sense for Christian Horner
The F1 prize money is highly lucrative for every team as it’s a percentage of the sports’ profits. The winner of the constructors’ championship goes on to earn 14% of that sum.
Thus, a team can probably match the budget cap sum with the prize money with the rising revenue of F1. Therefore, Red Bull boss Christian Horner thinks the cost cap needs to be revised.
“The cost cap does need looking at because you have a prize fund exceeding the cap for the first three or four teams,” he said. “Even the teams at the back of the grid are probably going to have 70 to 80 percent of their costs covered by the prize fund,” the Briton revealed.
Give the money to struggling series
Horner then was asked what should be done with the $7 million FIA would take from them. He suggests that while F1 is in very good health revenue-wise, other motorsport series are struggling.
The most prominent being the W-series, the premier motorsport competition for women, got curtailed for the 2022 season due to a lack of funds, even though three races in the season remained. The officials of W-series reasoned that the three races were cancelled to raise money for the 2023 season.
Jamie Chadwick already won the season, but the last three races were remaining. Therefore, if funds collected by the FIA from penalties can be used to support such motorsport areas, then Horner thinks it would be great.
Also read: Haas F1 team to receive $60 million from their MoneyGram sponsorship deal
