The director of Alpine F1 believes that there are loopholes to bypass the budget cap
In 2023, Formula 1 will be budget regulated for the 3rd season in its history. In order to limit the gaps between different teams, a budget cap has been introduced. However, this cap contains some loopholes that certain teams will try to exploit according to Alpine team's leader, Otmar Szafnauer.
The FIA and Formula 1 authorities aim to drastically reduce budgets for upcoming seasons and gradually limit the amounts spent by teams by lowering the cost cap each season. Set at over €153 million in 2023, which is more than in 2022, there still remain significant loopholes.
Migrate technical resources to departments outside F1.
Many prominent Formula 1 teams have had to transfer personnel to various ancillary services in order to stay within budget constraints. However, they manage to generate profits.
Indeed, Szafnauer suggests that if Alpine were appropriately sized in relation to the challenges of the budget cap, they would not have to let go of too many staff members, and competitors would be able to juggle personnel to utilize their skills only when needed.
“When everyone is the same size, you lose that small advantage,” Otmar Szafnauer assures Autosport. “This is what some of the other teams are doing now. The bigger teams are looking to exploit or better understand where there are gaps or organizational changes that you can make to get more people under this budget cap. And we’re not there yet.”
(I) I got rid of 100 people, but now I want to rehire them. Because I was able, within this budget ceiling, to find places for them where they don’t count as a full person or they do marketing or whatever, or they work on a boat for part of the time. (F) explains the Alpine director, referring to his situation.
An alliance between several services.
Szafnauer declares that Alpine now has a technological department that works on projects outside of F1. Therefore, this department is not affected by financial regulations.
“We started doing that,” he revealed. “We have a working group, but it’s very small, only two people. We’re building a ski workshop, with three ongoing projects, one of which involves parts for the production car of Alpine.”
Alpine is close to the appropriate size for the budget cap, however, it must also operate its various services intelligently in order to adhere to the amounts set by the FIA. External companies can also come and support the teams, and this is one of the solutions chosen by Alpine to keep costs down.
(The translation may vary depending on the context)
« We do not use our design resources in these projects. We use a portion of our manufacturing resources to produce components such as the rear wing of the Alpine, some CFD work is done, some laminating work as well, but not much. And then external companies also request help with design.
» States the leader of the Alpine team.
These people working at Alpine are therefore not included in the F1 budget cap, although synergies are clearly being made to optimize costs.
It would therefore be better to be structured with 500 employees, half of whom work in F1 50% of the time but use them sparingly, rather than having 250 employees working 100% of the time, risking limited skills.
