F1 teams can’t be “selfish” over new budget cap - Szafnauer

Racing Point’s Otmar Szafnauer says Formula 1 teams cannot be “selfish” in talks to agree on a new budget cap to help teams recover financially from the coronavirus crisis.

F1 chiefs and team bosses have spent recent weeks trying to further reduce the cost cap for 2021, which was originally set at $175million. The championship and its teams have been hit hard by the lack of racing and subsequent drop in revenue after the first 10 races of the 2020 season were postponed or cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Teams have already agreed to postpone a major technical regulation overhaul by a year until 2022 in a bid to save costs and are in the middle of intense negotiations to significantly lower the planned cost-cap for next year.

While many teams are in favour of reducing the budget cap, opposition has come from others, most notably Ferrari, who want to avoid reacting “in a hurry” to the coronavirus crisis.

Racing Point team principal and CEO Szafnauer said he expects to be presented with the latest proposal within the next week but urged that F1 teams must think about the state of the sport as a whole.

“I think we'll have a proposal pretty soon, either by the end of this week or early next week,” Szafnauer said on the latest Sky F1 Vodcast.

“We'll see what Jean [Todt, FIA president] and Chase [Carey, F1 chairman] and FOM come up with.

“Maybe I'm more pragmatic than many others, but I think what we need to do here is look at the entirety of the sport - not just be selfish as we generally are for our own position.”

Teams have already agreed informally to lower the original figure to $150million, but McLaren are leading the charge to knock it down into the region of around $100 million.

“The big teams have come down from 175 to something smaller, but 100m for them might be just a little bit too far to go and a little bit too deep of a cut, so I think somewhere in between there is just about right,” explained Szafnauer.

“We've got to be realistic and pragmatic so that we don't have a budget cap where some of the bigger teams say, 'do you know what, at this level I'm not efficient. I'm better off taking my x-amount of world championships and leaving’.

“We don't want that. We want to keep everybody racing, keep F1 in its entirety that it is today. So we should go for a budget cap that either keeps everybody equally upset, or equally happy."