Formula 1 Motorsport Director Ross Brawn has claimed top teams are privately asking for the creation of a "regulatory authority" in the sport to police spending and reduce costs in the sport.
The financial situation in F1 has been a major area of discussion for a long time and encompasses a number of different areas from the spending of top teams, to smaller teams going bust and the uneven distribution of revenue across the grid.
When Liberty Media took over as the new Commercial Rights holder back in January one of their first declarations was that they would address the rising expenditure and the spending epidemic of the leading teams.
Now, nine months on, Brawn has reiterated that point again when speaking about the success of the team he led as team boss until 2013 and has recently secured their fourth straight Constructors' Championship last weekend in Austin.
“If you take the current dominant team, Mercedes, they have the biggest resources in F1,” he said in an interview with Forbes. “They spend around half a billion dollars on their F1 program a year to get the results they get on the track and that's a fantastic achievement.
"The problem is they are four seconds quicker than the guys at the back of the grid and that's no good for the business. Also, it's not really sustainable."
Explaining why, the Briton added: "What happens is when they are winning, those budgets have grown. During their period of domination, they spend more to stay dominant. When that domination fades away, the budgets become awkward because they are not succeeding yet they are spending a huge amount of money.”
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Previously, when talking about greater financial controls in F1 many have scoffed at the likelihood of any kind of agreement being made believing the top teams, including Ferrari and Red Bull, wouldn't want to lose what it is a key competitive advantage.
But Brawn insists even they acknowledge changes must be made and are desperate for help in making competing in F1 more attractive.
"Those teams, particularly the boards of those teams, have come to us and said 'Please save us from ourselves because we have to get in that loop of achieving success. We want a regulatory authority'," Ross revealed.
"'We want control over what we can and can't do and to make the business more sustainable. To bring the budgets down to a level that even if we are not winning we can still justify it.'
"So Mercedes, if we take an example, always want to be winning and they want to be in the top three and they are prepared to accept a reduced competitiveness if it means greater sustainability," he clarified.
"They are in this vicious loop now of huge budgets, having to dominate to justify the budget and looking for a way out. Not a way out of F1, a way out of that condition they are in."
