Formula 1 motorsport director Ross Brawn believes the potential for whistleblowing will help police the sport’s new budget cap.
This year will see a dry run of the measures put in place by the FIA under the new financial regulations to ensure no team exceeds the $175m limit on spending.
They will be monitored by the new Cost-Cap Administration but in addition, an avenue for potential whistleblowers will also be created.
“What happens classically in Formula 1 is there is a constant circulation of personnel around the teams, and most of the indiscretions in Formula 1 have come out because someone has moved from one team to another and told them,” Brawn explained in a press gathering in Barcelona.
“Every team knows that they will never retain any fraudulent activity because someone will leave next week or the week after and they’ll take that information with them.
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“The teams have, in a very crude sense, this internal policing going on because they know that this engineer will move to another team next season and you won’t be able to retain that information.
“So there’s self-policing, there’s a whistle-blowing system, and there’s a strong group of auditors. We’ve partnered with Deloitte, who have been very involved with a number of these sports initiatives, and we will meet some challenges for sure in the next few years.
“But unless we face up to that, we’re never going to get this under control.”
Policing such a cap has always been considered one of the main hurdles to its implementation, however, Brawn believes the recent punishments handed out to Manchester City in football and Saracens in rugby union for breaching financial regulations prove F1 teams shouldn’t be complacent.
“My judgement is teams will be less cavalier in what they do because it’s shown there are consequences,” Brawn added.
“For us, that’s a good thing because it shows there will be consequences if a team fraudulently breaches the cost cap regulations.”