Mercedes and Red Bull have traded barbs after the latter voted against imposing sporting penalties for exceeding Formula 1’s new budget cap.
This year, teams are limited to just $145m in spending primarily on operating and developing the cars, a significant cut for those at the front with Mercedes revealing recently their total spend in 2020 was $460m.
While previously much of the talk was about how a cap would be policed, now attention has turned to what would actually happen if a team was found to have breached the limit.
“A large group of teams, seven out of 10 teams, voted in favour of introducing sporting penalties for financial cap infringements,” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff stated.
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“At the moment, there are only financial penalties and three teams voted against it, saying ‘we’ll take a financial penalty but we don’t want to have a sporting penalty’.
“That’s a bit odd. But I think the compromise we have achieved now is to understand why that is and which regulations they feel are incomplete or uncomfortable.
“The target we have set ourselves is a couple of weeks to sort it out and then everyone understands that financial cap regulation infringements should be seen just the same as technical infringements in terms of sporting penalties,” he confirmed.
In addition to the two Red Bull teams, Ferrari was also named by Motorsport.com as the third outfit against imposing a sporting punishment, for eg. a points deduction.
However, Red Bull boss Christian Horner disagreed with the Austrian’s explanation for their opposition, instead claiming that the penalties for overspending were “already clear”.
“There is discussion currently about procedures which, because it’s a new set of regulations, they are all being tidied up,” he added.
“I hope within a month, everything will be clear in terms of procedures.”