Budget Cap Introduction Not Enough to Close the Gap on Big Teams – Franz Tost

Franz Tost says that whilst the new budget cap is a step in the right direction, it alone will not help some of the smaller teams close the gap on the bigger outfits, including his Scuderia AlphaTauri team.

Regulation changes have meant that teams are restricted to a maximum spend of $140million this year, and while that will mean the likes of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Ferrari will have to reign in their spending, other teams do not have the infrastructure in place to take advantage of this.

Tost, the Team Principal of the Faenza-based squad, says the money that the bigger teams have put into the team, in particular the infrastructure such as their simulations, in previous years will still keep them ahead and leave the smaller teams that have been run on lesser budgets still behind.

“We still have to work on the infrastructure, to optimise everything on this side,” Tost is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com.  “If I see the simulation tools, and I can only hear what these top team have, we simply don’t have that. They invested in the last few years, millions for this.

“We have a good budget, but we never were in a position to invest so much money for simulation tools. And simulation tools are getting more and more important, because we are running less at the track.

“Therefore you need to have this, and I think that there, we still have some deficiencies.”

Despite those concerns, Tost says he sees no reasons why AlphaTauri cannot make a competitive car in 2022, and he trusts his designers and engineers to go in the right direction when it comes to the new aero regulations.

“It’s a very unknown story because it’s completely new everything,” said Tost. “We don’t have any comparisons with others.

“I trust our engineers because they have built two good cars: the AT01 was already a good car and the [2021] car was a next step forward. So why shouldn’t they be able to make AT03, even if it’s a completely new car, also very competitive?

“But there are, from the technological side, also different philosophies. I just hope that we go in the right direction.  Where we then really end up, I don’t know. But I trust our team, the aero group is doing a very good job and they are going in the right direction.”