Flavio Briatore wants to strengthen the F1 budget cap and notably proposes to include drivers’ salaries in it.
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Introduced in Formula 1 in 2021, the budget cap aimed to reduce financial gaps between teams and prevent the most powerful from spending without limit to gain an advantage. Five years later, Flavio Briatore believes the system must go much further.
The Alpine executive advisor considers that the many expenses currently excluded from the calculation continue to favor the large structures. He therefore proposes to considerably expand the scope of the cap, notably by including drivers’ salaries.
A development that could profoundly change the way teams build their budget and compose their driver pairings.
Briatore wants a much stricter cap
When introduced in 2021, the budget cap was set at 145 million dollars. The initially planned limit was 175 million, but it was lowered in the context of the economic consequences of the pandemic.
The system has since allowed control over a significant part of teams’ expenses, with financial audits carried out by the FIA. But not all amounts spent by a team are accounted for.
Drivers’ salaries are notably among the main exceptions, as well as those of the three highest-paid employees and several other categories of expenses.
Briatore believes these exemptions should be gradually removed.
“We have a budget cap, but we need to do something stronger”, explains the Italian.
“The budget cap was a very good idea, but at some point, we have to make it much stricter and we have to include the drivers.”
Drivers’ salaries in the budget cap?
Such a measure would have considerable consequences for the big teams. The remunerations of the main stars of the discipline are indeed particularly high amounts.
Max Verstappen would thus earn about 70 million dollars per season at Red Bull, while Lewis Hamilton’s salary at Ferrari would be around 60 million. If these amounts were to be included in the cap, they would alone represent a very large part of the authorized budget.
The teams’ spending cap rose to 215 million dollars with the introduction of the new 2026 regulations, notably to take into account the additional costs caused by the deep technical transformations.
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But Briatore wants this envelope to reflect much more faithfully the actual expenses of the teams.
“We have to include many things that are currently outside the budget cap in order to give small teams the chance to compete.”
A historical advantage for the big teams
The budget cap also has another limitation: it cannot erase investments made before its introduction.
Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull or McLaren already had particularly developed infrastructures, expensive equipment, many specialists and know-how accumulated over several years when the financial restrictions came into effect.
Teams historically having more modest resources therefore still have to catch up on part of this gap while respecting the same spending limits.
For Briatore, strengthening the financial regulations would help reduce this structural advantage further and offer small teams better chances to get closer to the top positions.
A proposal that would disrupt the driver market
Including drivers in the budget cap could however produce effects far beyond just reducing gaps between teams.
Recruiting a highly paid star would potentially force a team to reduce the amounts available for developing its car or other sectors subject to the limit. Conversely, betting on less expensive drivers would free up more resources.
Drawing on his experience leading Benetton then Renault, with which he won several world titles, Briatore nevertheless believes a more ambitious reform is necessary.
His principle is simple: if Formula 1 really wants to place all teams on an equal financial footing, its budget cap must cover a much larger proportion of their actual expenses.
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