Toto Wolff considers it necessary to adjust the agreements on the teams’ budgets for this year to compensate for runaway inflation, rising energy prices and logistics costs.
When the championship teams agreed to cap 2022 budgets to $140 million, no one could have foreseen that inflation processes would develop at such a pace.
“It’s not that we want to achieve higher revenues,” emphasized the head of the Mercedes factory team. “In effect, we need to make sure that wage increases can offset the excessive inflation that people are currently suffering from.”
In order to monitor the increase in energy and logistics costs, it is sufficient, according to Wolff, to look at the annual accounts: “I think it is very easy to demonstrate this. Our base power costs at Brackley have increased from £2.5m to £6.5m, and crew freight costs have increased in a similar fashion.
This is all reflected in the bills we pay. That is why we ask for budget adjustments and then the salaries of employees will rise. All this is not happening because we suddenly wanted more money.
Let’s look at the facts: we need to take the economic indicators that we ended last year with, as well as the ones at the beginning of this year, and compare them with the ones we have now. Hopefully we can find a way to adjust the budgets after that.
The worst thing for our sport is that some small teams take a stubborn stance, believing that the big teams are trying to gain an advantage, but “we won’t let them.”
As a team owner, I can say that I don’t want to raise the budget cap just to increase it and get around the restrictions that were originally intended.
We don’t have to negotiate every year to increase the budget cap, but I think we are now facing an emergency situation. I want my employees to be well paid, especially in such difficult circumstances.
The shift to limited budgets had a special purpose: small teams could spend as much as the top teams. In any case, we want to avoid another reorganization of major teams, as it will harm both our team and the entire motorsport industry.”
Source: F1 News
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