The work on the single-seaters that the Formula 1 teams are carrying out this winter is unusual, very different from what they were used to do in the past.
The teams had to face a series of unforeseen events, starting with Covid-19 pandemic that postponed the start of last season, which ended on December 13 in Abu Dhabi, up to the freeze on most mechanical parts.
The conditions under which the teams are working, to ensure a competitive season, are entirely new: a short time frame to perfect the new cars, the impossibility of modifying several parts or changing them, but what changes everything drastically is the presence of the "budget cap".
But what is this Budget Cap?

The Budget Cap is nothing more than an established limit of expenses (145 million) that each Team can get to spend, in order to close the gap between the top Teams and the minor ones. The purpose of this rule is obviously to try to make the championship as exciting and competitive as possible.

Ferrari's reaction to this was positive; from Maranello they say they are satisfied, after having, however, declared that 145 million were not enough. Binotto had to mediate and deal with the British teams who wanted an even tighter budget cap (about 100 million).
What is certain is that the "red" team principal will have to find a way to make his team more efficient with less expense in order to return to be a winner in F1.

"It's a competitive paradigm of moving away from who is spending the most, to who is spending the best" former Renault boss Cyril Abiteboul said last year.

Mercedes technical director James Allison last week stated: "It's a new way of thinking, a new way of doing things, that should reward planning, that should reward management of the resources, management of the talents, management of a good execution, rather than only recognising just the ability to spend the most in this sport"

"The biggest of these by far" - he said - "is trying to understand and assimilate the new financial regulations, the so-called cost cap regulations, to make sure that we can adapt our organisation to be able to operate within the much tighter confines of this new regulation" then he added: "We have been working on that all the way through 2020 and carried on working through it over the winter to try and make sure that we've first of all understood what the regulation was saying" he continued.

Also Zak Brown, Chief Executive Officer of McLaren Racing, gave his opinion about it: "It's a three-year journey as the cost cap comes down each year. We're ready for 2021, and we have a plan for '22 and '23. We have those plans in place, but we don't need to execute against all of those plans yet, because we want to leave ourselves room for understanding what's going to be the most efficient and performance-oriented way to run at the reduced cap".

The budget cap, on the other hand, arouses perplexity in the minds and hearts of F1 supporters, who think that a consequence of this decision will be a high level of standardization.
These reduction in costs and hours in the wind tunnel will make F1 even more similar to Endurance. Of course, the leveling is good news for second-tier drivers and teams, who could find new opportunities to obtain important results, but it'll be a whole other matter for the top teams that have invested a lot so far.