Alfa Romeo Racing’s team principal Frederic Vasseur believes that the budget cap should not be changed despite Ferrari and Red Bull’s comments that some teams would have to miss some races to meet the spending limit.

One of the subplots of the weekend has been the budget cap, with some calling for it to be raised as some teams predict that they will struggle to remain with the $140m cap as they continue to grapple with the rising costs of inflation and freight.

But Vasseur, in an FIA press conference of which MotorLAT was in attendance, seems somewhat unsympathetic towards the issues that the big teams are facing as he states that the team will simply stop developing the car to meet the cap’s limit.

“The difference is that we are not speaking about budget gap; we are speaking about budget, on our side. It means I won’t be able to spend what I have. And if we have some increase and I can understand their situation, but if we have some increase on energy or freight, the best solution is to switch off the wind tunnel to stop bringing updates every single weekend. We are in this situation, and sooner or later, we will have to stop the development of the car because we will be at the limit of our budget. And I think everybody can do the same.”

Vasseur hopes that the cap doesn’t get changed for the foreseeable future as he explained that the reason why the team isn’t feeling the financial pinch revealing that the team planned its budget around inflation in the autumn of 2021. 

“Yeah, I have exactly the same comments as before that; for me, it’s absolutely not a case of force majeure because inflation is not a case of force majeure. We knew perfectly in November or October when we did the budget that will have inflation. And now it’s up to the teams to decide if they want to develop the car all the season and to miss four events or if they want to slow down now and to do the full season.”

“Honestly, I think that at one stage that, we have to agree on the fact that we won’t try to change the rule. If after two events that it was exactly the same story with the weight, the way it was clear, some teams didn’t achieve it, they wanted to change the minimum weight, you know that and the numbers of teams were not able to achieve the target. It’s not a topic that if you have eight cars under the weight after the qualifying, the eight cars will be disqualified. It’s not because you have one or two teams; it doesn’t matter.”