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I think it makes sense to talk about the Concorde Agreement here. It’s a big help knowing this is all done – I can be as optimistic as I want, but things are never done until they are done – and now Gene has signed we can focus on going forward, which are the things that I like to do.
Getting the Concorde Agreement signed needed to be done, especially in a time like now with the pandemic. It’s not an easy thing to do, to manage all these things – a reduced budget for this year, when it wasn’t clear if we would be racing or not racing, or how many races we would do. It was a lot of things to do, but now we can clearly focus on the future, and that is what we will be doing over the next few months and the next five years.
We put a lot of work in over the past months to make it viable for Haas and for Gene to commit to going forward and we achieved that. Formula 1 is still a very good global marketing tool for Haas Automation and therefore, together with the new financial regulations coming in and the new Concorde Agreement, with the revised money distribution and with the budget cap solution, Gene still had an appetite for it. For sure, these were the determining factors in his decision.
The biggest thing is that you should be able to be competitive – we should be levelling the playfield – because nobody is allowed to spend more money within the regulated budget cap, and if you can get to that money, or near to it, you should be competitive.
Right now, it’s impossible, because you can never have the right amount of resources (money basically) to beat the big teams. Because if you get near performance-wise, they just throw another 10% in of whatever they spend and they pull ahead again. Under the new regs, that cannot be done.
There’s still a long way to go for the small teams to get as strong as the big teams, because there is a big in-built advantage from how it’s been done for the last 15/20 years. I’m not saying in the short-term there will be a level playfield, but in the mid-to-long-term, it’s now in our own hands: anybody who does a good job can be competitive. And when you are competitive, you should be able to find sponsors, you end up better in the classifications and you get more prize money, and that makes it financially more viable as well.
It should be feasible that any team could potentially win. Of course, it will take a bit of time, it will not come immediately. I don’t know exactly what they did in MotoGP that means the customer teams can win now, but in theory that should be possible in F1 too. If we can achieve the budget cap, we should be able to do that. And that means we have a different challenge in front of us.
It’s not just the challenge to compete in the midfield, now the pressure will be on to compete at the front, because in theory we are all in the same position. And that means commercially you need to do a good job and find sponsors that take you to the budget cap – the gap now is not hundreds of millions, it’s tens of millions. It’s still a lot of money, but it’s a lot better than before! Before the gap between the big teams and the small ones was maybe 100, 150 million, now maybe it is 10-30 million. It’s a big step in the right direction.
Right now, there is no point in investing a lot of resources into 2021 when you know that the mid-to-long-term is the 2022 regulations. At the moment we are not bringing any upgrades to this year’s car. We will do the upgrades for next year because some of the rules are changing, even if most of the car is carrying over, some of the rules are changing to create less aero performance at the rear.
Next year we need to get straight onto 2022 and focus on that one, because obviously we know that our current car is not the best-performing so we won’t try to make a miracle and try to make this car a wonder car. We can live with that, but we cannot miss the boat for coming out of the blocks with a good car for the 2022 season.
