Cutbacks at Mercedes: 'How can we deliver the same performance as before?'

This season, Formula 1 teams face a budget cap for the first time. The teams are allowed to spend a maximum of $145 million (not including certain costs such as the driver).

Huge challenge

For the smaller teams, the budget cap means little change, but for a team like Mercedes, it means significant cuts. "That has been a very interesting change here inside Mercedes, because we are one of the bigger teams in Formula 1 and so we had to figure out how we can operate our championship assault with far less financial resource than we might have had previously," technical director James Allison said in a video.

According to Allison, the team now had to figure out how to make certain parts of the car last longer and be built more cheaply. "It’s a huge challenge and building the car is only part of it. How to build them more cheaply and how to make sure we maintain the same sort of performance that we did previously, despite the fact that our overall budget has come down," Allison said.

Starting as well as possible

According to Allison, the key to making savings lies in starting a new season as well as possible. "A car that is fast from the beginning is going to be cheaper to stay quick during the whole season. Let's hope that we’ve put enough goodness into the car at the beginning of the year, to allow our plans to unfold in a way that sees us operating at a high level under this new constraint, where we are fighting with exactly the same guns as everybody else.”