Vowles says cost cap favours Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull and McLaren: 'We have a two-tier championship'

Few people in the paddock have backed the cost cap as consistently as Vowles, as his team tries to make up the gap on their rivals. F1 brought in the cap in 2021 to rein in rising costs and level the field. Several teams had only just made it through the Covid-19 pandemic without going out of business. For 2026, the limit on performance-related spending is $215 million.

Vowles said the top four teams have scored 83 per cent of the points in the cost cap era, up from a share in the 70s before it. He also said the rest of the grid now reaches the podium five per cent of the time, half the 10 per cent it managed before the cap.

"In other words, we have made the situation worse, where the top four are the top four and all the rest of us are fighting over 17% of the points," he said.

The cap was built around three goals: long-term financial sustainability, sporting equity and a closer field. Vowles believes only the first has been achieved. "We wanted long-term financial sustainability, and I think in that goal, not just have we achieved it, but we've exceeded it," he said. On the other two, he added: "Those are the three goals of cost cap, and those two have failed."

Vowles began by admitting his own team's mistakes this year. "We have gone backwards, we had a car that was overweight," he said. He then explained why he thinks the cap is harder on a team that is rebuilding.

"I'm spending millions, tens of millions actually, just on basic systems, so you just know where a part is in the factory," he said. "We're caught in a cost cap trap. Before the cost cap, Williams weren't spending really any money at all. So, I've, roughly speaking, tripled the expenditure," he said. He still concluded that things were "different" but "still worse".

Vowles is not asking for the cap to be scrapped. "The solution isn't to take cost cap away," he said. "As I said before, we have a brilliantly financially stable sport now as a result of it, but we do need to think about what mechanisms we have in there to make sure we're all playing with the same tools and the same mechanisms, because today we're not."

One idea he raised was to link extra spending allowance to championship points or finishing position. Any benefit would be phased in over time rather than giving a team an instant jump up the order. He stressed that the best teams should still be rewarded.

Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur, who was sitting next to Vowles, and offered a different view. Ferrari had long opposed the cost cap before Liberty Media won them over.

Vasseur added that the cap sends a wider message: "And it's not just the fact that the business is going well, it's the fact that we are sending the message that everybody can compete, right or wrong, but this is the message."