Karun Chandhok says F1 needs to give budget cap "a chance"
F1 News
F1 pundit Karun Chandhok says that F1 teams and fans must give the budget cap a chance to show its worth when it is introduced in 2021. Teams have a budget of $175million in the hope F1 can become more cost effective and racing can become closer.
Former HRT and Lotus driver Chandhok reckons that F1 needs the budget cap, as both teams he drove for left F1 a few years after with money problems.
He told GPFans.com: “First of all, we haven’t seen it come into effect. So lets give things a chance. Obviously, they haven’t just plucked this number out of thin air. This number has been arrived at after a long period of meetings and negotiations amongst all the ten teams.
“It’s in F1’s interest to keep all ten teams happy.
“Through this process, they’ve arrived at this number and I think now we’ve just got to see how this works. Once we’ve seen two or three years of that working, then we can judge whether that [figure] needs to be adjusted up or down.”
Can the budget cap attract new teams?
Haas have shown that it is possible to join F1 and make a reasonable success of it, but they're the only team to make it stick in the last decade.
Liberty Media may be hopeful that they can attract more teams because of this budget cap, with some interest already being shown from various parties.
Chandhok added: “They’re talking about standardising certain parts and they’ve obviously got the listed components that you can get, like Haas have done and Toro Rosso have done with the Red Bull technology.
"All of those things, and Haas is a good example of showing that a new team can arrive and can partner with key technical partners to make their program work and score points at least."