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  • Anyone has the contents of the article? Won't open for me :-/

    • Too long to post in one comment

      That’s perhaps not surprising given that for many years the team struggled to balance the books. Spending on equipment for the factory was not a priority compared to reaching the end of the season. It’s taken the arrival of Vowles, a man with so much intimate knowledge of how Mercedes operates, for the realisation to fully sink in in terms of just how far the team lags behind.

      The good news is that this is a boom time for teams in terms of income and potential values, and owner Dorilton is well aware that it also needs to protect its investment by keeping up with the competition. Williams simply has to have state-of-the-art facilities, even if there are no potential plans to sell on the horizon.

      The complication is that it takes time to plan and undertake infrastructure projects, and more importantly they now have to be conducted under the auspices of the cost cap. Even if you have the money and the willingness to re-equip the factory, there’s a hard limit on what you can allocate to capital expenditure each year.

      That has become a point of debate in recent months as teams such as Williams, Alpine and Sauber – all of which reined in spending when times were tough – now seek to improve their facilities.

      “Twenty years of underinvestment is why we are where we are today,” says Vowles. “But I'm in a fortunate position that my predecessors weren't – where we have investment, significant investment, behind us.

      “In fact, there is a strong desire to have Williams return back to a competitive position. But to do that requires investment. So the money's available and ready. The cost cap itself is split into two things. There's an operational cost cap, which is about $145m, which everyone knows and talks about.

      “Perhaps more hidden than that, there is a CapEx, a capital expenditure version of the cost cap. That's round about, it's a bit complicated, but $36m spread across four years. But if you like, every year you can spend six or seven of that, if you just do it fairly equally. Vowles is under no illusion about the difficulty of the task facing Williams given its infrastructure deficit

      Vowles is under no illusion about the difficulty of the task facing Williams given its infrastructure deficit

      Photo by: Williams

      “That's good in as much as it's restricted down spending. But in many regards, where we are today, that money is disappearing on what I think is basic infrastructure.”

      Vowles cites one key example of what is currently lacking at Williams.

      “This is being very transparent about it,” he says. “When a designer releases a part, it sort of goes into a black hole. And then there's emails going backwards and forwards between production to try and find out where their part is, how it's being upgraded, how big it is, how long it will take.

      • Normally, that would go into a digital system that can be tracked, so you understand actually, what does the car get made up of? And bear in mind, there are 17,000 components and by the time you have designers doing this 17,000 times, you get lost. So you have inefficiencies.

        “That software to fix that isn't, unfortunately, £100, but that's millions, and even up to 10s of millions if you get it right. So, CapEx for me, at the moment, my expenditure was more spent on trying to get some infrastructure in place, so at least we know how long it takes to design a part.”

        It’s abundantly clear that in the years leading up to the introduction of the cost cap and its associated CapEx limit, the teams that had plenty of resources saw which way the wind was blowing. They spent heavily on infrastructure projects precisely because they knew that the limits would make it harder to so from 2022 onwards.

        Indeed, as Vowles notes, those numbers are available if you scan the annual financial reports of the teams and see where they were allocating their money in the two or three years before the cap was imposed.

        “It's all publicly available,” he says. “If you actually go look at Companies House [where the reports of UK businesses are logged], you can sort of see that the numbers we're talking about here is hundreds of millions. Not 10 million, or 20 million, but hundreds of millions to sort of catch up with the level of investment, from where Williams is today, to perhaps the most extreme expenditures you see in the sport. That's a big deficit.” Williams wasn't in a position where it could build up its infrastructure in advance of the cost cap as it struggled to remain afloat

        Williams wasn't in a position where it could build up its infrastructure in advance of the cost cap as it struggled to remain afloat

        Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

        That’s why we are currently in the middle of a debate about an adjustment to the CapEx limit that’s designed to help Williams and other teams that fell behind in terms of infrastructure to catch up, with a decision set to be made over the Belgian Grand Prix weekend at the end of this month.

        Exactly how the extra allowance will work is not yet clear, but there’s a precedent in that wind tunnels were taken out of the main cap and teams were given a $55m allowance should they decide to build a new one. Aston Martin and McLaren opted to do just that, and the others have the opportunity to play their joker in the coming years – although they still have to have that money available and be able to justify abandoning their old tunnels.

        The Catch 22 is that the extra CapEx allowance to help teams to catch up will also go to the established frontrunners – but the theory is that they already pretty much have what they need, and any new equipment they invest in now will represent marginal gains relative to what the likes of Williams, Alpine and Sauber can achieve with better equipment.

        “F1, the FIA and other teams have been supportive in this,” says Vowles. “What we're looking for at the moment is the ability to have sporting equity, the ability to have infrastructure that matches our peers, such that we're not fighting with one hand behind our back, but fighting in the same way as other people are.

        “For us, certainly where we are at the moment the numbers aren't small. In fact, they're scarily large, and what we would have to spend on the site and on infrastructure. The site’s OK, that's actually external to the cost cap, interestingly enough. But on machines, for example, or simulators, or the software I was talking about here, or your composites facilities, and I can give you a list – there is a list, in fact.

        “What we're looking for is the ability to show where we are today, where the benchmark is, and the ability to spend in order to catch back up to that benchmark.”

        Vowles makes it clear that the example he cited earlier is top of the list and would immediately make a difference to how effectively the team operates.

      • Out of interest, do you know the post limit? I tried pasting the full article but it kept erroring out and I couldn't see anywhere that had a character limit.

    • Just worked for me on mobile, maybe the site was having issues? Worth another shot.

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