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Between Le Mans and the Austin round of the World Endurance Championship this year, Toyota ran two test days, while Porsche ran nine. With both teams wielding substantially varied budgets, it’s easy to see the imbalance when you’re fighting against similarly experienced management and superior resources.
Likewise, after learning Audi were using twice as much wind tunnel time, Toyota successfully implemented a wind tunnel limitation, with the regulation being introduced next year at 1200 hours.
“We are favouring this, because it’s our strategy to ask for it” says Pascal Vasselon, Toyota’s LMP1 Technical Director and former Senior General Manager of Toyota’s Formula One team. “We need it and the series needs it. We have to be careful, because we are very close to entering an ‘F1 crisis’.
“We feel our position is fragile and then you are left with two manufacturers from the same group – this is fragile as well. What we have proposed is to cap some spending so that it’s not so easy to buy performance. We can’t buy performance we can just do the strict minimum to be there.
“We were doing 30 test day and they [the opposition] were doing 80, which is just ridiculous.”
Under such circumstances, it becomes difficult to enter the sport. At the moment, if a new team enters F1, it takes them five years to be competitive. WEC are in danger of doing the same, and Toyota are leading the way by proposing a revised F1 token system that benefits the haves and have nots.
“We now control the running of the car, the aero side, but what we don’t control is the powertrain” says Pascal. “That’s where most of the costs are. So we have proposed to put in place a token system.”
At the moment the recommended token system is purely theoretical, but while there are no set figures, Vasselon’s arrangement is a simpler version of the current token system used in Formula One.
“You consider the powertrain. Then break it down in say 100 development areas which are clearly defined,” he explains. “Next year you only allow 30 areas of development, so to make it simple you’re only developing 30 per cent of the powertrain. If you want to go to 50 per cent you can do that, so it’s really a tool for the regulators and the partners to decide how much.”
But how do new manufacturers catch up in a free development race? If a team was working with an unlimited budget, they would still be confined to set areas of development and not have four or five R&D departments wandering off into areas of mad science. That way, whether you are at the front or rear of the grid, your budget theoretically can’t change.
“Our budget will limit the amount of development we can do. Even if we have to catch up, we cannot redesign our engine, and so are better to make sure nobody can do it,” adds Vasselon.
This is the approach currently being taken by Honda in Formula One, who believe their unique engine design will be hard to replicate once running properly, but have been desperately spending development tokens like an Arts Council nearing the close of its financial year. A loophole in this year’s regulations means power units can be developed throughout the season by using tokens, but with that loophole due to close on February 28, teams have to spend all 25 development tokens for 2016 before that date – potentially rushing down into a development cul-de-sac.
Focussing on restraint, rather than scrounging for vouchers that may have been sucked into an air-intake, could prove to be a better way forward.
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