The verdict came not from an outsider but from one of the men who sits inside the rule-making tent. Speaking at the team principals’ press conference in Sepang on Friday, Vowles argued that F1’s defining financial regulation has delivered on money but not on sport.

“Cost cap has made it worse, not better,” he said, according to crash.net.

His numbers were pointed. The top four constructors, Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull and McLaren, now bank 83% of the available points, up from a figure in the 70s before the cap arrived, he told reporters. Non-top-four podium appearances have halved over the same period, from roughly 10% of the time to about 5%.

‘That’s not me telling you’

Vowles was blunt on what the figures amount to.

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“We have a two-tier championship. That’s not me telling you; that is just what is on the table right now in terms of point scored,” he said.

The Williams boss framed it as a structural problem rather than a complaint about any single rival. Catching teams that have spent a decade pouring money into their factories, he argued, is now mathematically harder under a cap than it was without one.

Why the cap keeps rebuilders down

The mechanics are what Vowles calls the “cost cap trap”. Teams rebuilding from the back have to spend a large share of their capped budget on basic infrastructure that the elite put in place long ago, meaning less of each dollar reaches the car.

“When you’re in a cost cap, I’m not spending money on the car. 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.

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“So we’re caught in a cost cap trap because if I do anything short-term, and I always talk about investing in the future, now you understand why.”

He was careful to say the regulation itself is not the enemy. Three goals were set when the cap was drawn up, he recalled: long-term financial sustainability, sporting equity, and a tighter competitive field. On the first count he thinks F1 has overdelivered. On the other two, he says it has failed.

“The solution isn’t to take the cost cap away. We have a brilliant, 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.”

Vasseur pushes back

Sitting beside him, Ferrari team principal Frédéric Vasseur offered a very different reading of the same regulation.

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“What we have to keep in mind is that before the cost cap, 2018, 2017, 2016, for sure the business in general was much worse, but we had also five or six teams in bankruptcy or almost in bankruptcy,” Vasseur said, per gpblog.

“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.”

Vowles’ call is for the mechanism inside the cap to change, not for the cap itself to go.

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