There’s always been dominance in teams since it’s inception, and unless you want to do away with the category system F1 manufactures have been dealing with forever, and replace it with a sterile, under the umbrella spec series, dominance will always prevail. It’s the nature of the sport.

I can’t see Ferrari or Mclaren showing concern over, oh, Force India, no matter what budget was in place.

As to whether Brawn would say the same thing if he was still at Maranello then the answer is a clear “no”. There are other people running the PR department at Ferrari. Still, Honda just like most of the other manufacturers (except for Renault) will spend whatever it takes. BAR is very well funded indeed.

What’s really behind this is that Brawn knows full well that Ferrari and McLaren have written the rule books for Formula 1 for a decade now. Whenever anybody is catching up with them in one area, they rewrite the rules to give them an advantage in the other. When Mercedes had the best engine, nobody was talking about the cost of building them. Then when they lost their edge, engines were suddenly taken out of the equation for cost reasons. Leaving aerodynamics as the key differentiator: clearly a McLaren/ Ferrari speciality. Now that BMW and others are catching up on the full scale-24/7/365 wind tunnels, the FIA is going to limit their use for “cost reasons”. Funny that McLaren and Ferrari already have the largest and most mature CFD (computational fluid dynamics) departments, which will remain unaffected. Neither company is even remotely interesting in limiting costs; being able to spend limitless amounts of cash is one of their greatest advantages and the cash is not about to dry up anytime soon.

What Brawn’s idea would really do, is to remove Ferrari and McLaren’s ability to rewrite the rule book to suit their own strengths and the emphasize the weaknesses of their opponents.

Honda had a V12 1000+ hp engine before they were due to enter F1 as a new team almost a decade ago. They tested it and trounced the then leading teams. Six months later the rules were changed to require a V10 engine design because of a potential “cost explosion for everyone”, i.e. being beating to a pulp by a new rival.

I’m sure Ross was pleased no end by this when he was at Ferrari, but now that he’s at Honda he’s thinking “I can’t believe how you guys just let yourself be bossed around like this”. Expect a lot more pressure on the FIA from Honda in years to come.

A $100 million spending limit would suit Honda just fine. They are trying to showcase their ability to innovate and shaving 3 grams off the front suspension isn’t really what they understand best. They want to build engines. They build engines. Engine building is what they do. They WANT to build engines.. please let them.

Just my 5 euro-cents.

Doing nothing would be more helpful than the Brawn proposals. For different reasons, doing nothing would also be more helpful than the FIA’s idea of restricting innovation.