Formula One's new motorsport managing director Ross Brawn wants to reopen the discussion on budget caps as a possible means for levelling the sport's playing field.
With top teams still spending huge amounts of money to win titles and the smallest teams struggling to survive, Brawn -- in his new role as part of F1's management -- is keen to look at ways of reducing costs.
"The situation at the moment is that the return on investment, in terms of performance, is still steep, so the more money you invest the faster you go," he told ESPN. "As long as you get a competent team like Mercedes doing it then that is what happens. What we really need to do is reduce that slope and find ways within the technical regulations of rewarding less for heavy investment. That's the concept, achieving it is more difficult.
"The idea is to have a process going on all the time of chipping away and getting back to where we want to be -- there won't be one solution where we can say 'if we do that we can halve the slope'. But every decision that's made, we have to take that into account: are we giving more scope for heavy investment to go further or are we reducing it? We just need to keep thinking about it and making sure that all the discussions that happen are going in the right direction to pull the slope down."
In the last ten years F1 has toyed with the idea of a budget cap to control costs, but the FIA's last attempt to enforce one in 2009 failed when Red Bull and Ferrari threatened to quit the sport. Instead the teams signed up to the Resource Restriction Agreement (RRA) in an attempt to control costs but, with no formal regulations to penalise spending outside the RRA, it was dropped towards the end of 2011.
"Budget caps have been discussed; people say that they don't work, but they have never actually been tried," Brawn said. "There was a voluntary budget cap or resource restriction that didn't work because not everyone volunteered to it in reality. So that is never going to work if you have got some of the teams doing it and some of the teams not.
"I would still like to have a discussion about budget caps and control, and see where people stand on that and if we feel it could be a solution. That, for sure, would then bring a limitation to what people can do. But maybe it's nirvana; maybe that is something that can't be achieved because of the range of teams in different countries and different considerations.
"I'm not saying that we have to have a budget cap, but I think we should certainly discuss it because that does address many issues. You've got all the nuances to it, because do the drivers come into the budget cap or not and so on and so forth. But a huge amount of debate went on a few years ago and I think that could be picked up again to just see if that is a solution that could work."
A budget cap proposal is likely to come up against opposition from F1's top teams, with Red Bull boss Christian Horner rejecting the idea in a separate interview with ESPN last year.
"Interesting concept, in reality impossible to police," he said. "We have explored the living daylights out of it and it's exposed too many issues in terms of policing it, so I think it would be fraught with difficulty and would not be healthy for Formula One. The best way to control costs is through the regulations -- both technical and sporting. There isn't necessity to spend excessively because your return is minimal or zero."
Brawn is also keen to address the distribution of central revenues among teams, which are currently skewed in favour of F1's biggest players. He admits there is not much scope for change until the current commercial deals expire in 2020, but outlined a vision in which independent teams are able to compete.
"Of course, we've got the issue of the distribution of funds to the teams, which we can't do anything about now because we have got contracts with the teams and there is no proposal to change that, but they are coming up for renewal in 2020 and we need to look at that and see if there is a better way for Formula One overall to distribute the funds.
"My personal view is that a healthy Formula One is where there is a good stock of teams that can stand on their own two feet, not be manufacturer teams, not be funded because there is a different set of objectives -- but the Williams, to some degree McLarens, Force Indias and Saubers, those teams can stand on their own two feet in a respectable way and put up a decent job. If those teams spend far more money than they have and go bust then we can't stop that, but you want to get them over the breadline so at least if they do a sensible job with good management then they are going to have a good business and the businesses are going to be attractive and we are going to get new teams in."