"You never can stop people spending money," he commented, "If they have money, they should spend it. I have no problem with that. But, in an ideal world, we would have rules where you spend $50 million or $500 million and you can be competitive with $50 million if you're smarter and work more efficiently. That's what we have to achieve, and I think we are headed in that direction. [Mercedes-Benz] is spending less than in years before and we are very efficient. I'm quite pleased with the progress we have made in that direction, especially the last two years. And thats the right direction."
Haug hopes that next year's one-make tyre restriction in
F1 and the impending 2008 engine freeze will have a beneficial effect on controlling costs.
"[Engine costs] are probably forty per cent of the total budget, which is too much," he remarked, "Having said that, we are testing, testing, testing, all the time. You spend 20,000 kilometres on the racetrack and you do a total of 200,000 kilometres in testing and dyno testing - ten times more just to develop the engine. Half of that is tyre-testing. So we have a one-make tyre rule next year and you will need to test less, not nothing, but less. So that will help and, all in all, we will save quite some costs."
Denis Chevrier,
Renault's chief engine designer, confirmed that this year's defending world champion team is in agreement with both Mosley and Haug.
"I think that Renault is very positive about the frozen engine because of the basic request to try to make Formula One not as expensive," Chevrier said, "It is purely political, but an absolutely vital aspect for Renault to keep enjoying competing in Formula One to have a good view that Formula One is good for you. But you need as well to make the costs less."
However, Ferrari's public relations man and spokesman, Luca Colajanni, offered a different view.
"At
Silverstone, the president of the
FIA gave his view of a long-term future of
Formula One," Colajanni said, "There were a lot of ideas and proposals, but what is important to us is that there is always a link to our road car production. For a manufacturer like Ferrari, that is the way it must be. The link between the race car and the road car is critical to
Ferrari. We tend to transfer a lot of the technology that is used in Formula One to the road cars we produce. We want to avoid having a car that doesn't require that kind of technology, so there is no need to transfer it to our road cars and there is no connection between Formula One and the road cars.”
