It certainly isn't in the interest of the sport to have dominant periods.
Agreed. There's no good evidence the budget cap leads to more dominance than we had before. The same team won the WCC 8 years in a row with free spending, most of those weren't even the least bit close. Before that we had 4 years with another team winning everything. The only changes we got with free spending was when there was a regulation change. 2014, 2017, (2021), that's it. In other words, the evidence that the free spend model yielded more convergence under stable regulations is non-existent. The cost cap is still in its infancy, we have way less data on how successful it will be in the long run.
First year of budget cap and there's one team that is the most dominant ever, or at least in over 50 years. I'm not so sure it's a random occurrence, again the same happened with engine tokens and when scrapped everyone caught up to Merc within a few years.
The first year of the budget cap was 2021. The second year of the cap was 2022, which started out as a very close season before one team faultered. The third year of the cap is not close (in terms of the best team). So we see a picture where the team that does the best job wins, and the teams that make mistakes fall off. We also see teams that would never have fought with the "big 3" suddenly start competing with some of those teams. Now if a team wants to unseat RB they are going to have to do a better job than RB, which sounds an awful lot like sport.
Never made any fairness argument, this is a business AND a sport.
That's right, and fairness is a cornerstone of sport. There's nothing sporting about a wallet size competition. And there is no good business in it either, which is why the teams don't want to go back to that model. Having a more equal spend opens up the competition beyond a select few teams, which is a much more attractive proposition for F1 in the long run.
It's not that hard to understand... If you cap my spend I will be forced to spend more time before I catch up to you. In an uncapped environment I could redesign the entire car and copy in-season, in a cap I can't. Meanwhile the leading car will develop a bit slower but still develops plenty.
I think we've seen plenty of re-designs mid season. AMR 2022 comes to mind, Merc have changed their philosophy a lot. Beyond that I see no evidence that the free spend environment created a closer competition. Merc were dominant in 2014, by 2016 they won every race but two. The competition wasn't getting closer, the only thing that happened was a rule change came in for 2017 which reset the competitive order. What happened after that? The championship got successively less competitive every year from 2017 until 2020, then the cost cap came in. In other words, with a free spend the team that was winning kept outspending its rivals and kept its advantage, even made it bigger most years.
I have zero interest in your judgement of competence or incompetence of other teams. These arguments are useless at best, and every team said the same when it was their turn to dominate. Furthermore, once again, the engine token nonsense shows it's totally false, there is a way to allow competition that levels off and eventually caps development of the engine. Capping development from day 1 of new rules doesn't work.
I could care less what your interests are, your interests are not arguments. We have an equal spend environment and one team is flourishing over its competitors. They are obviously doing something better than the competition. They're more efficient, their innovation is clearly working, their correlation is working, they're doing a better job in a much more fair sporting environment. You not wanting to hear it doesn't make it not true. It's all sour grapes.
