F1 introduced a $145m spending cap in 2021 in a bid to cut costs and help level out the play♔ing field. 

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff♈ and Red Bull’s Christian Horner have claimed both their teams have been forced to make staff redundancies to ensure they have stayed within budget. 

But Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer has claimed the big teams are finding ﷽w🔯ays to relocate staff within their organisation that keeps them within the cost cap. 

"When everyone's the right siz💮e, you lose that [advantage]. You lose that a little bit,” Szafnauer is quo✨ted as saying by GPFans. 

“What some of the oth🍃er bigger teams are now doing is they're looking to exploit or have a better understanding of where there are loopholes or some organisational changes you can make to actually stuff more people under that 🍎budget cap.

"They're looking at: 'Yeah, I g🐎ot rid of a hundred people, but now I want to hire back because under the budget cap I was able to find spots for them where they either don't count as a whole person or they do some marketing stuff or whatever it is, or they work on a boat for some of the time’.

"We're not there yet. I think they're there already, and that advantage of bein🗹g right at the beginning does dissipate.”

Back in October, Red Bull were hit with a $7m fine and dock𒁏♋ed 10 percent of their wind tunnel time over the next 12 months for breaching the cost cap during Max168澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果历史: Verstappen’s maiden title-winning campaign in 2021. 

Red Bull fiercely denied throughout the saga that they had gone over the cost cap but F1’s governing body, the FIA, later revealed the Milton Keynes team had wrongly excluded costs in a 168澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果历史:number of areas incl꧟uding catering, which ultimately led to an overspend of £1.🅷8m.