I was thinking along the same lines, like they probably spend more on fuel. I remember when Honda pissed everyone off in the 1990s after inflating F1 budgets and then suddenly leaving the sport when the Japanese market crashed. At the time they had Honda factory R&D teams designing and building engines just for F1 teams; that was probably tens of millions a year that wasn’t even part of a team’s budget… in the 80s and 90s.
Anyhow… F1 teams have a budget cap for several years now. For 2026, it’s $215 million, and that doesn’t include engines, nor driver and team manager salaries.
I was thinking along the same lines, like they probably spend more on fuel. I remember when Honda pissed everyone off in the 1990s after inflating F1 budgets and then suddenly leaving the sport when the Japanese market crashed. At the time they had Honda factory R&D teams designing and building engines just for F1 teams; that was probably tens of millions a year that wasn’t even part of a team’s budget… in the 80s and 90s.
Anyhow… F1 teams have a budget cap for several years now. For 2026, it’s $215 million, and that doesn’t include engines, nor driver and team manager salaries.