The problem the cap was written to solve
Before the regulation, there was no ceiling on what a team could spend on car development, only the practical limit of what an automaker or investor group was prepared to fund. That produced a competitive order that tracked budgets almost as closely as it tracked talent, since a team willing to run three times the wind tunnel hours of a rival could iterate through parts and setups a smaller operation simply never got to test. The FIA's original plan called for a cap around 175 million dollars, but the number was cut to 145 million dollars for 2021 after the pandemic hit team finances across the grid, giving every team, including the biggest spenders, a real incentive to accept a lower ceiling rather than fight it in negotiations that had dragged on for years beforehand.
