Originally Posted by Assa2:
“That's certainly an argument against that's been used a lot in the past, but I disagree. If it were that simple to circumvent a budget cap the big teams would have agreed to budget caps long ago knowing full well they could avoid them. Any budget cap would only work with the agreement of open-book accounting over-seen by a 3rd party auditor with forensic auditing capabilities like Deloittes and it would be easy enough to track back where any new development on a car had come from and how much it had cost.”
I guess it's probably easier for there not to
be a rule rather than there being a rule which can be, erm, tested.
Trouble with auditing is that it's really only possible to audit tangible things rather than IP.
An auditor can look at the books and verify that a team spent, say, 100 hours developing a front wing at a cost of $1,000 per hour but they have no way of knowing if the concept came to the designer in a dream or whether it's the result of 10,000 hours of study in a separate part of the business which the designer used as the basis for his idea.
Course, I wouldn't say that, just because a rule can be circumvented, it isn't a good idea to implement it.
Put the budget cap in place and if teams find ways to break it, good for them. If they get caught, however, they get into trouble.
I still think it'd be a good idea to make it a rule that other teams can buy various items from competitors for a stated price, though.
After all, a budget-cap, alone, just restricts established teams.
If the new teams could
buy parts from the established teams, they could learn from those parts and it'd help those teams advance.
And it'd also deter teams from spending millions developing a component and then saying it'd cost $10,000 because there'd always be the risk that they'd end up having to supply that part to 10 or 11 other teams.