Formula 1 has spent the last few seasons drawing hard lines around what a team can and can’t spend, but one number still sits conspicuously outside the fence: the drivers.
That omission is starting to look less like an administrative detail and more like the next big philosophical fight in the cost-cap era. And it’s a debate that neatly splits along two familiar instincts in the paddock — the romantic belief that the best should be rewarded, and the accountant’s argument that everything that wins races should be treated the same.
On the High Performance Racing podcast, Rob Smedley offered the straightforward defence you’ll hear from plenty of old-school engineering types when the subject turns to eye-watering pay packets: elite sport costs what elite sport costs.
“Well, yes, if you look at other sports,” Smedley said when asked whether F1 drivers are worth their huge salaries. In his view, it’s all relative — the market for the very best in the NBA, NFL or Premier League football has long since normalised salaries that would make even a well-funded F1 team principal blink.
Smedley’s wider point was that Formula 1 itself has changed dramatically in recent years, and it’s changed in a way that makes this conversation inevitable. The cost cap has continued to absorb more of a team’s activity; as Smedley put it, almost everything is now inside it, including areas like marketing that used to sit outside the regulated spend. The ceiling may have risen, but the principle has hardened: if it contributes to performance, it’s increasingly being pulled into the same financial framework.
Except, of course, for the people holding the steering wheels.
That’s where Otmar Szafnauer landed with his typically blunt logic. The former Aston Martin and Alpine boss argued that driver salaries should be counted against the cost cap, precisely because they are performance. Not in an abstract, “brand value” sense — in the cold, lap-time sense.
“I think they should be,” Szafnauer said. “Because one of the reasons the drivers get paid so much is the value of winning is high, and they are a big component of that winning.
“They’re not capped, and it’s a differentiator.”
It’s hard to miss what sits underneath that word: differentiator. The cost cap was designed to compress the field by limiting how far the biggest operations could outspend the rest in development and infrastructure. If you believe it has nudged F1 toward that direction — and most inside the sport now accept it has, even if imperfectly — then the most valuable remaining advantage is the thing you can still buy without constraint.
And Szafnauer’s argument goes further than “fairness”. He’s proposing a forced trade-off that would change how teams build their entire competitive model.
“The team should have to make decisions between paying a driver more and having more upgrades, because they both do the same thing,” he said.
In other words: if you want the proven superstar, fine — but accept that you might be running an older floor or a less aggressive development schedule by mid-season. If you want the factory to keep churning, you might have to take a cheaper, less complete driver pairing. That’s a very different ecosystem to the current one, where the richest teams can attempt to maximise both, because one of the biggest levers on performance is exempt.
Szafnauer even put numbers on the logic, the kind you’ll hear thrown around in technical briefings when people are trying to translate talent and carbon fibre into the same language. A good driver, he suggested, might be worth around two tenths per lap; an upgrade could be two to three tenths. The exact figures are debatable — and will vary circuit to circuit — but the point stands. Both are lap time. Both move you up the order. Only one is currently restricted.
Smedley didn’t disagree. In fact, he endorsed the direction of travel with a tellingly emphatic line: “100 per cent right. That is 100 per cent what’s happening.”
Whether you view that as a warning or an inevitability depends on what you think Formula 1 is supposed to be.
There’s an argument — the one Smedley leans toward — that drivers are the sport’s central commodity and should never be treated like another line item. You don’t sell out grands prix, shift sponsor inventory or build global fandom around a new front wing spec. You do it around names, rivalries and the credibility that comes from knowing the best are being paid like the best.
But Szafnauer is describing a structural loophole, not a moral crusade. If teams are genuinely converging in car performance under the cap, the driver becomes the sharpest blade left. And when the driver becomes the blade, the price goes up. That escalation is rational in a market — and potentially corrosive in a regulated competition.
The current salary landscape on the 2026 grid underlines how far the spread can run. Lewis Hamilton is thought to be the highest-paid on base salary at $70 million, with Max Verstappen reported at $65m. At the other end sits Racing Bulls rookie Arvid Lindblad, on a reported $500,000 to $1m base range. Bonuses can push figures higher still.
That gap is part of what makes the cost-cap question so volatile. A regulation that drags driver salaries into the same bucket as development would not land softly. It would change the leverage in negotiations, it would change how teams recruit, and it would change what “smart spending” actually means in modern F1.
For now, the sport is left in an awkward middle ground: ever tighter controls on the machinery, and an effectively open market for the human component — the very part most likely to decide championships if the cars really are converging.
And if the paddock has learned anything over the last few years, it’s that when the margins get tighter, teams don’t stop spending. They just start spending differently.
