The FIA have circulated a letter to the F1 teams this week. It basically sums up the recent talks the teams had about budget caps, and engines.

The letter says that the FIA are going to go ahead and introduce the budget caps in 2009, and also details what will be exempt from the cap.

So far it looks like Drivers, Engines, Marketing and Team Principle salary’s will not have to be found out of the rumoured 150million dollar budget.

Instead it seems the budget is directly targeted at lowering the cost of Aero development, as CFD and wind tunnel usage is not cheap (BMW own a 12-teraflop supercomputer for their CFD usage called Albert2).

The letter also eluded to the rumoured change to the 10 year engine freeze, it seems that it will certainly be lowered to a 5 year freeze, so we are already half way through it, which is good news.

The budget capping is certainly a better idea than the mandated limiting of CFG and Tunnel usage that was first planned by the FIA.

The FIA will have a working group look into what the budget should be exactly set to, and what it should and should not cover, they publish their results in June.

Another thing to come out of the letter is a recent (still to be ratified) change to the engine replacement rule, the driver will not suffer a 10 place drop for the first engine changed in the season, this is obviously to negate fears that a switch of engine electronics could show more hiccups in the engine reliability department.

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