Why is F1 only six seconds ahead of GP2?

The average difference between Formula 1 and GP2 pole position times so far this season, where conditions were comparable, is just 6.016 seconds.

While it is a myth that the tailenders on the grand prix grid are always slower than the quickest in GP2 (that has only happened three times this season in normal conditions), it is perfectly reasonable to question why even a modestly-funded F1 team should find it so difficult to turn a spend around 25 times greater than that of a GP2 outfit into the performance needed to be fighting at the sharp end.

Four F1 teams recently wrote to FIA president Jean Todt, offering a figure of $120,250,000 for running a middling team for a season. And even minnows Caterham and Marussia, which have recently gone missing, will have spent hundreds of millions on their difficult five years in grand prix racing to go only very slightly faster, and occasionally slower, than GP2.

So what makes it so difficult to turn all that cash into performance compared to an off-the-shelf race car?

The comparison between F1 team spending and GP2 expenditure is not like-for-like. GP2 teams do not have to design and produce their own cars and the cost of the series' development is spread over 13 teams purchasing chassis that have a long lifespan. So the economics are not the same.

F1 operates on a completely different level. Currently, all teams have to be constructors, defined as teams that own the intellectual property to various key parts that comprise the car, the most obvious of which is the monocoque.

Caterham launches its 2013 car - a bespoke design like all its rivals © LAT

So immediately that engineers in vast design, research and development production work that GP2 teams simply do not have to do. A GP2 car is a set specification, so the scope of such an outfit is simply to put the car together, set it up and run it properly.

Needless to say, it isn't as simple as all that, as the performance spread from front to back on a GP2 grid full of identical cars proves. But in F1, you are effectively producing a racing car from the ground up exclusively for your own use.

Not only do you have to design and produce the car, you are shooting for a moving performance target. The ultimate laptime potential of a GP2 car is effectively defined when a team receives the car, so it's all about exploiting 100 per cent of that theoretical speed.

That isn't the case in F1. Performance targets are constantly changing and if you stand still, you will go backwards. So not only is it necessary to design and produce the car - you have to constantly develop and improve it.

The counter-argument to that is that grand prix racing has always been about constant evolution and small teams have been able to thrive in such an environment historically.

So why was it possible for AUTOSPORT's technical expert, Gary Anderson, and Eddie Jordan to put together a small team that was able to finish fifth in the championship in its first season in 1991?

The answer lies just to my right at the time of writing. Brazil always likes to make a big show of its F1 heritage, so in the hotel AUTOSPORT is billeted in is a 1990 Nelson Piquet Benetton.

Simpler cars meant easier targets for F1 newcomers © LAT

A quick glance at the simple front wing shows just how much things have changed. As understanding has grown, so has the complexity. Compared to a modern front wing, it looks like child's play. As for the GP2 front wing, yes it is more complex than a 25-year-old F1 car, but it is unchanging.

Given how tight the regulations now are, teams are working in hugely restrictive 'boxes' when it comes to improving aerodynamic performance.

For all the talk about the new engines this year, which have been hugely influential, aerodynamics still matter. You just need to look at the difference in pace between a works Mercedes and a customer-engined Force India to see that.

It's now about very precise control of the airflow. This requires in-depth understanding and simulation work. The technical developments that have been obvious this year have very often been detail changes relating to small turning vanes and slot gaps.

This level of detail work requires massive resources. What's more, aerodynamic parts are not modular. Everything that goes on at the front of the car influences the rest of it (and vice versa), so every change in one area has an effect that must be analysed elsewhere on the car.

If you don't do this kind of work in F1, you will go nowhere and, with the rules the way they are, you will probably be slower than a GP2 car indefinitely.

You also have to factor in the amount of work that goes into getting the best out of the engines.

While it's true that this year's are vastly more complex, even with the previous-generation 2.4-litre V8s huge resources were thrown into exploiting exhaust blown downforce, particularly before the initial attempts to eliminate such technology.

For a team in Marussia's situation, just getting the 2014 package on track was a challenge © XPB

This is another area where the smaller teams really suffer. Take Marussia as an example. During pre-season testing, everyone was spending huge amounts of time attempting to get the power units to work as well as possible, which was a big challenge in terms of electronics.

Marussia had no more than three electronics specialists outside the race team working on this. And even with the assistance the team had from Ferrari, they worked themselves into the ground during that period to get the team into a position where it could run cleanly during testing.

With a GP2 car, such a challenge doesn't exist. While there will be a bit of work to do when a new-car cycle starts, those teams aren't dealing with genuine prototype technology.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is a lot more that an F1 team needs to do. That doesn't mean GP2 is easy, far from it, and it certainly doesn't mean that team members are any less hard working or skilled.

But what it does mean is that you need significantly fewer people to do it. And with fixed costs for the car, that makes the whole financial equation simpler.

Even so, this only partly explains why F1's extra spending doesn't translate into a bigger pace advantage.

The other major factor is that, for the past 30 or so years, there has been an increasing drive to keep a limit on speeds.

The 2004 Ferrari still holds some F1 lap records © LAT

There was a general trend for the first 80 years of grand prix racing for regulations to be less tight. This meant that the pace of the cars could be dictated by the available technology.

But more and more, it has been necessary to keep a cap on speeds. So it is true that F1 is no longer about pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of laptimes. That's why the 2004 Ferrari holds so many lap records.

Instead, it is about achieving the maximum pace within very tightly-controlled regulations. If you take a very simple example of regulations from the early days, perhaps a minimum (or even maximum, as was often the case) weight and perhaps a capacity limit, there are very few limiting factors to pace beyond the laws of physics.

But now, every single part of the car is regulated. This is why you rarely see 'magic bullet' design concepts suddenly appearing these days. And those that do crop up are horrendously difficult to implement.

Grand prix teams are so much better today than they have ever been in terms of understanding what they are trying to achieve. So the constraints on what they can do become ever tighter.

By comparison, in GP2 it's a question of working out how to get the requisite laptime and characteristics within set constraints to make it cost-effective using whatever technology is deemed appropriate.

This is why it's incorrect to suggest teams are squandering money because F1 cars are only six seconds faster than GP2 machines. Yes, both are fielding racing cars, but the game is completely different.

That doesn't mean to say that you can't question whether the gap is too small. Perhaps it is. And that can only be changed by opening up F1 regulations, which itself has a cost implication.

But the argument that F1 teams should be able to find the kinds of performance that they do for a fraction of the cost under the current rules is nonsensical.