Martin Whitmarsh has described Bernie Ecclestone's budget cap plan as unrealistic

McLaren Team Principal Martin Whitmarsh has described Bernie Ecclestone's plans for a budget cap in F1 as "unrealistic".

Instead, Whitmarsh favours further development of the current Resource Restriction Agreement (RRA) - although it has been dogged in controversy with accusations of teams breaching the terms. "The budget cap from Bernie has the elegance that you can describe it quickly, but it is very difficult to find out where the money is and control it," said Whitmarsh. "The resource restriction agreement asks: How much money do you spend externally and how many people do you have? It's difficult to hide either of those. "They're also the core elements of a budget cap, but then it goes on to wind tunnel hours, CFD (computational fluid dynamics) etcetera, and we should be free to pay drivers whatever we want to pay them. "What we should be doing is finding the easy, clear, measurable, definable elements of spend and control those. "They (the RRA and budget cap) are both trying to do the same thing. They're not against each other. They're just a different philosophy." Lotus Team Principal Eric Boullier, however, can see the benefits of Ecclestone's idea, but believes further discussion is required. "Bernie is very serious," said the Frenchman. "The budget cap is one of the best ways to have control over useless expenditure and to end the competitive war. "Clearly, this is a good start, that Formula One starts to understand and to put in place a budget cap, and I can back up Bernie's idea. "You need to do it in a clever way and build it up over the years, and it's something that could happen because it's coming from the right authority." Asked whether it was a better idea than the RRA, Boullier added: "I don't know yet. "We have been working for years on the RRA, and we have a better understanding of what we could achieve with that. It's a complex system. "The idea of a budget cap from Bernie is quite new and we just need to look at it a bit more."