1) Salary caps like NBA's won't work in F1. It's been explained why many times.
2) It is true that teams will spend all the money they have going after the tiniest increase in performance.
Not if you gear the regulations towards diminishing returns.
Which again supports my contention that *they don't want it to be affordable*.
When the V10's reached maturity and the regulation allowed it, you could keep spending money on refining it but you were only going to get a tiny bit of a return. Meanwhile you've got Cosworth catching up.
That's the kind of scenario that makes financial sense. It's still F1 - if someone wants to toss money at it they can, or if somebody comes up with a genius breakthrough they can implement it and gain the advantage. But just spending money doesn't yield a 1:1 advantage as it does today.
The complexity of the the hybrid engine and braking systems is a money pit that will suck dollars into it for many years, and the ENTIRE time prevent anyone to dare to enter a new engine the further down the line we go. That is antithetical to F1 itself, not to mention does nothing to improve the sport or help costs.
FOM has to be bold and say "this is what we're going to do: car racing, without subjective philosophical concerns outside of that premise". Bozo hybrid schemes and the sudden emphasis that everything has to be "road car relevant" in order to have manufacturers participate came out of the sky.
But like I said, I don't think there is any concern for it to actually be more affordable, it is about protecting the "dignity" of the big marques investment. Ferrari does not want Cosworth to be make a competitive engine, Mercedes doesn't want Hyundai coming in with a team threatening them. So you come up with goofy technical rules that force expenditure to be more directly related to performance: not only an illogical oddball hybrid scheme, but you make the regs such that it's not open to experimentation - completely defeating the notion of actual engineering competition and having things relate back to "road car relevance".
Spec front wing, that cuts a chunk out of the aero budget;
Because of the spec front wing, you get diminishing returns on researching everything further along on the car, disincentivising spending;
Off the shelf FIA spec cockpit/survival cell, decrease manufacturing costs via mass production, as well as each team designing that part;
Conventionally aspirated IC motors, allow previously homologated off the shelf engines/designs, no goofy brake by wire systems - simplify.
I think that is all you would need to massively bring the costs down. McLaren could put a car in a windtunnel twice as much as Caterham, but they would only get to tweak the nose/front of chassis/engine cowling/rear wing, and unlike now if they hit a wall - you couldn't start the entire money-suck process over by changing the front wing. It's all about the front wing.
But if they wanted to keep tweaking they could, and maybe they get a little bit of an advantage. Genius would still be rewarded, ala the double diffuser, etc.. But with 30% of the downforce taken out of the financial picture, AND that limiting how many iterations you can create behind it - that would yield enormous cost savings and tighten up the field.
F1 should be arranged so that every car manufacturer on the planet wants to participate. The more complex the regulation the less that is going to happen, and the more expensive. Ultimate fun would be if they were allowed to run assembly line engine blocks and maybe pistons. That would be the ultimate "road car relevant" formula....