This whole thing is about some teams wanting to change the way the RRA is worded and closing off some of the loopholes that are in there (on purpose?). Some of the teams get away with spending way over the allocated amounts, but do so without breaking the RRA. This means that those teams like the situation as is, but the teams that have actually tried to stick to the spirit of the agreement and limit spending want the loopholes closed.
How do you get away with spending way too much?
Is a fairly simple exercise really. Imagine you own Bob Smith F1 Team and have billions of dollars in a bank account doing nothing, you want to spend this money but the RRA means you are (legally, sort of) obliged to limit what you spend. Now you are allowed a certain amount for external consultancy spending and this is where the breach comes in. Set up Bob Smith Motorsport, a totally seperate company with no financial link to your F1 team, buy them all the fancy toys, CFD, wind tunnels, the best staff etc etc and then start touting for business as a motorsport consultancy who can look at customers cars and improve them. Strangely enough your F1 team decides to spend their external budget on your motorsport team, what a coincidence and how fortuitous for you. Bob Smith Motorsport agree to provide design, testing and build services to Bob Smith F1 for exactly the amount the F1 team has for external spending, but unfortunately for Bob Smith Motorsport it finds out that the costs for providing these services way in exceed the quoted price charged. You can then throw money at Bob Smith Motorsports as it is not an F1 team and not bound by the RRA. You also get to right off any excess spent against tax personally. But this means that the team has obided by the RRA as they have not exceeded their allocated amount of spend, however their car has just cost 20 times the normal spending amount, but this is not a breach of the RRA so everyone is happy (apart from the teams who despite having mutli-billionaire owners are trying to stick to the spirit of the RRA and are not using the loopholes that are built into it).
So when the RRA comes onto the agenda again some teams want this overspend cut out, other teams (those with stupid amounts of money to spend and a corporate layout that lets them do this) want to keep this way of working in place. Then the split comes, people fall out and some people are definitely wanting to use this split to gain an advantage elsewhere (Revised entry agreements, prize money, appearance fees etc). The whole thing is the new boys who see the logic of limiting spending vs the old boys who see the benefits of spending your way to the front, but hiding the way you do it. It is not going to be resolved any time soon, possibly not until we see some of the old guard fall on their swords for the good of the sport, or some of the new boys backing out of the sport.
