The reason the big teams will still have a major advantage for quite some time is because of the many tens of millions they splurged on updating their factories right before the capital expenditure portion of the cost cap kicked in. All the smaller teams couldn’t do that and were left stuck with whatever machinery and technologies they were already using.

The CapEx cap is around $36 million every 4 years. James Vowels was on the F1 podcast last week and he said he’s actively campaigning to get that number raised for a team like Williams, since that’s the only way to bring about real long-term change without actually waiting a decade. They’re still working with 20-year old tech in parts of the factory but they literally cannot update it, even if they have the funds, because of the capital expenditure limit.