As a fellow F1 player, I do feel less comfortable buying these games at full price and that's why I don't buy them every year, even though of like the updated grid and tracks. I wish there was a cheaper upgrade option, since I'm clearly not buying a full game. Your point that it doesn't need a full overhaul is completely correct, but we are still paying full price.
I do agree with you on the price point. And sometimes I do feel like I'm overpaying just to have the game up to date. Obviously I don't know any of the financials behind making such a game, but I would imagine that licensing makes up a fairly large chunk of the price.
I know nothing about this one in particular but typical game license deals are something like 25% of revenue to the IP holder. A strong dev like EA may bump that down a little bit and a mega IP (Harry Potter, Marvel, etc) might bump it up, but it's not going to be super far off.
