The introduction of the cost cap for the 2021 season intended to close up the competition between F1 teams, by reducing the effect of the top teams' financial advantage.
Although that effect has helped to create a tight midfield pack thus far, it has also limited the development scope of the current generation of cars and made it more difficult to overcome a slow start.
The effect on components with long lead times has been minimal, according to Allison, but the common trickle of upgrades introduced throughout the season has faced a greater amount of lag between testing and production.
As a result, teams have moved towards grouping their upgrades into packages, which causes further delays for the parts developed first.
"If you imagine that most of the performance is coming from the wind tunnel, the wind tunnel is always, therefore, leading where the car will ultimately follow," Allison explained in an exclusive interview with Autosport.
"The lag between what the car sees and what the wind tunnel is doing is how quickly you can drop the wind tunnel geometry into the design office, and how they can spit that out into manufacturing to make.
"Back in the day, when cost cap wasn't there, then you could drop those things out the wind tunnel pretty much every other day, and people would furiously design them and then you'd furiously build them, which meant the lag between where the tunnel was and where the track was always only a few weeks.
Source: Autosport