Its Official: F1 Engine Homologation Rules Are A Farce

[Malbec]

I Think that there is a high likelihood of several teams complaining about it. Mercedes has already said that they will start 2015 with their 2014 PU, which makes sense considering the amount of effort put into making these PUs reliable. No one wants to lose points, or use up PU components early on, especially considering that the rules only allow 4 PUs without penalty in 2015. If the other manufacturers follow suit I think, if I understand the rules correctly, that that will mean 32 tokens for the Honda PU. Probably nothing short of unlimited development will allow equity in this arena, which would be very costly, and probably price the lesser funded customer teams out of the series. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there is another tweak to the rules before the start of the season!
Can of bloody worms really.....mate!

I think the new Honda ruling gives an incentive for all three existing makers to introduce as many revisions before the season starts as possible which penalises Ferrari and Renault, especially since Ferrari itself acknowledges that they are behind schedule even now. If Mercedes start the season with their 2014 PU then Honda have at least 10 points to play with already through 2015.

[anfield5]

It beggars belief that F1 have to always make the simple things overly complicated. It is claimed that it is a money saving measure, but this it garbage. Why not simply state the displacement, ers, maximum power output etc of the engines/power units and let the manufacturers manufacture. The cost of the engines will not rise because most teams are customers and have limited budgets. The best era (imo) was in the 70's - mid 80's. Engine development was allowed but wasn't really done to any great degree, there weren't too may draconian rules

[airshifter]

I Think that there is a high likelihood of several teams complaining about it. Mercedes has already said that they will start 2015 with their 2014 PU, which makes sense considering the amount of effort put into making these PUs reliable. No one wants to lose points, or use up PU components early on, especially considering that the rules only allow 4 PUs without penalty in 2015. If the other manufacturers follow suit I think, if I understand the rules correctly, that that will mean 32 tokens for the Honda PU. Probably nothing short of unlimited development will allow equity in this arena, which would be very costly, and probably price the lesser funded customer teams out of the series. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there is another tweak to the rules before the start of the season!
Can of bloody worms really.....mate!

It's a big mess really. After years of talking about money savings that never took place, now we have these freezes and regs on development. So if someone gets it wrong and goes boom too many times, they eventually run out of "tokens" and have spent all this money for no reason. Unless of course the FIA forgives them and changes their mind since they already have huge money in development, in which case they threaten to leave and the FIA gives them more tokens probably.

It's like a poker game where everyone is very drunk, nobody has a good hand, and they are all trying to out bluff each other!

I'd wonder if Honda gets a fair deal on this, as the other teams and especially Mercedes have a great deal to lose. They will know Honda isn't stepping back in short on funds, and will likely do everything possibly to slow the development.

[Tazio]

I think the new Honda ruling gives an incentive for all three existing makers to introduce as many revisions before the season starts as possible which penalises Ferrari and Renault, especially since Ferrari itself acknowledges that they are behind schedule even now. If Mercedes start the season with their 2014 PU then Honda have at least 10 points to play with already through 2015.

With the exception of Mercedes who I'm sure would love to save enough until the end of the season to effectively "roll over" their tokens. Unless of course they find another team has reached equal footing with them, which I find unlikely.

[anfield5]

here is a random simple idea. Scrap the stupid token system and simply tell engine manufacturers that they develop whatever they want, but cant charge their teams more than x amount per year. That way teams are not footing the bill for the engine upgrades, but engineers can still work to improve the engines.

[AndyL]

here is a random simple idea. Scrap the stupid token system and simply tell engine manufacturers that they develop whatever they want, but cant charge their teams more than x amount per year. That way teams are not footing the bill for the engine upgrades, but engineers can still work to improve the engines.

Interesting, sounds like something akin to a claiming rule. But it would hand an advantage to either the manufacturer with the biggest budget, who can afford to subsidise their customers, or to the manufacturer with the fewest customer teams.

[Big Ben]

So if I get this right if some engine manufacturer wants to get in F1 in 2019 he will have to get it right from the very beginning because he won't have many tokens left to use and probably will be allowed to use even less engines per season?

[zako85]

So if I get this right if some engine manufacturer wants to get in F1 in 2019 he will have to get it right from the very beginning because he won't have many tokens left to use and probably will be allowed to use even less engines per season?

I always thought that's a truly bizarre plan

[zako85]

It beggars belief that F1 have to always make the simple things overly complicated.

Perhaps F1 could learn something from Indycar where, I believe, the cost of engines is something like 1 million USD per season (which has about 16 races), and I heard it costs something like 5 millions USD in sponsor money per season to add a full time car. And besides the engines, F1 needs some radical changes, including the possibility of customer chassis sales. The high cost of engines is only a manifestation of some serious problems with F1. For some reason, everyone doing business with F1, including FIA, thinks that all F1 teams can print their money, and track owners can print their own money, etc. As a result, a team on a 100 million dollar budget can barely afford to build a working chassis and employ only pay-drivers. The figures are ridiculous.

[AndyL]

So if I get this right if some engine manufacturer wants to get in F1 in 2019 he will have to get it right from the very beginning because he won't have many tokens left to use and probably will be allowed to use even less engines per season?

That's right, though they would have the benefit of creating a design from scratch having seen what worked or didn't work for everyone else. I guess they would be in a similar situation to Cosworth when they came back with the V8 straight into an engine freeze. While that Cosworth was the weakest engine on the grid it was not a million miles off the pace, Williams won a race with it.