COST CUTTING A f1 joke

[zako85]

Going from a satellite team to a full constructor would be similar in cost for an entirely new entry since its the R/D and manufacturing side that is expensive to set up.

One important issue about the customer chassis use is that the customer team does not have to give up on doing its chassis development in the season. With the customer chassis they get a blue-print and ideas on how to mod the chassis. A team like Marussia could simply race with an unmodified chassis the whole season because they don't have the expertise to improve upon something that's already very refined, but a more experienced team like Lotus could simply use their Ferrari chassis (or whatever) as a starting point for mid-season chassis development or even for the next season's chassis. So a customer team does not necessarily have to give up all of its development capability, and so for some teams going from customer to a full developer shouldn't be as hard as for some other teams.

Perhaps, the concern about the loss about manufacturing capability of the lesser teams could be addressed by limiting the "sales" of customer chassis actually just to blueprints. Didn't RBR and Toro Rosso do this form of chassis sharing in 2008?

[zako85]

Having accepted a two-tier championship, would you put something in the rules that would put the customer chassis users at an inherent disadvantage? I think you'd need some rule along those lines. Ferrari and McLaren won't be very interested in a championship where the only limit on how low down the order they slip is how many customer teams Mercedes deign to supply with their dominant chassis.

I don't think any rules are required to "cripple" the Mercedes customer teams. Remember that the top teams are doing quite a bit of chassis development through the whole season. Even though a Mercedes customer may be starting a season with a chassis as good as the Mercedes's own chassis, by the mid-season they could be quite behind.

As for McLaren and Ferrari being beaten by Mercedes customers, I don't think there is anything unfair about it. If McLaren does not want to be beaten by secondary teams, such as Force India (who already nearly managed this as is using their _own_ VJM07 chassis), then McLaren should get their act together and start making a better car as well as procure a better engine, instead of whining! The same applies to Ferrari.

[AndyL]

I don't think any rules are required to "cripple" the Mercedes customer teams. Remember that the top teams are doing quite a bit of chassis development through the whole season. Even though a Mercedes customer may be starting a season with a chassis as good as the Mercedes's own chassis, by the mid-season they could be quite behind.

As for McLaren and Ferrari being beaten by Mercedes customers, I don't think there is anything unfair about it. If McLaren does not want to be beaten by secondary teams, such as Force India (who already nearly managed this as is using their _own_ VJM07 chassis), then McLaren should get their act together and start making a better car as well as procure a better engine, instead of whining! The same applies to Ferrari.

I don't think saying that McLaren or Ferrari should get their act together and make a better chassis really answers the problem I was describing, for two reasons.
First, they're at a massive disadvantage: Mercedes have data from 8 or 10 cars to develop from, while McLaren or Ferrari only have 2 or 4, as hardly anyone wanted to buy their inferior chassis.
Second, even if they succeed, it doesn't change the situation, only who is in it. Say Ferrari dominate with their new "last of the summer wine" Brawn/Newey/Murray-developed chassis. Next year all the customer teams buy that instead and now it's Mercedes spending a fortune to plod round out of the points. The real winners are the likes of Sauber and Force India who managed to come 2nd and 3rd in the WCC and beat all the other supposed "first-tier" teams every year by simply buying the best customer chassis.

It's true that in-season development would be a significant factor. We often hear that the cars gain a second or more during the year. However, what's to stop the customer teams receiving all the supplier's developments? Is that the thing you'd ban in the rules, to control the performance of the customer teams? Otherwise Mercedes could be handing out all their new wings and whatnot to their customers, just to put the boot into the other factories.