COST CUTTING A f1 joke

[CNR]

Mercedes-Benz Spent $285 Million for 2014 F1 Title
http://www.gtspirit.com/2015/02/08/mercedes-benz-spent-285-million-for-2014-f1-title/
Despite continual efforts to reduce costs, teams frequently spend hundreds of millions of dollars each and every year with varying results. Now it has emerged that for the 2014 season, the drivers’ championship and constructors’ championship winning Mercedes team had a budget of 250 million euros (about $285 million) from Daimler itself.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/motor-racing/red-bulls-196m-budget-highlights-formula-one-inequality-9852378.html
Red Bull’s £196m budget highlights Formula One inequality

http://www.jamesallenonf1.com/2014/01/mclaren-boss-we-will-have-larger-budget-in-2014-than-any-previous-season/
Although Neale did not say so, sources close to the team have suggested that the bottom line difference for McLaren between paying for customer Mercedes engines in 2014 and getting free engines and funding from Honda in 2015 could be as much as $100 million.

http://www.tsmplug.com/f1/average-cost-of-formula-1-car/

Cost of Formula 1 Car in 2014

Basic Components Price
Engine Unit $7.7 Million
Carbon fibre monocoque $650,000 per chassis
Front wing & nose cone $160,000 (farout )
Rear wing & DRS overtaking aid $80,000
Steering wheel $50,000
Fuel tank plus assembly $110,000
Hydraulics $160,000
Gearbox $480,000
Cooling system $160,000
Total Basic Cost $9.4 Million

[zako85]

The part about the cost breakdown of a car is utter nonsense. Where is the off the shelf cooling system I can buy for 160 grand? This season highlighted how tightly packed the cars are and the great lengths the teams go to optimize cooling, and yet apparently I can get this system for 160 grand from a corner store? Likewise, the engine unit cost is much higher. The "affordable" Cosworth engine used to cost more than that. But the biggest problem is that there is no R&D expense mentioned. The carbon fibre costs $650,000, but only once you have the blueprint.

As for the rest, I don't know if that's big news. Firms with big pockets can spend a lot more. What's more scandalous is that a team with a budget around 100 million USD can barely build a passable chassis and come to compete.

[Doc Austin]

They are spending more for a front wing than most people have invested in their homes.

[jens]

The part about the cost breakdown of a car is utter nonsense. Where is the off the shelf cooling system I can buy for 160 grand? This season highlighted how tightly packed the cars are and the great lengths the teams go to optimize cooling, and yet apparently I can get this system for 160 grand from a corner store? Likewise, the engine unit cost is much higher. The "affordable" Cosworth engine used to cost more than that. But the biggest problem is that there is no R&D expense mentioned. The carbon fibre costs $650,000, but only once you have the blueprint.

As for the rest, I don't know if that's big news. Firms with big pockets can spend a lot more. What's more scandalous is that a team with a budget around 100 million USD can barely build a passable chassis and come to compete.

Isn't this particular cost breakdown actually based on a single car? I think then it makes sense.

Which means one power unit costs $7.7M. Did they use something like 6 power units last year? Though the number is down to 4 for 2015. Anyway, from my memory the power unit cost for the whole season for a team was somewhere between 30-50M € last year. So if we multiply the above figures, it should be pretty close to reality.

[jens]

They are spending more for a front wing than most people have invested in their homes.

True that.:) That carbon fibre is a pretty damn expensive material. And then you can add manufacturing with specific machines in the factory, and wind tunnel testing to get a proper aerodynamic shape for the front wing.:)

[anfield5]

F1 teams will spend millions of dollars. If the design rules are that restrictive that all teams are building the same car, the teams will spend the money researching what colour screw heads have the highest degree of light refraction etc.

Free up the rules and let the teams spend the same amount of money designing unique solutions to the design formula, like it used to be.

F1 is expensive, it is meant to be.

[steveaki13]

F1 is always going to be expensive, but it really should not be this hard to at least enter F1. I mean you should be able to have teams enter and race hard for a lot less than the teams have to currently spend.

It would end in a two tier system in reality. With 16 cars and then 10 cars for example if you allowed poorer teams to enter, but they would still race hard and provide entertainment. You can have F1 teams that have no chance of winning the title. As its always been.

As for the 3 car idea. I dont want that, but if it was a decision between not changing entry and design rules and having 16 cars or 3 car teams and 24. I would always choose more cars.

F1 as a pinnacle of motorsport really should not be pricing people out except manufacturers who will at some point all leave. F1 setting itself up for a crash.

[Bagwan]

Ban carbon fiber in F1 .

Specify hemp fiber in it's place .

Cheaper to start with , and compostable in the end .

[steveaki13]

Ban carbon fiber in F1 .

Specify hemp fiber in it's place .

Cheaper to start with , and compostable in the end .

Green F1 at its best :D

[Doc Austin]

Ban carbon fiber in F1 .

Specify hemp fiber in it's place .

Cheaper to start with , and compostable in the end .

And of there's a fire everyone gets high!

[zako85]

F1 teams will spend millions of dollars. If the design rules are that restrictive that all teams are building the same car, the teams will spend the money researching what colour screw heads have the highest degree of light refraction etc.

Free up the rules and let the teams spend the same amount of money designing unique solutions to the design formula, like it used to be.

F1 is expensive, it is meant to be.

F1 is not meant to be expensive. Your example about color screws is what some mathematicians would call "optimizing on a flat surface" (looking for a peak on effectively a flat terrain). That's what some teams will do if the rules are too restrictive. They will still find find ways to spend hundreds of millions of dollars or euros. Limiting the budgets is also not very politically tenable. Because of the popularity of F1 as a marketing medium, there will be always teams willing to spend hundreds of millions, while others only have a fraction of that. Ideally, I'd like to see more or less unlimited development of chassis and engines by the top teams while the poorer teams should be allowed to race with an affordable customer chassis.

[anfield5]

F1 is not meant to be expensive. Your example about color screws is what some mathematicians would call "optimizing on a flat surface" (looking for a peak on effectively a flat terrain). That's what some teams will do if the rules are too restrictive. They will still find find ways to spend hundreds of millions of dollars or euros. Limiting the budgets is also not very politically tenable. Because of the popularity of F1 as a marketing medium, there will be always teams willing to spend hundreds of millions, while others only have a fraction of that. Ideally, I'd like to see more or less unlimited development of chassis and engines by the top teams while the poorer teams should be allowed to race with an affordable customer chassis.

Yes.... and no. I agree with most of your statements re development, this is how it was when F1 was at it's best and in effect no more money will be spent, it will just be spent on better things. As to the smaller teams, I can't agree on customer chassis. In my opinion (feel free to disagree please) F1 is about designing and building your own chassis. What needs to change is the allocation of money, so that new and/or small teams get a fair slice. The big teams with big sponsors don't need to get the bulk of the F1 money fund.

[Doc Austin]

As long as there's a million dollars to be won, there will always be someone willing to spend two million dollars to win it.

[Rollo]

F1 is not meant to be expensive. Your example about color screws is what some mathematicians would call "optimizing on a flat surface" (looking for a peak on effectively a flat terrain). That's what some teams will do if the rules are too restrictive. They will still find find ways to spend hundreds of millions of dollars or euros.

Are you now arguing with yourself?
You think that simplifying engines and building them so they have less parts is going to reduce costs though.


Considering the runaway engine cost situation, I think they should consider 4-cylinder turbos, as was originally planned years ago. The smaller engine will have two less cylinders than V6, which means less valves, pistons, etc, which hopefully reduce the price of the engine by about one-third.

[anfield5]

Saying what engine config will be used is part of the problem. What is the problem with having variety. In the glory years the engines had to be 3.0l normally aspirated engines.

Ferrari used v12s others used Cosworth V8's or similar. The V12's were more powerful, but less drivable and their size meant aero efficiency of the cars was compromised, but in a straight line they were epic. The smaller Cosworths gave the designers more scope for designing a better chassis, but they were less powerful, but more driveable. This variety meant that racing was unpredictable and better. The V12's went well on fast parts, the V8's on tighter parts.

[Doc Austin]

Ferrari used v12s others used Cosworth V8's or similar. ........ This variety meant that racing was unpredictable and better.

The fact that they blew up a lot added to the unpredictability too! Now unpredictability means you never know when a sensor is going to go bad or the system needs a reboot. I miss the old days of motors exploding in a big fireball, especially if it was the leader. I can't remember the last time someone had a race locked up and then blew up.

[Rollo]

Saying what engine config will be used is part of the problem. What is the problem with having variety. In the glory years the engines had to be 3.0l normally aspirated engines.

From 1966 until 1986, the engines could be either 3.0L normally aspirated or 1.5L force aspirated. That sort of explains why in 1977, Renault decided to come along with their Yellow Teapot which kept on blowing up in a puff of white smoke.

The 1981 South African Grand Prix which was downgraded to a non-championship race because of the FISA-FOCA war, saw an entire field of Cosworth DFV cars because Renault, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Toleman and Ligier were all no-shows.

The Cosworth DFV was cheap because Ford could sell them at £7,500 in 1967*; this was kind of helped because they built so many of them and the componentry was developed from the FVA which was already in the Ford parts bin.

*£7,500 in 1967 works out to be £78,010 in 2015 at 5% inflation. No engine in F1 is that cheap.

[zako85]

Are you now arguing with yourself?
You think that simplifying engines and building them so they have less parts is going to reduce costs though.

That part was meant as a joke. Not sure why no one got it.

[zako85]

F1 is about designing and building your own chassis. What needs to change is the allocation of money, so that new and/or small teams get a fair slice. The big teams with big sponsors don't need to get the bulk of the F1 money fund.

Formula 1 has gone too high tech. I don't think it's still possible for "garage teams" to innovate and build a competitive chassis like in the 50s through 70s. A lot of technological advances of that era were simply a low hanging fruit that could be picked by a typical team, but once the low hanging fruit was picked up, the rest of improvements required much bigger efforts. Hence, millions spent on wind tunnels or engine tuning so that revs could go up from 18000RPM by like 3%, thus gaining an advantage.

The big issue right now is that a team with a 100 million USD budget can not build a chassis that's competent even in the mid-field. And that's a lot of money. I heard that in 2012 season, five million was enough to fund one car in IndyCar, so with 100 million in sponsor money you can fund 2/3rd of IndyCar grid, while in F1 that gives you two so-so cars driven by a pay driver.

At this point, I think it's much better to let teams use a customer chassis, which they could tweak to their liking. Allowing customer chassis will also make the new team entry and exit more dynamic again. Right now, it's so expensive to enter F1 racing and so hopeless to succeed, that almost no one wants to do it. As a result, the number of teams has shrunk to just nine teams this season, which is probably a record low. We need new rules with a promise of affordable racing so that the F1 grid could go up to like 15 teams, like tomorrow. Entry level F1 racing should be affordable so that a relatively good GP2 team could be in principle at least one step away from entering F1 racing, like Hesketh could jump from F2 to F1 in the 70s.

[jens]

Complicated topic. In a way F1 needs to be high tech and cutting edge, because they are the leading series and have to be above others in their own discipline. If they ceased to be leading the development standards, someone else has to take over that over!

However, there is food for thought. Because endurance racing (WEC) manages to do much cheaper, and they have some pretty innovative and interesting technology as well.

As for F1 teams spending hundreds of Millions of $ per seasons. Well, they will keep doing it as long as there are sponsors willing to pay for it. But sponsors are willing to pay as long as there is audience and they feel pumping in lots of money would justify itself in terms of marketing.

But as we see, F1 audience figures are dropping, and it has an effect on F1 as well... Has already had. Sadly, the first ones to feel the effect are the weaker ones. Because there are still 3-4 top teams, who still have big sponsors, budgets are in the range of 200M € still. But most mid- and back-end teams already are having trouble in surviving.

[Malbec]

At this point, I think it's much better to let teams use a customer chassis, which they could tweak to their liking. Allowing customer chassis will also make the new team entry and exit more dynamic again. Right now, it's so expensive to enter F1 racing and so hopeless to succeed, that almost no one wants to do it. As a result, the number of teams has shrunk to just nine teams this season, which is probably a record low. We need new rules with a promise of affordable racing so that the F1 grid could go up to like 15 teams, like tomorrow. Entry level F1 racing should be affordable so that a relatively good GP2 team could be in principle at least one step away from entering F1 racing, like Hesketh could jump from F2 to F1 in the 70s.

The overall cost of competing in F1 should be reduced but customer chassis should never be allowed. They would destroy the existing midfield leaving just the top three or four teams and their satellites.

If I bought Marussia/Manor tomorrow and did a deal to buy a Mercedes chassis/engine combo from last year I reckon I'd generally be quicker than Force India and Sauber. Depending on whether Lotus improve much I could beat them too. Repeat that three or four times so last season's RBR, Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren are being raced by teams on a tiny budget then existing midfielders such as Sauber which are saddled with the huge cost of developing their own chassis will be totally locked out of the points. As those teams fall by the wayside you will be left with the top three/four teams and satellites dominating the sport resulting in a centralisation of power greater than it is now.

The impact then of a company like RB or Mercedes quitting the sport as in 2009 would be that much greater.

I have mixed feelings about the hybrids. They are a massive engineering feat and extremely impressive but their expense has been instrumental in killing of Marussia and Caterham and has not made life easy at all for Lotus, Sauber and FI. On the other hand changing regulations now will have big cost implications, something the inquiry into whether 1000bhp engines would be good for F1 ignores completely. At the moment I say stick with the hybrids and the current rules re: development but agree a cost cap. They managed it a decade ago with the engines for $10 million deal, they can manage it now.

The bigger problem is how to distribute income more fairly and to stop FOM competing with the teams for sponsorship. Also not taking TV coverage behind paywalls would be good, noone wants to sponsor a sport people can't actually watch....

[Tazio]

Interesting comments from AN:


Red Bull design guru Adrian Newey has criticised the 'restrictive' nature of the Formula One regulations which have played their part in his decision to take a back-seat role this season.
Red Bull's chief technical officer will shift his focus away from grand prix racing to helping Sir Ben Ainslie design a yacht to challenge for the America's Cup.
Whilst still involved with Red Bull, Newey will be less hands on than in the past, primarily as he feels F1 has become an engine formula at present, offering him little scope to make a difference.

'You can always improve, but the problem is the limitation of the regulations, so much so the car is designed for you,' said Newey.
'Formula One should be a blend of the driver, chassis and engine, but the current regulations have swung too much in favour of the engine, combined with a very restrictive set of regulations on the chassis.
'As the engine manufacturer has the benefit, it's difficult for the chassis manufacturer to make enough of a difference to overturn that.'






F1 reg's too restrictive, I agree!

[Doc Austin]

It's going to be interesting to see if they can revolutionize F1, cut costs, and get 1000hp all at the same time. Sounds like a lot of bs to me.

[anfield5]

Interesting comments from AN:



F1 reg's too restrictive, I agree!

Finally I am not the lone voice :)

[Firstgear]

I also agree that the reg's are too restrictive.

But I don't like this comment by AN 'As the engine manufacturer has the benefit, it's difficult for the chassis manufacturer to make enough of a difference to overturn that.' It sounds like sour grapes to me. For a number of years, the engine development had been frozen (kind of) with (probably too much) emphasis in development going to aerodynamics. Did AN complain then? He seemed pretty happy when he was holding the trump card. The scales have been leveled, not turned the other way as his comment suggests. If they were turned too much in the favor of engines, then McLaren would've been right there with Mercedes last year.

There is good and bad in this very restrictive environment.
Good - the small teams can't get it too wrong and will run closer to the top teams.
Bad - hems in creativity & diversity.

[steveaki13]

I agree too.

You are far from alone Anfield. :)

[philipbain]

There was a great article in Motorsport magazine recently about F1 costs and how they have escalated over the years which validated my views completely on this subject. The main issue is money supply, which in real terms peaked about 10 years ago when the sport was it the height of it's manufacturer era and tobacco advertising was still present. Today F1's popularity amongst non-enthusiasts is waning, in part due to a partial or wholesale move to pay TV in many markets and ironically, given that F1 trades on an image of cutting edge technology, the fact that the sport has been very slow to react to the evolution of broadcasting and communications since the turn of the millenium. One great example is that F1 didnt adopt widescreen broadcasts until 2007 (the BBC started broadcasting in widescreen in 1998!) and didn't broadcast in HD until 2011 (since 2006 the World Cup was broadcast live in HD) and still have a limited online presence with very little in the way of video coverage available online. All this combined with increasingly complex and convoluted technology that provides another barrier for the non-enthusiast and the multitude of choices available to the modern viewer has led to a decline in F1 viewership which whilst this is reflective of many other sports too, the most popular keep on gaining, such as English Premier League football whose TV deals and international viewing make F1's look rather paltry by comparison and amazingly for a domestic league it has greater international penetration now than F1, whose broadcasting reach has actually contracted making it less and less justifiable to sponsors.

In short F1 needs new management, as soon as possible, Bernie & cronies are dinosaurs.

[zako85]

The overall cost of competing in F1 should be reduced but customer chassis should never be allowed. They would destroy the existing midfield leaving just the top three or four teams and their satellites.

There is nothing wrong with that. First, we should all agree that we already have a two-tier championship: the haves and havenots. The haves are the top four teams. I am not sure where Williams falls. The have nots are Sauber, Force India, and Lotus, and these three are now shells of former themselves. They're nearly bankrupt, and I don't see a huge value in maintaining rules that preserve Sauber or Force India as a chassis manufacturer. All three of these could be competing better and cheaper using an off the shelf chassis. This means that the number of chassis constructors could be reduced to four-five. But at the same time, this would allow an additional five to ten teams to operate a competitive chassis at an affordable cost. If a new big player, such as yet another drinks company, decided to enter the competition as a top tier team, they could always take over one of those satellite teams and develop it into a full constructor again.

[AndyL]

There is nothing wrong with that. First, we should all agree that we already have a two-tier championship: the haves and havenots. The haves are the top four teams. I am not sure where Williams falls. The have nots are Sauber, Force India, and Lotus, and these three are now shells of former themselves. They're nearly bankrupt, and I don't see a huge value in maintaining rules that preserve Sauber or Force India as a chassis manufacturer. All three of these could be competing better and cheaper using an off the shelf chassis. This means that the number of chassis constructors could be reduced to four-five. But at the same time, this would allow an additional five to ten teams to operate a competitive chassis at an affordable cost. If a new big player, such as yet another drinks company, decided to enter the competition as a top tier team, they could always take over one of those satellite teams and develop it into a full constructor again.

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'm not quite sure how you'd control this; using year-old chassis for the customer cars has been suggested, but with the constant rule changes it's rare for any given car to be legal two seasons in a row.

[Malbec]

If a new big player, such as yet another drinks company, decided to enter the competition as a top tier team, they could always take over one of those satellite teams and develop it into a full constructor again.

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.

It looks like you're more interested in consolidating political power within the top four teams or so for the foreseeable future, something that has helped make F1 less affordable all this while and has helped us get into this cost predicament in the first place, something that would get worse with your proposals.

[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.