COST CUTTING A f1 joke

[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.