It's easy to lose interest in things when you know it could fall apart. I remember when champcar got down to 15-16 cars, and even those were falling apart because they were so old and worn out. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time, and it got too sad to watch. I don't think Formula One is going to go away, but if the grid shrinks any more people could start turning it off. It's hard to sell something as important if you can't get enough people to compete.

More equal distribution of funds will help, but it's still going to be so expensive that teams will falter. They need to cut down the expense or they are going to have this kind of crisis again. Teams have always come and gone, and it always revolves around money. I think the current crisis was exacerbated by everyone having to throw out everything they had and start over with all new cars this year That, and these cars are so complicated that it would be hard to believe they are not substantially more expensive than what we had before.

OTOH, Indycars are very inexpensive comparatively and they are scratching around for entires. I think the whole world is just dead broke.