Quote Originally Posted by OmarF1
Your post made me wonder something, maybe a little bit different, but got the inspiration by thinking about crappy teams, is really money that significant in an F1 Team, or crappy F1 teams have mediocre engineers?

but it is a vicious cycle because the more money a team has, the more they can pay to a fantastic engineer, (am I right RB-Newey?), but there's the Toyota case too, they are ultra rich and they suck so bad, and Renault had a limited budget and they were smoking Toyotas, Hondas, Ferraris in 2005 and the beginning of 2006, they must have some talented dudes in there.

The point is, cans somebody explain how it's money spent in F1, wing tunnels??, some are owned by the team, some run 24/7/365, why is it so expensive, eletric power bills?, I Don't know, still i think F1 wastes too much money when there are people dying of starvation everyday.

cheers.
I think there's a saying - "speed costs money - how fast do you want to go?" A team will ultimately spend however much money it has available to it. Of course - some teams will spend more wisely than others - so money isn't the ONLY factor, otherwise Toyota would run away with things. In Renault's case most of their staff bar Schuey/Brawn/Byrne had been around from Benetton's successful era in the mid 90s, but it was only once Renault bought into the team and they got a world class driver/team leader in Alonso that everything clicked back into place for them. There's no simple answer to how best to spread your resources, otherwise we could all be team bosses.

But a simple comparison with Renault and Toyota would be - while Flavio, who by his own admission has never been an F1 man, simply hires the best he can for the job and lets them all get on with things, with minimal interference from either himself or Renault HQ, Toyota bogs itself down with multiple layers of management structures and committees which may be appropriate for running one of the biggest and most successful volume car manufacturers on the planet, is not necessarily suited to running a successful F1 team.

To answer the first part of your post - it's probably a bit of both. While there is only so much money to go around in F1, it's also true that there probably isn't enough top-notch personnel to go around for 15-20 fully competitive F1 teams even if they were all had a high level of funding, although they should be given the chance to prove me wrong, but Max 'n' Bernie decided to cap the number of teams at 12, so they can't.