Christian Horner: "I think the situation is that a cap is never going to effectively control the costs. All of the teams are effectively agreed that we want to reduce the costs, and the most effective way to do that is really through the sporting regulations more than anything. So we need to look at the sporting regulations and look at what are our cost drivers." Toto Wolff: "We found out that with a cost cap there was too much opposition from certain teams," he told AUTOSPORT. "We have to accept that. But we believe very strongly that costs must be coming down, and limited in a certain way. If sporting and technical regulations are the way to go, and there is enough historic proof that it worked - like cutting back the testing, the introduction of curfews and parc ferme, then again let's explore that avenue and come up with some rules. Hopefully that will get the costs down." Bob Fernley: [Force India] "I think that shows the frailty in my view of the system as it is today," said Fernley. "It [the Strategy Group] is totally unacceptable and we will never change our mind on that. How can you enrich six very strong teams and disenfranchise six, and expect those six to be happy? Let's keep at it, because we have not backed off at any point. We are trying to be constructive in the criticisms, but nevertheless criticise. We have to stay with that." Jean Todt: "To be fair, some who are not in the strategy group are not happy and I can sympathise," Todt explained. But they all signed the Concorde Agreement knowing it was like that. It was not something like 'let's sign the Concorde and we will tell you how is the governance after.'" Will F1 ever see a cost cap, the teams with a say are all spending over even the generous $150m (except Williams). They're all affraid the others will find ways of hinding costs obviously. Red Bulls budget would drop around $100m, thats a lot of key staff and facility costs to hide. The Likes of Mercedes and Ferrari who make 'all' of their cars would probably find hiding costs the easiest, but yet Wolff is (publicly at least) showing some support for the idea. I think something needs to be done to help the little teams, for starts they can get rid of the stupid payments to Ferrari et al. for simply turning up. That money should be spread equally, that'll be a huge amounts for the likes of Sauber and Marussia. Cost cap? Can it work, should it exist? Begin
No. The big teams won't allow it because it threatens their place at the top with all the power. I think if the smaller teams want to do a budget cap then they should form an alliance and do it alone keeping competition in the lower ranks while making them sustainable.
Unfortunately in most sports the more money you have the easier it is to get better. OK so that is very much an oversimplification but I don't believe it is possible to have the technical flexibility that each team have to develop their own parts and have a cost cap that can be monitored accurately. Maybe having standard parts would cut costs but it would also limit teams ability to be innovative. Like McL with their rear wishbones! Maybe aero isn't really applicable to road cars so maybe that could be standardised but then all cars would look the same and have similar characteristics. One thing I do believe is that the money the teams get is very unfairly distributed. All teams that compete should get a fee for racing, maybe even paid at the end of each race weekend, plus a bonus based on team points.
Something somewhere needs to be done, the eventual outcome is teams withdrawing from F1 leaving a grid of 5 or 6 teams. How is anyone supposed to take F1 seriously as the pinnacle of motorsport when the competition varies between non existent and unable to compete? The best teams should get more for doing well, but all the teams should get the same to start the season. Autosport did a piece last season saying Ferrari would get more money coming tenth than Lotus would get from winning the WDC. How is that fair? How is that even justifiable?
The big teams agree in principle to a cost cut on the premise that they can spend more than their closest competitor!
"Will there ever be a budget cap?" - Unlikely, in my view. Surely not unless there is a paradigm shift in F1's management structure AS WELL AS a governing body which develops sufficient backbone to not be held to ransome by one (or latterly, two) competitors who feel they have most to lose. It should also be said that although the discussion revolves around a noble and fair-minded ideal, it might be argued as flying in the face of the concept of competing to a prescribed formula which sets out in principle to extend man and machine without limit. Indeed, in the early days, that is precisely what it was. However, we should remember that back then it was not conceived of as a spectacle so much as a rather expensive self-indulgence for the aristocracy, or a privileged few on shoulder-rubbing terms (this has changed, but not quite entirely...); and that commercialisation eventually came about as an exploitation of increasing public fascination. It's good to read that people are aware of some of the more extreme examples of inequality, Ferrari being the prime example. Consequently, I see some irony in the present situation, where we find the 'special' team being out-played at their own game by one with an even bigger budget; a team amongst the most eager to downsize engines* according to their supplier; a team which has also assumed a disproportionate arrogance, such that it feels it can dictate its own terms. Then again can we blame them? After all, the precedent was already established and reinforced by short-sighted, over-compliance on the part of F1 ownership and governance, some leading lights of which may have proudly displayed scale models exemplifying red allegiance on desks or window sills, or driven them out of the car park after knocking-off time... Some say you only live once. Others grab the bull by both horners (sic). Both statements have an undercurrent of selfishness, which of course is entirely acceptable within competition. What I find unacceptable, however, is that such selfishness is actively promoted – and done so unequally – by an organisation which oversees and referees, ostensibly to provide a level playing field to the ignorant paymaster: Joe Public, who thinks all is fine and dandy. Now that's a con. Budget cap? Hmm, is it in the interests of an organisation to undermine the foundation of its own existence, allegiance and bias? The difficulty of policing the budget cap idea is very much secondary (but a far more saleable notion) to the true will to actually make it happen... *For F1 to retain some credibility, downsizing engines (amongst other things) was inevitable. But also inevitable was/is that some will find it more or less to their liking, regardless of the price of research and development, so long as they get ahead. On the other hand, if F1 takes the route of attempting to reduce costs through regulatory changes, it risks credibility if it is perceived by the public as straying too far from its original, idealised, far simpler beginnings.
There can not be a budget cap because it is impossible to govern it. Ferrari have a veto on all the rules and they would simply set the cap as high as they wanted. Forget fans opinions. They are irrelevant and often contradictory. People romanticise F1 as being “innovative” it is not now or ever been innovative. The technical rules forbid innovation. If you want innovation then look to WEC where innovation is actually encouraged. I will play the “Life Of Brian” card and invite people to inform me what F1 has actually innovated. My suggestions for cost reductions are as follows 1. Standard front and rear wings manufactured and supplied from a central source 2. Price limit on power unit supply. The power units have to be supplied to anyone that wants them at a fixed price of $10.m 3. Only 4 pit crew can touch the car in the pit stop 4. Only one type of tyre compound which is capable of lasting the race 5. The EU to declare that the Concorde agreement is illegal.
In terms of F1 revenues Bernie has never legally owned the rights. He bluffed his way through helped by Ferrari in return for preferential status. F1 revenue comes from 2 sources. Track Hosting and TV rights. Both sources generate about $1bn each. The teams get a spilt of 50% of the TV income. 3% goes to Ferrari 50% of the remainder is paid in equal shares to the 10 teams that have finished in the top 10 WCC in 2 out of the previous 3 years. The remainder is distributed on the following according to where they finish in the WCC list. 1 = 19% 2 = 16% 3 = 13% 4 = 11% 5 = 10% 6 = 9% 7 = 7% 8 = 6% 9 = 5% 10 = 4%
GramP: I like your provocative stance on innovation (or lack thereof). With a bit of luck there will be some good responses to your invitation. But before offering an answer, do you have some caveat about the definition of 'innovation'? For instance, do you consider that Colin Chapman's monocoque chassis was not innovative for some reason?
Quoting from page 80 of Burning Rubber by Charles Jennings Regarding the Lotus 25 “If the whole package wasn't quite as earth shattering as Cooper's original insight (and pre-war, there had been one or two attempts at competition monococque construction; while Lancia's inspirational Lambda touring car dated back to 1922), it ran it pretty close. Allegedly, Cooper took a look at the Lotus-Climax 25 at the Belgium GP at Spa, and asked where the chassis was.” My theory about F1 innovations is that the designers are taking existing known concepts and making them work in a F1 car. No doubt if the challenge is taken up to find innovations it will probably keep me quiet for several months while I carry out detail research. (ho ho)
Thanks for that info. I calculated it out in money terms: 1 70,325,000 2 63,050,000 3 55,775,000 4 50,925,000 5 48,500,000 6 46,075,000 7 41,225,000 8 38,800,000 9 36,375,000 10 33,950,000 Plus Ferrari 3% = 15,000,000
As Cosi has stated, what do you mean by innovative? Do you mean innovative as in just for F1, or innovative as for all applications? In terms of global road car production, F1 has not necessarily created anything new, it takes existing designs, usually whilst they are relatively new technology, and applies it to racing, the benefits of which eventually find their way down to the road cars that we drive. Turbocharging was not common before F1 picked up on it in 1977 with Renault, by the mid-80's pretty much all manufacturers sports and hot-hatch cars had some form of turbocharging. Carbon Fibre was previously space-age material until F1 started to use it with McLaren in 1981. Whilst still expensive, the processes are used heavily these days with high-end sports cars, but also now on bicycles and other applications where strength and light weight needs to be mixed. F1 can only be so 'innovative' as it has always used 'old' technology i.e. 4 wheels and an internal combustion engine. All it can do is improve on existing or new technology. At the end of the day, it is just a sport, not a science, so budgets are relatively restricted compared to what road car, aerospace, engineering etc manufacturers put into their R&D which allow them to be really innovative.
most innovation in F1 comes from the aviation industry, ground effects, ABS, wings, F1 isn't really innovative at all, and I would say it doesn't come there as quickly as ASC implies, for example turbo's have been around almost as long as the internal combustion engine, though normally mechanically driven, the first supercharged car rolled off the production line in 1912. The first exhaust driven turbo took 50 yers and made it on to production cars in 1962 and it took about 15 years to make it into F1. ABS has been around since the 1920's, the monocoque from the first decade of aviation, traction control which came to F1 fairly quickly in comparison, still took almost 20 years to make it from the road to the race track.
Miggins, quite agree with the history lesson, my point is it took F1 to take all of this to the masses. Whether by public demand, or advances in design because of F1 which made turned a rudimentary product into something that worked efficiently, or just sheer coincidence that stuff like turbo's, carbon fibre, traction control, semi-auto gearboxes etc became in vogue shortly after it was perfected in F1, most of the above only came to the general public knowledge once it was in F1.
Most creative thinking is an adaption or evolution of a pre-existing idea, itself developed from some embryonic process from the past. True 'eureka' moments are extremely rare and perhaps it is a matter of faith as to their existence at all, but I believe they sometimes can. Whether one considers the word, 'innovation' to form any part of a definition within F1 is really a matter of semantics; but what is surely not in doubt, GramP, is that there is creative thinking within both the sport itself and its technologies. The Wright brothers are widely considered to have invented the aeroplane, but few would suggest they 'invented' aerodynamics any more than Einstein, his colleagues or forebears, invented physics. However, inverting the (innovative?) concept of the wing which the brothers had first employed to get their machine to work could be argued as innovative itself, since it was a new application of the science of fluid dynamics which demonstrated that a difference in pressure could be exploited to advantage. Taking the concept further, within just a few years we had 'ground effect', which is surely not attributable to Orville and Wilbur, or their parents – or birds, fish or submarines!
The thing is that is only correct this side of the Atlantic, the American automobile industy already had a lot of production line sports models with those fitted as standrd before they were ever put on an F1 car. I must admit I was a bit surprised to learn that while investigating, I'd assumed they'd all made their way from aviation to F1 to the road, not aviation, road, then F1. Gramps is correct, if you want to see innovation you do have to look at WEC, Mercedes innovative power unit design is taken from there, you have the wing car (although to me it's always looked a bad design for racing) On a side note here is a link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroën_Traction_Avant it's a raod vehicle built in 1934 with a monocque chassis, and F1 designers were nicking other bits of its design, most notably Brabham & Cooper, 30 years later.
But how is WEC 'innovation' and F1 not? WEC is still just using already widely used road car technology, but is using it in a racing capacity, which will eventually filter into the road car industry. Same as F1.
You're absolutely correct, rear and mid-engine road cars had been around for ages, as had monocoque chassis, it's just that it was new to F1, though again F1 improved on the principles of the original designs, which is what F1 is good at.
Cooper and Brabham also nicked the lightweight aluminum design for the rear axle as well. The only really relevant technology in an F1 car is the power unit, which has been locked until when? 2019? now the only real innovation is in rule book interpretation, and the rulings on the legality of those interpretations seem to depend on you being a manufacturer (Ferrari & Mercedes) or customer (the rest), something Red Bull are quite legitimately upset about, as were the members of FOCA during the FOCA-FISA war. The sad thing is the technology that was banned before it had the chance to see the light of day and never became 'popular', such as the CVT designed by Williams in the 90's. It was banned before it had the chance to run, because Ferrari were scared the one they were designing woudn't stand a chance. And who wouldn't want a fan-car?
