Yes, Ferrari's technical veto that they used to hold did stem what teams could do in the 90's and 00's. Most were banned under cost issues, but as Williams was the main developer of active suspension, TC, ABS, CVT etc, it couldn't have cost that much as at the time they were still a privateer effort and had no where near the resources of say McLaren and Ferrari, so the cost issues (IMHO) was a bit of a smokescreen.
Yes. And this leads us neatly back to the source of the biggest barrier to a budget cut: Ferrari. (And anyone who wants to copy their unsporting philosophy). They want rules written which favour them, just as anyone would; but they have been granted a say in how these rules are written, whilst actually being a competitor! Ever since the governing body buckled under coercive pressure, Ferrari's position has been extremely privileged. It's a bit like a sprinter who is particularly fast off the blocks changing the 100m to something far shorter because he can't keep the pace up whilst others gather momentum. Ridiculous.
The above makes it even more funny that Ferrari have not created a wonderful car this year! OK I know Renault were pushing for a more relevant engine but again they aren't doing very well this year either.
Ched999UK I used a base pot of $700m for 2013 so these are my calculations Pos Team Equal Prize Ferrari Total 1 Red Bull Racing-Renault : 37.9 + 64.8 + 0.0 = 102.8 2 Mercedes : 37.9 + 54.6 + 0.0 = 92.5 3 Ferrari : 37.9 + 44.4 + 17.5 = 99.8 4 Lotus-Renault : 37.9 + 37.5 + 0.0 = 75.5 5 McLaren-Mercedes : 37.9 + 34.1 + 0.0 = 72.0 6 Force India-Mercedes : 37.9 + 30.7 + 0.0 = 68.6 7 Sauber-Ferrari : 37.9 + 23.9 + 0.0 = 61.8 8 STR-Ferrari : 37.9 + 20.5 + 0.0 = 58.4 9 Williams-Renault : 37.9 + 17.1 + 0.0 = 55.0 10 Marussia-Cosworth : 0.0 + 13.7 + 0.0 = 13.7 11 Caterham-Renault : 0.0 + 0.0 + 0.0 = 0.0
As Miggins pointed out, turbo charging has existed since the invention of the ICE. Turbo engines were used in the Indy 500 since the 50s. The challenge for F1 was to get a turbo to work on the types of tracks they used without blowing up. The FIA introduced the rule allowing turbo's in the belief that no one would actually want to do it. They then subsequently banned them. When they were first introduced to road cars I felt that they were just a sales gimmick for the “make it go faster” kids. Rear engined cars were built by Cooper. They made 500cc run abouts using motorbike engines. They had to position them at the rear out of necessity. Cooper then realised the advantages of that position. I have never been an admirer of Colin Chapman. The only way he could compete with the Ferrari's was to lighten the cars to dangerous levels. How many of his drivers died in his cars? 5? I think F1 teams can pride themselves on their engineering, their ability to take a concept, design it, manufacturer it, test it and then implement it all in a short time scale. But maybe that is what is costing them so much.
Because technology moves so fast, teams have little time to develop new ideas over several years before putting them onto a car, because by the time they do it would be obsolete or the rules have changed. Am surprised that you don't like Chapman. Most modern F1 concepts can be traced back to him. Yes he did push things to the extreme and with tragic consequences sometimes, but it was a different era back then, when death was unfortunately accepted as a part of motor racing. By modern standards that is unthinkable, but its how it was back then until Stewart made a stand against it.
This is pretty much exactly what F1 does with possibly a couple of exceptions. But this is where the innovation in F1 comes in to play and where ideas can begin to move from impractical, early concepts to road cars, then every-day production cars. Unfortunately, F1 works in a very confined set of regulations now, which you could argue means that F1 doesn't quite have the same impact as it has in years past.
Gary Anderson on cost cutting ideas: Cost-cutting is a big talking point today. What would you do to make F1 cheaper and better? Adam Smith, via Twitter Adam, I would rather call it cost control and I would rather put better before cheaper. I have been involved in this sport for 42 years and in that time there have always been the haves and the have nots. The haves are basically too stubborn, short-sighted and powerful to try to help anyone else. An example of this is the car weight. The top teams won't agree to a small increase in overall car weight by having a 'driver weight' area so now Sauber, a team struggling for budget, has had to go and produce a new lightweight car because of a performance disadvantage. So my proposal would be that the controlling body, the FIA, takes a more active role and instigates changes in the technical and sporting regulations to save the teams from themselves. One of the changes would be for the power unit to become the power train. This would include the engine, turbo, MGU-K, MGU-H, battery pack and gearbox and allow a maximum of five of these units for the season. Use them as you wish but you only have a total of five. What we have now is too complicated and no one understands it or the various penalties. Another would be that the nose, front-wing assembly, rear-wing assembly, complete underfloor, sidepods and brake ducts introduced at the first race of the season have to do a minimum of six races before they can be changed for a new specification. This means that in a season of 19 races you have two in-season changes leaving one race as a wild card. So if you have really screwed up you can change the spec at the second race and carry on from there. I would also tighten up dramatically on brake ducts. These have got out of hand over the past few years. Doing this would mean that the teams would have more time to optimise the new components before introduction meaning there would be a lot less scrap rushed through. After race six and race 12, there would also be a two-day in-season test to allow the teams to optimise the set-up around these new components before introducing them at races seven and 13. Moving onto the proposed active suspension, if I was the FIA I would define it as a package of components that make up the complete system more or less as the FIA has done with the engine spec. Then I would put a sale price on it that means that if a team wants to buy a complete system from a rival, the price is set. If team 'A' wants to spend twice as much on a system then that is their choice but team 'B' can come along and put its money down. So within a certain manufacturing time, which is defined pre-season, team 'A' has to supply team 'B'. There are many other components on a car that this can be done with, such as steering racks, uprights, axles, brake callipers, braking systems and even pitstop equipment. If this type of cost control was introduced then it would not curtail innovation, it would actually stimulate it as it would have to be done at a more relevant market price.
So the organisation who runs the sport should be in charge of it. Ground-breaking stuff there Gary. In what way does that make F1 any cheaper? I agree it might help with viewer-comprehension, but so would actually defining what the acronyms all mean, rather than having instances like a couple of weeks back where Silver, dhel (I think?) and myself were trying to fit words to them, as no official definitions seem to exist. So if a team are dominant early on, we've even less chance of them being caught until we're well into the European section of the season? That's hardly going to keep the viewers interested. No problem with the brake ducts, but how are the teams going to optimise parts if they can't try them on the car? To get the best correlation between predictions and reality teams will want to run trial parts in FP1 and 2, so if they're going to produce them anyway, why can't they race them? That's not going to save money, and if there's then more pressure for the feedback of the driver to be accurate, as there'll be less of it, then the chances of rookie's being given practice sessions surely drop. I don't think this solves the problem he's creating. Unless you ban all changes to the car except like-for-like replacements, then teams will still want the track time to improve components during his 6 race freezes. Yes you could do that, but condensing all that testing into a 2 day period every 3 months means it only takes the slightest driver error, weather problems, component failure, etc to lose a whole day of that testing, making it harder for the chasing teams to catch those in front. And the testing is an extra expense. So Gary's for customer cars, but in a way that there's a thin veil of competition for each part. But team's won't shop around on a part-per-part basis, the manufacturing teams will have developed each part to work with the rest of their car, so it won't make sense to take part X from Ferrari and part Y from Mclaren. There's no guarantee they'd integrate effectively. To me though, his idea also doesn't address how the intellectual property is handled. If you have customer cars such that Ferrari (for example) deliver a complete package to say Haas, then Haas has no need for aerodynamicists, designers,etc, they "just" need the racing side of the team, with Ferrari providing tech support for the whole package in the same way they already do for engines. That makes getting a car on the grid cheaper for Haas, and as they've not got anyone doing CFD, wind tunnel work, manufacturing, etc they aren't going to be taking the designs from Ferrari, only to produce a slightly tweaked car and call it their own next season. But if a customer team needs to understand how each part works alongside those from other teams, troubleshoot each part themselves, and design their own chassis, they're still going to have most of the designing/manufacturing side of the team in place. That's going to make it much easier to use the designs from competitors to influence a car they produce themselves in the next season, even if they produce different parts. So, other than simplifying brake ducts (an idea I'm fairly sure we saw mooted officially weeks back), he's produced no ideas I can see working.
I agree that cost control must be derived from the technical and sporting rules. I also agree that the gear box rule should be changed to using a max of 5 without penalty. At the moment, each gear box has to last 6 consecutive races. However, if a car fails to finish a race then they get a new gearbox. Why? Apart from that, none of his ideas make any sense.
This seems sort of relevant, http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/29349740 Fan's going after a governing body for what is essentially a budget cap on their team.
The issue with Financial Fair Play is that it unfairly punishes the clubs it's supposed to help. The clubs lower down the league (2009-era Man City) lack the infrastructure to achieve revenues on par with the top clubs (Man United). But Financial Fair Play doesn't differentiate between short-term investment in playing staff (like QPR) and long-term investment (like City have done with their stadium) for financial gain. A similar problem will probably occur in F1. It's all very well saying "you can only spend £200m excluding driver salaries and transport costs" but that doesn't actually help Caterham, Sauber and the like at all. They're still stuck at the back of the grid, only now they can't build a wind tunnel to help. If they want to invest in that they should feel free to go ahead because it will only help them in the long run. In fact I'd say one of the major problems is driver salaries but I don't know how you deal with that. Note: this is not in the slightest a suggestion that there should be *no* restrictions at all. Obviously sports teams should be run sensibly, and I think a budget cap on certain elements of the sport's unavoidable costs (and a general proactive attitude towards them) would be a good way to achieve that.
Ferrari: certainly. Mercedes: probably. Red Bull (the most obvious team you've omitted, Miggs): absolutely*. Clearly it is in the interests of the wealthier teams to press home their advantage, especially when excused through being presented with no other motivating alternative from the ringmaster – quite deliberately. I'd like to say Bernie's position on this is hilariously ironic; but from an equal opportunities standpoint, it's not the least bit funny. What a businessman! He plays others against themselves to ensure there is no effective voice to counter his otherwise ridiculous claims. I'd like to say something sarcastic such as, "pure genius"; but to me, (almost complete) exploitation of others never comes close to anything remotely construable as complimentary… *Red Bull have out-Ferraried Ferrari at there own game (very successfully – even in terms of expenditure!) for the past few years. If anyone ever persuades the likes of Mateschitsz and Marko, as well as whoever ever happens to hold the Red team's helm, to see the virtue in some philanthropic budget cap, I swear I'll eat my hat.
Another title bought in F1? http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/...-world-title-costs-a-record-325m-9792217.html £325M???
Or $3.25 Gareth Bale's. Not bad! That does include the engine development too though, so it's not so straight forward. £200million is still a bloody lot though.
On top of this $11M in staff bonuses will be handed out (Not including High management & drivers) They will however be receiving around $60M in prize money. Along with other incomes (sponsorship etc) they still must be making a huge loss here
