For a man who has spent so much time in F1 not saying much and sitting so rigidly on the fence whenever he did it's a wonder he doesn't have splinters, it's amazing how much he suddenly has decided to speak up about Manor. And you know what? i wish he'd go back to being "splinter a*sed Bob". He's fast becoming my least favourite character in F1 with leading witch hunt against Manor, accusing them of everything he can to either stop them running or getting them kicked out. Once again... http://www.crash.net/f1/news/217148/1/force-india-unimpressed-with-manor-noshow.html It's greed and short sightedness that has this sport in bother and characters like him that need booted out. How bitter can that man get? Maybe if the sport supported them and Caterham better (remember the reason they joined was on the promise of a cost cap, a promise which was reneged on), then A) neither may have went under, or B) Marussia/Manor wouldn't be so far behind that they could indeed run properly. They need support, not hounded out.
This may be unfair but in my opinion, Bob Fernley is essentially a 'Bernie product', perhaps not unlike a somewhat illusive FIA President. If a ringmaster takes exception to something in his circus, should we be surprised to find at least one clown willing to reinforce his view?
Manor's existence threatens Force India's own by reducing the slice of prize money they get, so it's not surprising that he's on the attack. I thought Fernley was an important figure in the boycott proposed last season, but I guess as soon as that failed to happen, he's lost all sway in the paddock. Now he has to toe the company line in the hope that Bernie spares them when it's their head on the block.
I wonder if Bernie has paid FI a few quid to bribe them into trying to help him destroy Manor. It would also destroy Mr Kings reputation and prospects of taking over from Bernie!
I often wonder how people who must be intelligent can also be so dumb. I have no idea what Fernley is trying to achieve here, it's just hurting the image of Force India. If they're after Manor's hard earned prize money then does he really think it'll cover the losses caused by hurting both Force India's and F1's image? Like many things in life there is often fine lines, such as the one separating what makes you intelligent and what makes you clever...
Manor shouldn't be racing. This is their 6th year in the sport and they're still miles off the pace. I'm all for an underdog but it takes the piss how they're 5 seconds off the next slowest car.
Should be quite the jump when Manor switch to a proper 2015 car with a 2015 engine, maybe thats what worries Force India. Then again I doubt they can haul themselves more than 2s forward with the update.
I've made my views known on Manor in the past, they have had their chance and not delivered and that's before all the money the owe. The fact that the sport has not adhered to the promises made are a different discussion and one I woukd agree with most posters on here. Policing an F1 budget cap Is it possible to police a budget cap in F1? Will F1’s financial woes ever end? Just how is it that a sport so conspicuously wealthy can have so many teams in financial trouble? A more equitable distribution of income, and more income diverted the teams’ way, are regularly mentioned as potential solutions, So is a budget cap. The FIA has twice proposed the latter in recent years. It took a threatened breakaway to defeat the cap Max Mosley tried to impose in 2009 while the bigger teams used the Strategy Group to outmanoeuvre the governing body last year. The idea appears dead in the water - even though one team has since gone bust, another pulled back from the brink and at least three others are struggling. A cost cap would be unworkable, the big hitters say; it would be impossible to police. But would it? It’s time to talk to a policeman. While the notion of a cap, more specifically a salary cap, is most closely associated with American sports, it has spread further afield. Rugby league adopted one and David Wood enforced it. As sports go, yes, F1 and rugby league are as different as can be. Ultimately, though, it’s all just numbers to an accountant. One difference, it seems, is the unanimity of competitors in the face of financial strife. Rugby league’s 32 professional clubs voted as one for a cap 17 years ago after another, Oldham Bears, went bankrupt. The cap was based on a club’s profit, of which 50 per cent could be spent per year. According to Wood, big clubs didn’t oppose it because “they perhaps realised that in order to be strong, they needed to have a good competition. There was no point in clubs turning up and knowing you’re going to win. They realised there wouldn’t be much value in their marketing rights if, all of a sudden, fixtures had to be cancelled because a club no longer existed.” But a cap based on profit was always going to favour the likes of St Helens and Leeds Rhinos, who have bigger gates and sponsorship deals. “With this sliding scale of 50 per cent of their profit, the bigger clubs could still spend more on their players,” says Wood. Smaller clubs making smaller profits thought it unfair and said so. Therefore, the following year brought a fixed salary cap along the lines of Australia’s NRL, which limited the number of players who could earn a £30,000 basic salary. In theory it meant a greater spread of playing talent, with star imports no longer certain of finding their way to the most successful clubs. Yet there was still a danger that it could work against smaller clubs – a sadly all-too-familiar scenario as Wood explains. “If we put a fixed salary cap over all the clubs of the same monetary value and say that was £3m, we’re actually encouraging you to spend more,” he says. “Directors were effectively just supporters with a little bit of money, who went in and signed cheques with their heart ruling their head.” So a cap originally set up with financial prudence in mind had already shifted towards one with more emphasis on sporting equity. Even so, Wood adds: “In the 32 clubs I went to, I didn’t feel any hostility whatsoever – from the office staff or from the directors. They actually genuinely believed it was for the good of the sport." How to explain such goodwill? Perhaps all one has to do is compare and contrast a RL ground with, say, a Premier League ground. Or, for that matter, the space-age facilities in which some F1 teams make their homes. With rugby league’s finances, says Wood, “you’re talking, relatively-speaking, very low figures compared to, say, football, where with TV deals you can probably add another two noughts on the back end”. In rugby union, the Premiership and France’s Top 14 have caps and while football has UEFA’s Financial Fair Play Regulations, it has investigated the idea in the past. Wood says he gave a presentation to Football League chairmen but there wasn’t the appetite and also worries about legal challenges related to restraint of trade. Such resistance sounds familiar. “That’s why I said if all the clubs are for it, then fine,” says Wood. “You’ve got a problem if a cost cap is imposed on the sport and not everyone sees the value of it.” That’s the scenario F1 finds itself in, with Mosley trying to introduce a £40m cap in 2009. As it turned out, teams under the Formula One Teams’ Association banner threatened a breakaway, submitting themselves instead to a ‘Resource Restriction Agreement’ which gradually crumbled as teams broke away, lured by enhanced financial terms offered by Bernie Ecclestone. Mosley said his aim had been to ensure that teams stayed in the sport (in the face of the worldwide economic downturn at that time) while also encouraging new entrants. Three teams were accepted and two - Manor and HRT - made the 2010 grid alongside Caterham. Yet their efforts were hindered because the cap never materialised. Only Manor remain, with the two points they scored last season – they were the only new team to do so - a stark reminder of how they’d effectively been hung out to dry. A cap of $200m (£135m) was quoted the last time the FIA proposed a cap in December 2013. Again it was rejected by bigger teams, some of whom spend around £250m per season. But with budgets at the other of end of the pitlane less than a quarter of that level, it’s not entirely obvious what that figure would have achieved. “If you’re trying to stop clubs or companies going into administration or liquidation, that’s one thing,” says Wood. “Or are they trying to encourage the Force Indias of this world to compete on a level playing field?” Setting a cap’s level depends on why it’s needed. If rugby league’s cap was introduced for financial reasons then the idea of a level playing field predominates Stateside, in conjunction with ideas like the NFL draft. There are pay disputes, leading to strikes and ‘lockouts’. However, the caps stay in place. That acceptance leads to the crunch question: If some F1 teams are against the idea of a budget cap, then how – assuming they had the power to do so - might the FIA enforce it? “It’s difficult,” says Wood. “If you put some sort of regulation in place and there isn’t the willingness to comply, they’ll always go ‘right, we’ll get our legal team on to try and get round this’. “If there’s a genuine willingness to comply, there ought not to be too many problems. It’s a case of where there isn’t a willingness, a ‘how dare the FIA put a control on how we spend our money?’” And there’s no way a team of crack FIA accountants could smell a rat? “It’s one thing having suspicions, without trying to prove it. But to try and go into a company – and obviously there’s a lot of price-sensitive information there – I’d imagine it could be quite difficult to police.” “There’s always a way around it,” Wood adds. “I heard a scenario in Australian rugby league that a player’s wife received all the proceeds of a hotel or restaurant which she didn’t own. But it just happened to be owned by one of the directors of the club that her husband played for. [That way] it didn’t form a cost on the club’s books.” The detective work would be more difficult if a team formed part of a larger multi-national company – that, for example, a manufacturer might divert F1 costs into its road car division. “To then try and put it on a particular division within a limited company, it could be quite difficult,” Wood says. “Because there’d be transfer pricing, invoices flying from one division to another division and it would be relatively easy to mask. “If one division raised a sales invoice which then became a cost in the other division, depending on where you want that cost to go, it would be quite easy to do it. In a limited company it’s immaterial, because it’s within that being. There’s internal trading between divisions, but it doesn’t make a difference. The limited company takes both entities.” Summing up, he adds: “I wouldn’t say impossible but it would be very difficult. The only way is actually to have some sort of mole or whistleblower within each [team].” Ecclestone actually made the same suggestion last year, offering a £1m reward. “You may have a million pounds but your name would be mud,” Wood counters, not unreasonably. So while a budget cap sounds great in theory - forcing teams to rely more on ingenuity to find performance rather than just spending money - without their willingness the reality sounds like a headache. Actually, it sounds like double trouble: developing technical innovations that circumvent the rules is as old as the sport. But it inevitably causes arguments: does F1 really need any more? It’s a moot question because a budget cap is no longer on the agenda. The big teams think costs can be cut via the rulebook but in general a kind of paralysis exists; so far as the bigger picture is concerned, no-one seems able to make the next move. Maybe it’ll get messy in the months and years to come, but F1 has a way of weathering the storm. And perhaps in doing so teams might eventually come round to the idea. MW
Good read that. I think a budget cap is impossible, and using the technical regs to reduce costs is the way to go, but the sport aren't making big enough strides. If engine costs were lower, and aero a much less significant contributor, then two big performance/cost differentiators would have less of an impact and hopefully the field would close up, even if the pecking order was unchanged.
I suppose that the power units being frozen or equalised in power and sold at a cost effective price is logical, but once you start to restrict aero and others areas it can start to encroach on the creativity and uniqueness of design which we all crave. I'm still unsure myself what I want and what is reasonable?
I wouldn't look to prevent creativity and uniqueness, more shift it to other areas. Aero has near-zero applicability outside of F1 and requires wind tunnels, supercomputers, stacks of carbon fibre, etc, for marginal gains that become redundant by the next iteration of the part/car. But other tech is much more transferable. Hasn't the Williams kinetic flywheel from the KERS days found its way onto a bus or something? That kind of innovation is much more attractive to small privateer teams as they can potentially license out or sell their tech, and for works teams it may be more applicable to road cars. Energy recovery, battery tech, FRIC suspension, the J damper, etc have all in some part benefited from F1 development and gone elsewhere. That's the sort of development and ingenuity I'd like to see in F1.
The problem is that tech that benefits the motor industry isn't necessarily the same tech the F1 teams want for performance gain. Trying to direct F1 down a development route that is related to useable technology (which I agree with) doesn't go hand in hand with ultimate performance on track.
Equalising the power of Engines is against the spirit of F1, as is not allowing Manufactures to develop their designs as and when they want. That gets you exactly what we now have, one car miles in front of the others. Still far from convinced that Ferrari have made great steps forward, little ones certainly. The other problem is there's no one to sell the engines to since the small teams are up to their necks in financial problems. There have been far too many restrictions with the overtaking nonsense , pit stops, different tyres, all designed to make the sport "exciting" but actually achieving the opposite. Bernie and Todt need to butt out and let the Manufacturers get on with it within the technical parameters allowed by the rules. Then we'd get "exciting" racing because we'd have proper competition, not artificial.
