FIA admits engine rules had mistakes

[Scott]

Ya think???   

That's what happens when you let corporations bring politics to sport.  The FIA should never have signed an agreement they can't amend every single year.  Motorsport needs to have a way to fix itself if new regs don't work.  Having Mercedes and Ferrari hold the sport for ransom is simply nuts.  And if the entire point of rafts of FIA regulations is to save money, why on earth didn't they have dollar figures for customer engines embedded in the formula?

The fact that each engine costs $2.5m according to Mercedes and Ferrari shows that limiting the number of engines has not saved anyone any money.  Customer deals were in the $20m range when there was no limit on engines, so what have all these stupid grid penalties brought us?

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/121710

[lkjohnson1950]

Pain and misery, pain and misery. 

[F1fanaticBD]

Let me list a few that "Cost-cutting" efforts by the governing body :

1. Banning testing - resulted multi-million dollar of investment in simulators for the teams, resulting increased expenditure for the bigger teams, and the smaller teams not being able to utilize it struggle more than before.

2. Limited number of engines : Instead putting a figure regrading the cost of the engine, they have limited number of engines, thus giving the manufacturer the scope of pricing real high in the name of reliability.

3. Limited number of tyres for each Grand Prix : Forcing the teams to gamble in the safety issues and resulting some scary scenarios (British GP was the biggest mess I have seen for decades) resulting fresh investment from the manufacturer as well as the increase costing.

4. Limiting the number of gear-box : Like the engine same scenario, no team could show the cost have reduced, they are spending as they were before such steps are implement, and then you come to the conclusion, what is the point of such farce?

Sometimes these days I just feel like, the less governing body talks about lessening the cost, the better the state of the sports is.

[Alianora La Canta]

The FIA didn't embed dollar figures because if they had, the EU would have been onto them like a plague of locusts - the Nice Agreement prevents the FIA from doing anything with direct commercial effect on any entity except itself. And it would never occur to Bernie to put in such a rule in his secret bilateral agreements...

The problem is that there is one manufacturer willing to outspend the rest by a comical margin. Much the same as there is one team willing to make a bigger loss on their team than half the teams have available for their complete budget. And the FIA can't exactly complain as said engine manufacturer has by some margin the cheapest engine supply (in addition to it being the best-performing unit).

[Irisado]

If the rules are locked in place for the foreseeable future, then all that can be done is to ensure that they get them right next time.  This means taking the opportunity to sit down and go through them in detail and to sort this mess out.

I very much agree with BD's assessment of why cost cutting has failed and why the engine regulations as they stand simply don't work from that point of view.