GPWizard F1 Forum
F1 News & Discussions => General F1 Discussion => Topic started by: John S on November 07, 2013, 09:19:05 PM
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Others may be interested in licences, adds Mateschitz.
The Austrian 'Caffeine vendor' is sounding more like 'Money is King Ecclestone' than Bernie himself. ::) Must be really hard for billionaires to appreciate how the rest of life really operates. :D
F1 stragglers should consider moving over for the next generation of teams if they cannot afford formula one.
That is the message of Austrian billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz, who owns two F1 teams including Red Bull Racing, the dominant clean-sweep world champions since 2010.
It is believed many teams on the grid are struggling financially at present, notably Lotus and Sauber.
But the Swiss newspaper Blick claims Force India could be about to lose the crucial backing of the Sahara Group, and if Pastor Maldonado leaves Williams, he could take EUR 40 million in annual backing with him.
Sauber, meanwhile, looked to have solved its crisis recently with a Russian rescue deal and Sergey Sirotkin, but that deal is rumoured to have collapsed.
Blick correspondent Roger Benoit said the survival of the Swiss team might now rest on rumours of backers from Dubai.
Years ago, Minardi team owner Paul Stoddart complained loudly about the costs in F1, earning him a stinging rebuke from McLaren's Ron Dennis.
"This is a tough, competitive sport and, if you can't take the heat, get out the bloody kitchen," Dennis said.
"Formula one has a place for everybody, but we do not have a soup kitchen," he added.
Red Bull's Mateschitz has now issued a similar smack against those pleading with the sport's authorities about their financial problems.
"If there are financial problems," he told Welt am Sonntag newspaper, "they can be solved only through financial means."
The German report said Mateschitz was referring to private funding and sponsors, rather than cost cuts or restrictive regulations.
"If a team is unable to resolve the problem, they should question their commitment (to F1). There may be others who are interested in their licence," he added.
Grandprix.com, Tues 5th Nov.
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Nobody's interested in taking on the 13th licence, which costs a mere €309,000 per year and has the bonus of not having to heed cost-cutting limits until the entry is posted. Why would any sensible team boss buy a debt-ridden team that would likely take years to even remove the debt from due to limits on permitted spending - years when the team will be slow and unattractive because money spent making the team more solvent cannot be spent making the car faster?
I have sympathy with Dietrich's view that teams should try to solve their own financial problems, but F1 cannot afford to let any team go. There really isn't anyone to replace them. There's a reason Red Bull's brand image is so powerful - because it's unique.
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Agreed. F1, Bernie and DM would look rather silly if there were only 8-10 cars on the grid next year. That assumes Ferrari, Mercedes, McLaren and the 2 R/B teams are solid.
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At least DM puts his money where his mouth is. As far as I know he's the only one who has simultaneously taken on two struggling F1 teams.
Given F1 needs a certain number of cars, and Ferrari talks about running more cars... why doesn't Ferrari own a B team?
Or McLaren with a stable of upcoming drivers, they could benefit from having a development team to give their rookies an F1 tryout without having to shove aside veteran drivers.
I'm sure most of us agree that 13 healthy, competitive, distinct teams would be the dream scenario for F1. Given that's not happening right now, there are plenty of options available.
- Allow teams to run fewer cars. Or more cars (only top two elligible for WCC).
- Allow teams to own more than one team (which doesn't seem to be forbidden anyway)
- Allow customer chassis (with limits, like the engine supply deals)
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As Jeri suspected, team bosses are already allowed to own more than one team and always have been*. The only rules are that they must not collude to cheat (including a ban on inter-team orders) and they are established as separate companies (not difficult; many teams are already several companies, one of which exists only to carry the entry for Concorde purposes). It would be the cheapest method of getting new teams, but the current teams see no point in this.
Changing the number of cars got ruled out because there were too many ways that excess cars could be used to wreck a championship and one-car teams make no financial sense (nearly all the costs, outright more expensive upfront due to the pay-driver phenomenon, and with less than half the potential income). There is a rule that forces three-car teams if nine or fewer teams are in the championship; it's possible that Dietrich Mateschitz may be trying to force such a scenario. He missed much of the debate on customer cars last time and may therefore be unfamiliar with why that is such a stupid idea in the context of the sort of people who compete in F1. (Ferrari used to be a three-car-team advocate until the recession finally hit it and the other "strong" teams in 2011, at which point even it realised that it was a bad idea).
Customer chassis were banned for the same reasons plus attempting to protect paddock from the spying scandals that nearly ripped the paddock apart in 2007** and to enable protection of intellectual copyright in the wake of some recent and pretty stupid legal interpretations (Force India got told by a UK court last year that because it supplied parts of its 2008 car to the public as memorabillia in early 2010, its car's IPR had only nominal value and could therefore be copied by the team now known as Caterham). Impaired IPR is, technically speaking, a challenge to a team's right to compete under the Concorde Agreement at all, even if the FIA basically treated the FIF1 case as the stupid legal interpretation it was.
So it turns out that the options that should logically be available to boost team numbers are not really there. This is part of F1's problem.
* -Dietrich himself does, as Jeri mentioned. The Honda team bosses technically owned Super Aguri in the mid-2000s even though all they did for the latter was sign a few cheques. Ron Dennis tried to have two F1 teams (McLaren directly and Direxiv via Jean Alesi) in 2008 but his bid failed. Flavio Briatore (Benetton/Ligier) and Tom Walkinshaw (Ligier/Arrows) used to have two teams simultaneously in the mid-1990s. There are likely other examples further in the past.
* - Spying is of course still possible, but is nothing like as casually straightforward. Strong safeguards are imposed on any shared-expertise agreement (such as the one Force India had with McLaren and now has with Mercedes) because F1 does not want to go down that road again.
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I've no time for the top teams saying the other teams should just leave. It's both naive and inflammatory. If he wants a grid with only a handful of cars on it, then let him run his own Formula Red Bull series, but that's not what Formula 1 is about, and it should never go down this route in my view.