GPWizard F1 Forum
F1 News & Discussions => General F1 Discussion => Topic started by: Calman on March 10, 2019, 09:40:46 AM
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Could too much tampering really damage F1 in the near future?
The reasons for "tweaking" are understandable, but I wish they would stop comparing with other forms of motorsport, to figure out what is wrong with F1.
https://www.pitpass.com/64030/A-worrying-message-from-the-FIA
Best Regards,
Cal :)
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IMHO it's slippery slope rather than genuine cost saving that Todt, and especially Brawn is leading the charge towards. :nono:
Fire extinguishers and mandated ancillaries yeah maybe, but gear boxes are more fundamental in F1's developmental history.
Trouble with Poachers turned Gamekeeper is they can become too zealous, they think everyone is always up to no good as they were. :D
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What is 'wrong' with F1 is there are 'rich' teams and 'poor' teams. There are few sports where money is so important. A poor football team can find a star player who can snglehandedly win games. You're never going to find a single person to turn a back marker F1 team into a podium challenger. Even if you do have the best driver, or the best mechanic, or the best aerodynamicist, if the rest of your team is 8th best... you're going to lose to the team who can afford the third best across the board. That's where the money changes the sport. Ferrari or Mercedes don't NEED the best of the best, they just need to be best on average. Of course, they can afford the best of the best, and they'll attract the best of the best, because who doesn't want to be paid more AND win?
Creating standard parts doesn't solve this problem. It just means that the top teams don't have to waste money hiring the best transmission builders, and can spend it on better aerodynamic teams.
Could you imagine a football game where one team has 11 players on the field, and the other team has 30? It's not even a contest, and it's not allowed. Yet in F1 that's how it goes. Until F1 can put all teams on equal footing, there will be a divide, no matter how many 'standard' parts they implement.
Naturally, putting the teams on equal footing is easier said than done. Bowing down to 'big money' like Ferrari and Mercedes is easy, so maybe it's time to push back and say if your brand can't compete fairly, then your wins are tainted anyway.
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This would require the FIA and the teams to have the same notion of fair competition. For the richer teams, the ability to compete with what they see as reasonably strong teams, to push boundaries, is the main part of why they're there. Otherwise they'd go to the next series (or sport) which enables this - maybe WEC hypercars, maybe Formula E, maybe their own thing. To not allow this, to them, is unfair competition from the organisers, and taints their series. Their reaction would then be to leave.
Which sounds reasonable as a trade-off to F1 until you realise we've just had a team try to spend $105 m to complete a season and fail, because the actual minimum limit (as spent by Sauber and Toro Rosso) is $110 m. Elsewhere, the only series that's close to this is WEC LMP1, where Toyota spends around this much to win the WEC title. Even that's put off other manufacturers due to price and insufficient road-relevancy compared to Formula E. In the other series and categories I see, it's rare to see more than $40 m spent on a season (and that's typically teams with fleets of cars in a series, like AF Corse sometimes having 6-8 cars in a series and in WEC, at least 4).
The gap between $40 m and $110 m is basically insuperable for a team not owned by a billionaire, and billionaires are now able to find other things to do that work better for their interests. The ceiling height (which I doubt the proposals will do anything but aggravate) isn't necessarily the reason we have only 10 teams - the system not paying out all 13 possible team slots, and the fact that the gap between current non-F1 teams and the backmarkers is the same magnitude as the gap between Haas and Mercedes, are bigger factors.