Giblet wrote:Williams and FIf1 made it pretty clear that they are legally and financially bound to the FIA world championship.
If I were FOTA I would tell FI and Williams to compete in FIA F1 with a token car running a Cosworth engine. I would buy out their engine supply contracts and deny them the ability to use them in the FIA series.
Simultaneously, I would offer them sweet heart engine deals to compete in FOTA GPWC. Williams and FI can run a year old junk car with FOTA GPWC stickers as their livery on an annual budget of $500K + Cosworth's charge. They could fulfil the bare minimum of their contracts with FOM/FIA very cheap....
approximately for the same "cost" that their new TITLE sponsor... FOTA would pay them to put the stickers on their cars. Imagine all the team personnel at the FIA races wearing FOTA labels. Imagine all the literature in the entry lists referring to "Team FOTA Williams" and "Team FOTA Force India"! They could have so much fun making a mockery of the FIA/FOM series and there is not a thing Max's lawyers could do to stop them.
FOTA would have a full grid of every current F1 team.... and Max couldn't do anything about it. Bernie can copyright "F1" all he wants. The teams, the drivers, the heritage, the prestige, the glory will all be located in the FOTA GPWC series. They even have Monaco. And Canada, USA and Nurburgring and Imola and Spa and France... it will be easy and fun to compete with the FIA/FOM series as a business venture.
If I were FOTA, and since ticket prices yield a relatively low percentage of the revenue stream (TV and sponsors produce most of the revenue stream),
Friday, at Silverstone, I would announce to all the fans that next year's GPWC ticket prices across the board will be half of the cost of today's FIA/FOM ticket prices.
Innovation over refinement is the prefered path to performance. -- Get rid of the dopey regs in F1