Nando wrote:So basically you can create these suppliers and strip down the actual team until it only consists of the team personels paycheck and run everything else through suppliers?
The RRA was set up as an alternative to a budget cap. The main push was for a head count under 300 for the teams. The RRA allowed for a certain amount of outsourced services. The figure was initially 30m and has been changed several times but always remained in that magnitude. According to the RRA teams are not meant to outsource substantial parts of their work usually done by the workforce.
This is the reason why I suspect that the loop hole used by Red Bull was defining the design team as "the team" for RRA purposes and outsourcing the racing operations. It would be a strange methodology but stranger things have already been done in F1 than such a trick.
The whole discussion is of relatively little value now because the RRA is effectively over. It has not been replaced or extended for the 2013 season according to our knowledge. The last thing we have heard about cost control under the new concord agreement is Jean Todt's announcement that the new strategic working group and the new F1 commission will be dealing with the item of a budget cap as soon as the 2013-2020 Concord is signed. This sound more like they will have a new focus that isn't looking so much into head count as they did in the past. The head count approach sounded simple but it addressed the question of a team outsourcing substantial work by looking at a service charge limit. And that approach involves just the same problems that a budget cap has. The question of defining entities, having them deal at arms length with non controlled entities, the question of verification and the question of penalties for infringements.
The RRA was less efficient than it could have been because it did not address all these questions. A future system will have to in order to work. F1 has enough reasons to deal with the cost control problem. The failure of the HRT team to join the 2013 season competition is ample proof of that. F1 is now poorer of two driver seats and one team. This will not help to promote F1 internationally. It will hurt. And if nothing is done to get the cost issue back on track there will be a lot more team failures in very short order. With the exception of Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes every team could be on the block in the next three years. None of them has a stable financial foundation and they all will struggle in the coming years a lot more than they have in the last three years. The new power units and the expenditure for re designing the cars for them will be one factor. The other factor is that any change always suits the bigger teams with more resources more. So unless something is done very quickly we are going to see diminishing grids and abominations such as third cars or re branded cars from the top teams.
