donskar wrote:
1. Several posts took the position that "ingenuity is more important than money" or perhaps "you don't need a budget to be innovative." Admirable philospophically; impractical in application: Great ideas will remain only ideas without the budget to refine, prototype, test, and produce. Colin Chapman created breakthrough designs AND led the way to sponsorship in F1. There's a message there. John Barnard, Gordon Murray, and Adrian Newey are probably our contemporary "Chapmans," and all of them created their greatest designs for teams with well above average budgets.
2. It's lunacy to make such a radical change without input from FOTA. Think this through: several teams will have to slash their budgets by 50% or MORE. Think of the long-term contracts already in place: top drivers and technical staff sign multi-year contracts; there are leases in place; supplier contracts. Enormous sums have been spent on facilities and equipment that will go unused or underused. The more you THINK about it, the more painful it becomes.
3. It's been said that the big teams will make vast profits and be able to go into endurance racing (?) or whatever. First, with the public knowledge that the costs of F1 have gone down drastically, advertisers will have a very large club to use to REDUCE their support for F1. Profits are NOT guaranteed. Second, successful F1 teams do NOTHING ELSE but F1. Ferrari, Reynard, March, Lotus, etc -- all tried to race in multiple formulae at the same time -- and failed miserably.
4. Finally, the worst aspect has already been beaten to death (and it deserves to die):
The FIA has the right to adjust elements of these freedoms to ensure that the cost-capped cars have neither an advantage nor a disadvantage when compared to cars running to the existing rules.
NO ONE who takes part in this forum can see that as anything else but a potential nightmare.
I will spend some time to counter those 4 points.
1. The big teams who control FOTA currently have budgets in excess of 400 mil €. That is a fact difficult to denie. Any startup which would contest the 2010 season in the 11th or 12th slot would have just 10 mil € travel money from FOM garanteed. Under such circumstances it would be difficult to even get to the 33 mil € that FIA now proposes. After negotiations - which always happen- the figure will be probably closer to 50 or 60 mil €. Twenty year ago no team had such money to spend and it looks very generous if you consider GP2 run of 5mil and F2 on 500.000. There is no reasonable point why teams cannot go back to the budget levels they used to have. Benetton and Renault have always run on considerably lower budgets than the top and that hasn't stopped them to win 4 championships.
2. It is hybris to think that FOTA can allways have it their way and keep their cosy cartell regardless of the state of the series. Their policies fail to represent half of the grid (which has never had the financial legs) and definetely the replacement teams for those that have been pushed into bancruptcy by FOTA. So on the issue of a suitable budget cap FOTA have failed to deliver for 9 months. They have been warned about this and should bear the consequences of their failure. If one wants to talk about lunacy at all (not very sensible) then the lunacy is to expect FOTA to set a fair budget cap. It is like putting a gambling addict in charge of the gambling commision. Why is it so painfull to scale back the operations that have grown beyond sustainebility in the last years? Using that point is like advocating throwing good money after bad. Just because you have been unreasonable in the past makes it still unreasonable in the present to overspend instead of making a decent profit and offering the competitors fair equality of resources and arms.
3. If they do not want to kick people out they should divest and take up other forms of motor sport or vehicle construction. If you spin off the right resources and make them independent of the F1 operation that isn't detracting to the F1 teams. Ferrari have the road car department and McLaren have their hands full with the new super sports car. BMW certainly have enough other uses for their surplus F1 engineers.
4. The performance adjustment of the budget capped formula's average speed to the avergage speed of the unlimeted budget teams may be a bit tricky but certainly no nightmare for an orgqanization with the resources of the FIA/FOM. They have live timing of every lap that will be run during the season. The mathematical model of computing average performance of one class of cars versus the other is childs play. The tricky bit you need for a smooth adjustment process is the modell how the tweaking factors like wing angles, engine revs and ride height/diffusor geometry impact on performance. Once you have those you feed the tweak factors back to the ECUs of all class two cars equally and you are done. One has to assume that the average performance can float in a certain band. An algorithm is needed which monitors trends and pulls the class performance up or down according to the float within that band. It is nothing but an expert system with a limited number of control factors. Expert systems currently run by the teams probably have a lot more complexity. Surely there can be some research conducted to construct this model. Perhaps the excess capacity of FOTA can be put to good uses for a short time.
Talking about some more practicle aspects of the planned regulations would be intersting. When should those rules be implemented? I reckon they will have a a decision point latest in summer when they apply for the next season. Teams will have to declare which set of rules they want to run to. By then the budget working group should have firmed up the specifics. Perhaps the option of running with the cap is so compelling that there will be no two classes.
Fianally I would ask the honorable gentlemen to refrain from such terms as lunacy or nightmare in this argument. It doesn't help to paint the oppo as idiots when you want to make a point. We should all be considered intelligent persons who can make a point without too much drama.
