Imo, it's about at which side you look at. On the sporting side, yes, he has to go, F1 is being led by an single interest. On the money side, no. It still makes a crapton of money each year.Manoah2u wrote: Actually, i'm shocked i'm saying this, but bernie doesn't have to go at all
Williams had the luck of finding sponsorship.Rumour has it Sauber and Force India are the ones in trouble. Same has been said about williams before. Where are they now?
And because they lack the finances. It's that simple. They lack the finances to bring the fight to the "big boys". The team could be led as well as they want, the thing remains; You can't do as much with 100 people as you can with 500.The smaller teams are in trouble because 1. they didn't do their jobs good enough.
2. they never were or have fallen into not being really serious about their job (HRT). should that be rewarded by artificially keeping them alive? no. and 3. you win some you lose some.
The issue here is that these 3 teams were founded on the promise of a $40M cost cap, which didn't happen. They were expected to catch up with a fraction of the funds, and hardly any sponsorship to find. They were doomed from the start.
I would say entry costs were much different than they are now. Back then a team could leave, and another could just take it's spot. Now they have to pay big time for their entry and have to find hundreds of millions of dollars. And guess what, no one is going to throw big money at something that hasn't done anything, and neither is the team going to do anything without this big money. This makes the loss of 2 teams an issue as there isn't a replacement.I can't remember being this much attention and critisism when teams of the glory days 'fell'. Footwork/Arrows? Simtek? Forti Ford? Pacific (essentialy Caterham now)Onyx? Life f1? Eiffelland? Dome? Mastercard/lola? etc etc etc etc etc
An f1 team tends to spend the money they have, because throwing money at it gives the ability to more resources(ie. manpower). Thus, losing sponsors will lose you money, money you need to pay those people, facilities etc. and those facilities you need. All the teams that ceased to exist were plagued by money problems, and not "operational problems". You can lead your team as good as you could possibly do, if you don't have the money for it, you will still get nowhere. However, if you do have the money you can have a nice large team that can pick their noses through mismanagement, and they'll still exist.So if a team 'dwindles down' (remember tyrrell in the 90's), it doesn't mean they are in dire need or in dire problems; they just need the right solution. throwing $$ at a problem doesn't solve it, because the root of the problem isn't financial problems. it's operational problems that get hampered more by logically following financial problems.
The root of the problem IS finances.
Ever since he joined the team. Those Finnish sponsors didn't get onto the car by accident. Nothing wrong with being a talented driver with huge financial backing of course, but there was a reason Willians were so keen for him to skip GP2 for FP1s.
