It makes sense to recall the situation that lead to Honda pulling the plug on F1. They incurred a massive loss from declining sales and embarked on a big restructuring project involving factory shut downs and massive job and wage cuts.
Running an unsuccessfull F1 operation at the same time was opening the board to all kind of criticism. So there wasn't really an alternative to shutting F1 down and writing the losses off whatever it would cost.
While this was happening the budgets of the automotive sponsored F1 teams were still exceeding 300 mil € although some reductions were being discussed. This prevented interesting parties like Prodrive from taking over a team that obviously had a huge surplus of human resources compared to any forseeable revenue stream.
10-30 mil € in payments from FOM to Honda were small change compared to writing down the capital investments and the cost of shutting the company down. So I believe this was never an issue the Honda board even considered.
From a FOM point of view it would have been desirable to tie Honda into a Concord style committment, but I doubt they ever came close to sign anything of that nature. So all payments were subject to future contractual agreements that never materialized.
Hypothetically the Honda money could go to Brawn or the other Fota teams. But for that to happen FOTA would have to sign up with Bernie for 5 years and they are still far away from doing this. So there is a grey area that will likely be exploited by Bernie to keep the money.
It appears that F1 nowadays is run on a year by year basis defined by the renewalof the competition license by the FIA. This seems to suit Max Mosley well because the federation has no interest in getting bogged down with long term committments. They seem to prefer flexibility to shape the competition to the needs of the motoring public, safety and the world economy.
It is Bernie who needs stability of long term contracts because he typically makes multi year deals with promoters and TV companies. I'm getting the impression that the FIA stopped their support for a concord framework in 2003 when they sold all their economic rights to FOM. Their job only gets more difficult when every Tom Dick and Harry can veto everything down to the color of the marshal's underwear.
So they introduced majority voting and the bickering process moved over to the FOTA meetings. My impression is that this is working out quite nicely. Instead of being eternally bogged down we saw the major reform of the OWG this year and we are going to see more changes next year that will benefit the fan from my point of view. If the big wigs in FOTA don't like the change I say tough luck. As a pure spectator I have some sympathy with their problem but in the end it is better for me to watch a lively F1 season with close races and a championship race that is still quite unpredictable.
- Login or Register
No account yet? Sign up
