2010 regulation row on £40m budget cap

[ISLAMATRON]

You think Ferrari would stand for that? NEver... they would rather race in a series that resembles USGP 2005

[Conceptual]

Here's what Domenicali had to say about cap

Q. Does the decision to conditionally sign up imply an eventual acceptance of the budget cap?

SD: Absolutely not. The request to make the 2009 regulations the starting point, means there will be no budget cap.

He also added that within the FOTA they established a plan to reduce engine/gearbox combo cost down to 6.5 mil euro. They also plan to restrict development pace by limiting the number of new aero components that may be introduced per season - something I always thought may be crucial part of cost cutting.

It's not the construction of making the updates, but the labor and computational power that goes into refining them.

If you limit to 5 updates per season, every team will still use every single hour of windtunnel/teraflop of computation power just making those 5 updates.

With Rapid Prototyping and Stereo Lithography the test models and mould patterns are fast and cheap to make. It is the labor that is expensive.

So limiting the actual finished parts made doesn't significantly reduce costs.

[Conceptual]

If you want to watch Racing with teams spending 30Mil per year go watch Indy Car or Nascar Racing instead!

Teams in F1 should be spending 100Mil per year otherwise it just isn't F1 imo.

Seems you missed my point. The problem is not the value..the problem is technical freedom.

Regulations are tighter and tighter and all FOTA offers is to tighten them even more.

And just after that they speak about that bloody "F1 D.N.A".


I support the idea of budget cap just for that: spending is capped and technical freedom is increased.

Nothing to see with indycar obviously.

Ogami, I agree with your point. And I will go even one more step forward and say tighter regulations are a reason for the spending extremes that we see.

Think of this: since everything in your design is extremely limited you need crazy amounts of simulation/wind tunnel/testing to adjust a 10cm2 area in the front wing to gain 0.1 sec/lap. This will always cost millions more than a simple, creative solution to improve the cars. If more freedom were allowed in the regulations, we would not have this problem at all.

The regulations initially were to give F1 a safer, and slightly more level playing field. But they are now virtually designing the whole car for the teams. I believe the tighter regulations are killing the creativity and the beauty of F1.

I do not understand why F1 does not come up with something that will help both big spending and small teams at the same time? Something like a reasonable budget cap and a financial punishment for exceeding it, such as having to give the as much money as you spent over the budget cap to the lowest spending teams.

Even with technical freedom to find what is in essence the "perfect solution to the track", you will always end up with the endgame of refinement.

Think of it like a pyramid of competitors. As each possibility gets eliminated, the number of probable "perfects" get reduced. Eventually, in your hunt for the "last probability standing", you will end up with the same level of refinement that you are talking about here.

For any given set of rules and track, there can only be one "perfect solution" by definition. When all competitors get close, the cars become spec, and the costs inflate exponentially.

We currently have 9 teams essentially all designing the identical car seperately, and the race is to see who can figure it out first, and who can integrate others' tech fastest.

So to Ciro,

Of COURSE it is the car in Button's case, as it is EVERY YEAR!

The only difference is that the driver cannot make the car perfect on the track, but he can play to its strengths, and avoid its weaknesses, and win by making less driving mistakes.

It is the ability of the drivers to overcome the imperfections of their cars that make them good, and we have yet to see the "perfect solution" to the 2009 regs yet!

[outer_bongolia]

Even with technical freedom to find what is in essence the "perfect solution to the track", you will always end up with the endgame of refinement.

Think of it like a pyramid of competitors. As each possibility gets eliminated, the number of probable "perfects" get reduced. Eventually, in your hunt for the "last probability standing", you will end up with the same level of refinement that you are talking about here.

For any given set of rules and track, there can only be one "perfect solution" by definition. When all competitors get close, the cars become spec, and the costs inflate exponentially.

We currently have 9 teams essentially all designing the identical car seperately, and the race is to see who can figure it out first, and who can integrate others' tech fastest.

Conceptual: I agree with your comment about the exponential cost increase and your observation about 9 teams designing one car.

When I think of the creativity, I think of the Benetton B191 (1991), the McLaren MP4-1 (1981), or Lotus 72 (1970). The implementation of ideas like these enabled F1 to flourish. If regulations as stringent as the current ones were around, none of them would be possible. Just looking at the cars of 1973, I am amazed at the freedom that the teams had.

The "perfect" solution definitely is always many years away for any given shape. You can always improve the car to cut a millisecond from the lap time. Thus, the big budget teams will spend all they can and will dominate the championship.

I seriously don't think Brawn stands a chance to repeat this year's success ever again if the regulations are held as is. McLaren and Ferrari will be back at the top, and the small teams will go to the back of the grid. Until the sweeping rule changes of this year, the season points of the teams were proportional to their budgets (excluding Toyota).

[DaveKillens]

Under the current regulations and each team's search for improvement in performance where major changes are prohibited, I always think of this as "The Point Of Diminishing Returns".
The cost of refinement in Formula One is obscene.

[paused]

I happened to be trawling some articles and I managed to find this article written by Paul Stoddart nearly 3 years ago exactly. I can't cut and paste so you can read the whole article here http://www.pitpass.com/fes_php/pitpass_ ... t_id=28237

Now I confess I always have had time for Stoddy which I know will probably incur the wrath of some but have read this article within the context of the current dispute, Paul's observations take on a shade of prophetic. Having been the fly in the proverbial oitment of many F1 power players you can certainly appreciate Stoddy has see all of these machinations 1st hand. However, its hard to understand how he could have so accurately predicted the future direction the sports politics would take.

[WhiteBlue]

from the Guardian

The FIA president, Max Mosley, has restated his desire to see a compulsory budget cap introduced in formula one by saying the nine teams opposed to the move are more than welcome to create their own breakaway championship.

Ferrari, McLaren, Toyota, Renault, BMW Sauber, Red Bull Racing, Toro Rosso, Brawn GP and Force India confirmed last Friday, under the umbrella of the Formula One Teams' Association (Fota), that they would sign up to formula one through to 2012, but only if the FIA's proposed budget cap was made voluntary.

Fota will not adhere to the cap and instead will take part in F1 under their own cost-cutting proposals to be implemented over the next three years.

Fota are also demanding the re-signing of the Concorde Agreement – the regulatory and commercial document that governed F1 up until the end of 2007 – by all parties before 12 June.

However, Mosley insists that is not possible. "A Concorde Agreement received so late can't be signed by 12 June. There are 500 pages," he said. "We now have a dispute and we will see who prevails. I say to them: if you want to formulate your own rules, then you can organise your own championship providing it meets the safety requirements.

"But we have the formula one championship. We draw up the rules for that, have been doing that for 60 years and we will continue doing so."

The FIA will confirm next Friday which teams have been granted an entry, and there is every possibility the nine will be excluded.

Th former champions Williams have entered unconditionally, resulting in them being kicked out of Fota last week, as they have binding contracts with the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone's Formula One Management.

At present, 10 new teams have confirmed entries with the FIA to run under the voluntary budget cap - Prodrive, Lola, March, Litespeed, Epsilon Euskadi, US F1, Campos Meta1, Team Superfund, N.Technology and Brabham.

Brabham Grand Prix confirmed their entry today, although it is not the team that won two drivers' and four constructors' championships between 1962-92 when they ran in F1.

The German businessman Franz Hilmer holds the rights to the name, and last year bought the assets of the now defunct Super Aguri.

"The Brabham Grand Prix team has pleasure in announcing its application as a cost-cap formula one team for the FIA 2010 formula one world championship," said Hilmer. "We appreciate the FIA rules for cost-capped F1 teams and are convinced the budget limitation is a contemporary obligation and will effect a revitalisation of the Formula one world championship.

"We would be happy to enter into formula one as a cost-cap team and to meet the challenge under the new rules."

So we now have 11 teams seeking to compete in 2010. If only halfe of those are accepted it will get very uncomfortable for FOTA.

[Conceptual]

The split is here.

The reaction from Max will leave 9 teams looking at 2 spots on the 2010 F1 grid if all new applicants that want to adhere to the published regs are accepted.

FOTA have the choice of accepting the cap, and begging for preference for the available spots, or split and start a new series.

I for one, would split, but work with Bernie under a formal agreement of syncronizing the new series with F1. I'm sure if you think about how beneficial two "competitors" cooperating behind the scenes can increase the wealth of both, you could see why I would do it that way...

Anyways,

What will FOTA's reply to this be?

[WhiteBlue]

FOTA is out of options, unless they go break away. No serious person would see this as a feasibility. Ferrari and Mateschitz cannot do this on their own. The manufacturers have their hand full with the sales crisis. FOM are contracted with too many promoters, circuits, TV companies to make this happen. FIA has the global right to oversee all auto motor racing and can put a couple of spanners into their wheels.

The next move will see the FOTA teams put in individual applications.

[xpensive]

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[donskar]

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[axle]

I'm expect the other "racing" companies to break from Fota soon. IE the teams with nothing else but racing on their books.

Brawn, FIF1, RedBull and even McLaren will resubmit IMO.

[timbo]

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[mcdenife]

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[xpensive]

For me, it got tiresome to the xtent I had to take two weeks off from F1Technical.

Back this week and what do I get?