About policing, Max specified that on each engine FIA will put some seals in the right points (to cope with different design of different engines) and each time a seal is broken the engine has to be considered changed with the consequent penalization. So if next year McLaren has to change a single valve like they did several times last year, they will change the whole engine instead cause the penalty is exactly the same.
About the second point, that’s something I believe all the F1 engineers knows pretty well (if I figured it few days after the announcement of the rule, they did even before to approve the rule itself...) but, instead of reveal this loophole like they did last year with the idea of qual special cars, they preferred to say nothing. God knows what Max could invent to close the loophole. I’m pretty sure that big teams already planned to have a “particular” engine to put in the car just in case of a blow up in Friday/Saturday or of a big driving mistake in the qualifying lap. It could simply be a further evolution planned to be used in the successive races and not fully tested for “weekend distance”, a bit like BMW did in ’02 with “qual” engines. And that without considering that also in a normal 800 km engine a bit of electronic tuning could improve performance at the expense of few hundreds of km of life. They are probably spending lot of time in testing, both on test bank and on track, to verify how many km an engine last with each particular map (rpm limit etc etc...)
Well let's look at this realistically.. To be able to seal an engine it would either have to be taken apart and "blueprinted" by an FIA official or at least the dyno figures viewed by that official at the time of sealing !!!
OK so now we have another cost..... The NUMBER of Official engine sealers required to do the job !!! that would be employed by the authorities... ( couldn't rely on the engine manufacturer to seal their own engines )
AND I THOUGHT THIS RULE WAS TO CUT COSTS ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
About seal what Mosley said was : “Manufacturers wanted to know where we are planning to put the seals but we answered that we first want to see the engine, and then we’ll decide where to put the seals”. While I’ve read it, it looked to me like the typical expression you could hear from a 12 years old chess player who’s going to play his first match ever against the World Champion : “I know how all the pieces moves, I’ll beat him easily”...
That the rule is effective for cost cut is just an illusion. Most of engine manufacturers were perplexed since day one and also the main supporter of the idea (BMW) has recently declared that costs have gone up because of development, research and new materials... This was clear for many people but while proposed this objection Max often answered that it was non-sense (maybe he thinks that the research is free) and that the rule was mainly intended to help the teams that have to buy the engine : Sauber, Jordan and Minardi. That’s something I can’t believe either. Sauber surely has to spend more this year cause the engine is now a brand new ’04 version and not a ’03 modified. Furthermore to be effective the rule should be a limitation on the number of new engines to buy, but for Minardi it’s not. The rule allows a team to use new engines for the official cars + the engine on the third car + spare engines, all new for each race. Also considering only 2 for the official cars, assuming that the others are simply revisions of previously used engines that’s 36, more than what Minardi used last year. Giancarlo Minardi declared in January ’03 that the contract with Ford for 2003 was : 14 Million $ for 22 new engines and 60 revisions. So, if Minardi contract with Ford was already way more limiting, in term of new engines, than the rule, how the rule itself could help Minardi ? And in fact Minardi will use a modified version of last year unit that already was a 1 year old engine...
My opinion is that it’s simply impossible to reduce F1 costs working with the technical rules, if teams have a budget of 100 they will surely find a way to spend 120 even while racing with soapboxes.