F1 costs - ways of reducing them

[Richard]

I was looking for the calendar for 2015 and there is one thing that i don't understand. Why is the season starts in Asia, comes to europe, makes a run in canada, back to europe, returns to Asia, back to north america and ends again in Asia... Wouldn't be cheaper to make all the races followed on every continente?

The EU season has a limited time window due to the weather. So they have to book end spring and winter in the southern hemisphere. I also imagine they want to spread the Asia & Middle East races across the calendar to maintain interest throughout the year. If they were in one block people would get excited about the races in their region and then switch off for the rest of the season.

[Facts Only]

The only way to reduce the cost of F1 would be to stop recording finishing positions because as long as there is a winner people will spend as much money as possible for it to be there team.

Trying to stop F1 teams from spending more is like trying stop athletes from training more. It's not a guarantee of victory but it is a prerequisite and no amount of restrictions will stop the spending.

[SlowSteve]

There is ALWAYS the discussion that budget caps will lead to either 1) cheating or 2) creative accountancy.

So, why not have 3-5 independent, FIA salaried delegates, added to each team. An accountant, a materials scientistand a couple of engineers.

The accountant keeps track of the money - maybe the money is held in an escrow account and the FIA accountant has to pay the bills. The engineers have access to all designs, the build rooms, any meetings they choose to go to etc.

11 teams x 5 people is only 55 heads - thats a trivial amount of money.

[strad]

cut the size of the teams.
Have you seen how many guys they have these days?

[natehall]

A couple of ideas...

Each cars engine must be based on a road cars engine, purchaseable by joe public with no modifications to the crank or block allowed.

Standard gearbox designs with boltable bellhousings which is made available to ALL teams, if a team designs there own, they have to sell at a standard price to any other team.

standardised monocoque, front nose and roll hoop and mountings for other components

previous years cars (2014 is now previous years car) must be available for other teams to disassemble after the final race of the season (prevents locking in of a inherent advantages of the top teams)

[flmkane]

Dont allow the winning team to make upgrades for the next race. Forbid them from changing even a single part, until they lose a race.

Hence if you have a situation like Mercedes, the other teams would be allowed to catch up.

This would reduce both the amount and complexity of upgrades every season.

While this wont prevent the rich teams from spending, it will allow the lower budget teams to COMPETE with them.

Basically, this would reduce the performance gain per extra dollar.

[Manoah2u]

that won't work.

imagine the company's board explaining F1 like this;

yes, we are going to spend millions so we have a winning car, but then we can't do updates so our competitors can catch up and beat us and all our work was for nothing.

[FoxHound]

Good luck to the team winning in Italy going to Singapore!

[Ciro Pabón]

Oh, c'mon, Strad, cut the size of the team? Why reinvent the wheel?

Moreover, why should we reinvent the V6 engine with motor generator unit-kinetic (MGU-K), motor generator unit-heat (MGU-H), energy store (ES), turbocharger (TC) and control electronics (CE) as if it weren't simple enough already?

Duh.

I propose simple solutions, already proved.

First, we have 24 hours of LeMons, (I will talk about Chump Cars in another post) with two basic, logic rules:

1. Penalty because of investment

Each car is scrutinized by safety inspectors to prove that the car costs less than 500 dollars and at the same time it can race without killing other racers (killing yourself is accepted).

If the car is deemed to cost more than $500, it receives penalty extra-laps.

This Jensen-Healey comes with a Lotus 907 engine for less than 500 bucks. It looks pretty quick on paper


This is inspiring.

Extra laps.

We could do the same in F1.

Instead of promoting cheating, and adding more boring and unenforceable rules as the ones I've read in this thread, ehem, why don't we add, for example, one extra lap per each 100 million dollars spent per year?

A sheik in the Board of Directors? That's a 10 seconds pit stop and go per race!


2. Bribing

There is in place a traditional “BS Inspection,” where, under assumption everyone is cheating their $500 valuation, competitors are encouraged to bribe judges with booze and random automotive memorabilia in exchange for less penalty laps.

Bribing inspection


That's what I call pragmatism. If teams have to invest a LOT of money bribing marshalls, then Mercedes won't have any extra money to invest in 1500 persons designing the car.

This probably is what Daimler-Chrysler was supposed to be about


3. No more ads

Now, to reach unsurmountable levels of logic and populism, I have an even better proposal:

Instead of spending money on bribing FIA, Chinese and Bahraini officials and hundreds of milliones of euros yearly in advertisement for us to buy liquor, beer and cigarettes, why don't we eliminate the middle men?

I propose that all that money spend in bribes and advertisements would be better invested in giving fans like us free liquor, beer and cigarettes.

We can compromise: even if you don't spend the money in ads just give us the beer. We will drink it even if there are no ads.

It's Jeff's idea, I guess

[strad]

Have a friend that runs in Chumpcar and has a great deal of fun.

[goonerf1]

How about if the FIA should put a fixed price on the costs of gearboxes. engines, chassis etc? And then mandated that everything can be bought by a competing team for that set amount.

[emaren]

How about we just accept that from time to time, someone with seriously deep pockets will clean up.

Ferrari did it for a while, Red Bull did it for a while, Mclaren have done it and now Mercedes have done it.

Long gone are the days when a man in a garage can stumble on an idea and make it work. Nowadays the difference between a top team and an also-ran are of the order of 4 seconds / lap. There was a time when that sort of difference could be made up by a hell of a driver or water-cooled brakes or clever wastage positioning....

Nowadays the cost per second in terms of reduction of lap time is pretty much exponential. You might make up 1/2 a second by investing $20M, but the next 1/2 will cost you $50M, the next half $100M etc

As far as I can see it, the ONLY way to reduce costs is to standardise the cars, one chassis, one engine, one fuel supplier etc.

But then you have Indycar, Not F1.

[Richard]

As far as I can see it, the ONLY way to reduce costs is to standardise the cars, one chassis, one engine, one fuel supplier etc.

But then you have Indycar, Not F1.

We'd need to standardise the corners to make it Indycar. We could halve the cost of the steering componants if the cars only turned left