dans79 wrote:Phil wrote:
Somewhat logical; The 12 million cap was never meant for the engine teams, it is for the rest of the teams. And it wasn't meant to stop development costs - it was merely a free pass to say "you can battle each other on engine development as long and hard as you want, but you won't pull down your customers while doing it so - it will be on your costs alone" which was the whole point to begin with.
You know, the manufactures would probably have been fine with that if the rules didn't dictate they have to sell the exact same engine to everyone.
True, but that would have defeated the point. There's always going to be problems. It's either the engines are too expensive and will force smaller teams out of the sport, or you put a cap on development to limit the rate of development and costs, but then there's no guarantee that those behind will catch up, if ever, which will result in problems for those teams running those engines as well. So the sport has gotten itself into a stale mate situation.
So one of the logical solutions is; Take away development restrictions, but force the engine manufacturers to keep their engine priced at a viable price point towards the customers reliant on supply of engines. You can't do cost-caps, there's no way to enforce that. But you could set a max price on engines being sold. If you allow engine manufacturers to supply two types of engines, we're back to an 2-tier system, especially if the engine manufacturer can artificially influence who uses which engine. The only fair thing (from the view of the sport) is to force engine manufacturers to only sell one and and the same engine to all and if they want to improve it by spending billions, they are free to do so, but it will not be at the expense of their customers - they will benefit too, and by a fixed price per engine.
One would think the advantage of knowing the ins and outs and building your engine to run perfect on *your* fuel and *your* unique engine maps, as well as perfect packaging to be big enough to remain stronger than your customers using the same engine. The engine price cap would set some kind of upper boundary on how much an engine manufacturer wants to spend on development. If they deem its worthy to spend 3 digit million sums and only get back 12*3 million by 3 customer teams, so be it. It's still perhaps a win/win for them. Or not. Maybe they'll only spend 50 million on engine development then.
It's not relevant anyway. These engine manufacturers are not in F1 to make money. They are here to compete, for TV time, prestige and exposure. Their outside markets benefit of it.
Prior to 2014, none of 8, maybe 7 F1 teams was in favor of new engines because they aren't in the engine building segment. It was purely in the interest of Mercedes and Renault. Ferrari was neutral seeing little point in moving to engine outside their segment. The plan with the new engines was built on the prospect of more engine manufacturers joining in and keeping Mercedes and Renault at the table. Only Honda did.
If you allow the max price to be on the B-spec engine, what's to stop engine manufacturers to make the B-spec inadequate? The customer teams would be forced to buy them with no other choice since 6 of the 10 teams are not in the engine building segment. The only logical thing to do is set a max price for one single engine, forcing the engine manufacturer to do the best job they can and common-sense will mean that they won't spend billions in the process if they know they can only make back by the number of customers multiplied by the set-agreed-max-price for an engine. And you would need to limit obviously how many customers you are allowed to supply, or else they might all want to drive Mercedes. But hey, that just introduces even more problems, doesn't it?
Dammit, this is the engine crisis topic all over again - which makes me wonder why we have this seperate veto topic in the first place. It all boils down to the same problem over and over again.
