Comments on: Formula 1 as a spec series

By: theRoswellite

theRoswellite — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:16:24 +0000

@ Scott Newton

As outlined the specifics of this proposal are beyond practical application. However, the original concept…the customer car….is always a viable alternative to the present regulations.

This is when you would/will see customer cars.

The major car companies withdraw from the sport, for any or all of the obvious reasons.

Grand Prix fields drop to very low numbers literally overnight.

To make up the grids teams are allowed to field additional cars , or sell their cars to other teams.

The sport has a rich history of doing just this.

It can increase, not decrease, the competitive nature of the field.

A driver can find himself outside the factory team, and yet in a very competitive situation.

Formula One isn’t going away, even if ALL the major car makers withdraw.

The most important dynamic insuring good economic health in F1 is………………fan interest i.e., an enormous world wide TV audience. (which is of course a reason why car makers won’t withdraw).

Scott….good article for consideration, keep them coming.

By: chunter

chunter — Sun, 18 May 2008 02:41:45 +0000

That’s a fair idea but I don’t think it would work in Formula 1. The reason is because the teams are so large that they are often developing cars more than a year in advance in anticipation of a future season’s regs, so even if you could only introduce a car every three years, you have three years to waste gargantuan amounts of money on secretly developing and testing it.

By: Jonov

Jonov — Sat, 17 May 2008 23:03:10 +0000

Use rules similiar to the American Grand-Am series. A chassis manufacturer can only make major changes every three years. I’m not sure of all the details but basically the idea is that different constructors and engine builders are allowed, but development is severely restricted, keeping costs down.

By: MarathonMan801

MarathonMan801 — Sat, 17 May 2008 10:09:31 +0000

It’s not a bad idea, but the one aspect that I don’t think is workable is the timing. If the season doesn’t finish until October, a team won’t necessarily know if they are allowed to supply customer cars or not.
If the next year’s season starts in March, it doesn’t give much time to write contracts, finalise a team, collect sponsors and train staff, does it?

By: alan

alan — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:37:47 +0000

unworkable – if you win you can’t sell youre know how to offset costs – down to third place – no customers cars – has he been having a word with frank – williams/ toyota would be earning a fortune – I suggested main constuctors could run protype and customers could have a part to play by running alongside as production cars – fills the grid teams and gets income for experimentation /refinement and maybe the fia and bernie dont impose any more stupid rules – night racing fr example

By: William Wilgus

William Wilgus — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:35:16 +0000

So unless you build your own car, you automatically have NO CHANCE of WINNING: Ridiculous!

By: Alianora La Canta

Alianora La Canta — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:30:13 +0000

I never heard of any rule banning teams/manufacturers from competing in other sports; it’s just that F1 is so expensive that boards tend to hesitate about funding activities in other series (apart from driver development).

By: milos

milos — Fri, 16 May 2008 07:54:21 +0000

I can’t imagine something like this to work … It is way too complicated. there are also big advantages and disadvantages between finishing 1 place up or down in constructor / team table and that would bring lots of fishy stuff happening …

By: DG

DG — Fri, 16 May 2008 07:51:34 +0000

Following on from Chunter, I thought the F1 rules were that the Teams (or is it Manufacturers?) are not allowed to compete in any other race series. Surely this means that Ferrari and Renault cannot be allowed to supply chassis to similar race series either – A1GP is F1 without the sponsors, and GP2 is F1 with a single chassis. Surely this gives them an advantage when it comes to testing brakes, engines and aerodynamics? And if that’s the case, why haven’t McLaren and BMW, with their technological background taken such an advantage?
Strictly speaking, I suppose that Honda supplying the IRL engines must also been seen as an advantage too…
It does seem strange, that at a time when all Bernie talks about is the Teams cutting costs, that he has made ‘Customers’ such a bad thing, when sharing costs is surely the only way to keep them down? After all, in any other business, a ‘Customer’ pays for what they get!
I think it would liven up the grids and the races if smaller teams had access to the Big Boys Toys too, and to see an offical Ferrari team racing against Forza Dansk or Scuderia Andretti-Green would be great to watch – like it was in the 50s and 60s? – after all in GT Racing and Touring Cars there are lots of what Bernie would call ‘Customer’ teams racing the Manufacturers already.

By: ctm

ctm — Thu, 15 May 2008 21:01:17 +0000

Problems:

“First – third place constructors: No customer cars allowed”

Winning the championship is only possible if you have a good chassis that is easy to tune, can handle the spec tires, and so on. So the rule here is that if you win, nobody else is allowed to drive the same car next year. In reality, the winner probably don’t want any other team to use their chassis next year. Why share the winning formula with a competitor? So this will actually benefit the top 3.

“The third downside is the uncertainty this creates for customer teams.”

This is a major problem. One of the reason new teams have problems is the uncertainty of how long the will have the sponsors while not producing any results, which leads to bad results, which leads to fewer sponsors, and so on… This would cause the same problem. You learn a chassis and start producing results, only to be forced to change to something new and learn everything again, which of course will have a big impact on the results – and then the spiral down the drain will start again…