A cap on RPM’s and a few other short term (3 years before review) development freezes could save a fortune, add a few standard components to the car and you’ve got yourself a sizeable reduction in engine costs.

By reducing the aerodynamics on the cars there’d be less need for wind tunnels and computer modelling plus you get the added advantage of more exciting racing :~)

It would need thinking through very well, but surely it offers a better outcome than everyone driving with the same engine.

If Ferrari do some R&D at their factory are they doing it for F1 or their road cars ?
The same is true for all teams with connections to production car manufacturers.

Unless the FIA had people monitoring both the factories & the accounts then it is impossible for them to be able to tell who is really spending what, if the teams want to hide it then the accountants will find a way, that’s what they’re paid for.

I doubt the FIA has the people who are able to effectively police a budget cap. We’d just end up with endless court cases over alleged spending.

1. I don’t believe they could enforce it.
2. Even if they could, I don’t believe they could convince all the teams that it was being enforced.

I appreciate that a budget cap wouldn’t be straightforward because of cross subsidies within organisations and investment costs incurred in one year but the results used in another year.

But, it isn’t beyond modern accounting practices to come up with something workable.

Or is it?

Some teams will be sold and renamed, and if Max gets his way with cost cutting, customer cars etc then we may even get more than 10 teams in F1.

Well I am just considering a trip down under…

A lack of Honda to laugh at will hardly spoil it for me…

I can’t say I gave them much thought this year except to feel sorry for them…

Sigh, my Jenson Button Honda Mouse pad at work looks a little sad today

I’m shocked! Really! What’s all this nonsense of you guys talking about a more “modest” cheapest F1?

The reason of F1 is excellence. And excellent doesn’t come in cheap and modest packages. You sound like Mad Max trying to put cosworth engines on all cars. Nonsense! There are already cheapest and modest series wich provide very good racing, why would you want F1 to become that?

Face it, one of the reasons we love F1 is because it’s so unreachable for us mere mortals. We can’t even get close to the pilots and that’s some of what’s special to it.

Crisis or no crisis, F1 will survive one way or another, and if RB and TR go out with Honda, so be it. If Renault follows, no matter. Others will come eventually. Don’t become so paranoid about it, we all know that japanese can be swift and brutal in their desitions.

Seriously, a modest F1? Come on! We want cars made of unobtanium with diamond brakes and space age bodyworks (okok, exagirating a bit there)

Couldn’t disagree more.

Formula 1 once made it’s name with a grid full of Cosworth engines.

And to you, me and even GP2 a budget of £30 million is still a ridiculous, astronomical, unreachable figure, and yet considerably more affordable than current budgets.

I assume the eminent Mr Brawn felt he had sufficient support from the head guys at Honda to completely ignore 2008 to ensure 2009 would be excellent… but in business it is always your last results that are considered …. not next year’s pipe dream….

Perhaps the extreme forward focus and “catch-up” spending spree made the F1 team team expendable…. especially when there were no guarantees….. we can all recall the Honda F1 management’s optimism each year since BAR’s second place in 2004, accompanying a steady slide down the team table…..

I thoroughly accept that no-one saw the financial meltdown of 2008 coming but even so…. effectively betting “the farm” was always going to be a high risk strategy….

I only hope that we get to see if the reputed $300 mill was well spent….

I haven’t read any figures, but I don’t doubt that Ferrari aren’t exactly selling a lot of cars right now, either.

Honda exited F1 because it was a very easy way to lower the budget. It is the same reason that General Motors are considering removing more than half its nameplates from existence, for a person in charge it is a very simple and obvious decision. Honda did not remove itself from IRL because they probably make money by leasing the engines to teams, and they did not remove themselves from motorcycle racing because motorcycles do not have the ridiculous high costs of development, not that a Moto GP effort is cheap by any means.

I am very surprised that Toyota have not made a similar announcement yet; it would not be a bad or wrong thing, to me, it’s just saddening.

Max might prove to be a little bit smarter than some of us want to give him credit for: if manufacturers can’t afford to be in F1, then what we’ll have are privateers left in F1 in 2010 or so, driving in his identicars, and it’s really nobody’s fault. Though the rules allow for other manufacturers to make engines that meet the spec, there will be no takers, because the same rule existed in the Cosworth-only ChampCar.

Had the FIA imposed greater cost cuts sooner things might have been different.

Not for Honda it wouldn’t. Keith your not wrong in your appraisal of Honda’s F1 operation post 2004. From the moment they sacked David Richards it’s been a joke, a joke that they had only just begun to rectify before all of this and now they’ve chucked it in. It’s not surprising really, maybe they’re just using the financial climate as an excuse to save face. I even find myself agreeing with Jacques Villeneuve’s comments (which for me doesn’t happen often) about what he perceives to be a political rather than financial move.

Every year I think Toyota could leave and it’s not because of the crunchy credit, sales figures or even Honda. It’s because their F1 operation has been such a monumental waste of money. The real question is how long are they willing to throw that much money down the toilet? They’re always gonna have that kind of money to waste it’s just a question of when will they get bored of wasting it.

BMW won’t quit:

It is with regret that we learnt of Honda’s decision. It has no bearing on BMW’s involvement in Formula One. Our F1 involvement is an integral part of the company strategy. There is no better platform than Formula One for demonstrating our brand values. BMW, moreover, makes targeted use of the Formula One project as a technology accelerator for series production… With the BMW Sauber F1 Team, we have from the start focused on high efficiency and have achieved our successes with a compact and powerful team… The cost-benefit ratio is commensurately positive…

I doubt Renault will either. Even though I’m under the impression their financial resources are considerably less than the other top teams they have very good results which means their operation should be cost effective ergo not worth quitting.

Red Bull I’m not so sure about, mainly because I don’t know much about the state of Mateschitz’s inveastments and assets, but the Pitpass article someone linked points out that they’ve been investing a lot of money in their teams so I would be surprised if they made those investments to then quit.

I get the feeling that Williams could be one major sponsor loss away from folding but that’s just a guess, I get the feeling they’ve been like that for a while.

In short I don’t think we’ll see many or any more teams quitting. Honda’s pulling out could well be a good thing for several reasons not least in the hope that someone who actually cares about running a race team well will take over at Brackley.

I think the point about customer cars was a good one and that people should be mor open to the fact that standardized engines is only one possible cost cutting solution (and not a very good one in my opinion). Free-ing the regulations to allow for cheaper more innovative performance gains would be far more significant.

The reason of F1 is excellence. And excellent doesn’t come in cheap and modest packages. You sound like Mad Max trying to put cosworth engines on all cars. Nonsense! There are already cheapest and modest series wich provide very good racing, why would you want F1 to become that?

Face it, one of the reasons we love F1 is because it’s so unreachable for us mere mortals. We can’t even get close to the pilots and that’s some of what’s special to it.

Crisis or no crisis, F1 will survive one way or another, and if RB and TR go out with Honda, so be it. If Renault follows, no matter. Others will come eventually. Don’t become so paranoid about it, we all know that japanese can be swift and brutal in their desitions.

Seriously, a modest F1? Come on! We want cars made of unobtanium with diamond brakes and space age bodyworks (okok, exagirating a bit there)

Would be excellent to have David Richards back on the F1 Grid.

By contrast Honda wasted more than $28 million per point – big spending under-achievers. Honda also has very little sponsorship income and as a car manufacturer has a much smaller turnover than Toyota, Renault, BMW, Fiat or Mercedes. It’s clear why they were the first to go.

From what we have heard it seems like it was a sudden and unexpected decision by Honda high-ups. All this gives credence to the theory that only Honda will go. It also suggests that Moseley is rather over-playing his hand. With competitive budgets in the $200 – $400 million range, the cost cutting he is touting with his engine deal isn’t going to make the difference between survival and sudden death for any team. Especially as all the rule changes for next year (especially KERS) require huge additional expenditure.

In fact, Moseley has proved himself entirely incapable of cutting F1 costs.

I’ll still guess that no other team will pull out. But I’ll concede that there are no good reasons for manufacturers to stick around if they’re not winning. And there’s no good reason for billionaires like Mateschitz or Mallya to stick around if they get bored.