Oliver, Lewis isn’t earning as much as Button unbelievably enough!

I think you’ll find Lewis is meant to be on £70 mill for 5 years whilst Jense is on £8m a year… (plus personal sponsorship rights)…

I’d say that makes Lewis as earning nearly twice what Jenson is getting… as a minimum….

Thanks for the insight re: Jeff and part ownership of his own car. I agree with your assessment of him as a class act.

Relative to reducing current F1 driver’s salaries, it’s up to the teams to figure that one out. Can’t mandate that from on high, regardless of Spanky’s new found power.

There will always be a disparity between the top and bottom teams, the haves and have nots. Ferrari can afford to pay Kimi $33 million a year and TR needs a driver who can bring sponsorship to get his seat for a year.

This came up when Schumacher was still driving, I remember someones point was that Malboro could pay him however many millon for promotional work while Ferrari would pay him a realativly small amount to race cars.

Let’s not forget that Jeff Gordon is also the co-owner of his own car, the #24, although he does not receive points for it in the Owner Standings.

Jeff Gordon is everything that is right about NASCAR, and motorsport in general. He’s one of the greatest racers who has ever lived, and every bit of his immense talent is matched with immense class. It’s a shame we never got to race in a Formula One car, as he would have been very good.

I very much like the first comment that mentions many American sports have a salary cap that limits the total payroll of the teams in the sport. The NFL and NBA use this to great result- the big-market clubs naturally grab many of the top free agents after their first contracts are up, but good management and coaching ensures that small-market teams can compete. As an example, see the Pittsburg Steelers. While playing in one of the NFL’s smallest markets, their passionate fans and brilliant ownership see that the team is always in the playoff mix.

The problem with F1 is that, in this analogy, it is much like Major League Baseball, where the rich teams have been the most successful, and they have no desire to stop getting richer. McLaren and Ferrari are like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox of F1- for all intents and purposes, they can out-spend their way to championships.

The Yankees are about to sign superstar free-agent pitcher C.C. Sabathia to a record seven-year, $161 million dollar deal- something his previous teams in Cleveland and Milwaukee could never dream of- much like Williams could never afford to sign Kimi or Lewis at their current value. Indeed, some of the smaller outfits could probably run their whole operations on the combined salaries of a few of the top drivers- nxt season the payments the Yankees make to Sabathia plus their other top two stars, Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, wil be more than the entire payrolls of many teams in the sport.

If there was going to be a salary cap,reat, but the teams would probably fight it to the very end. Just look at a guy like Alonso, along with his millions of fans and millions in sponsorship dollars. Dose anyone really think that the top teams would give the smaller teams a chance to afford a superstar like that?