With the Concorde agreement expiring in 2020, all stakeholders are going to have to agree on something with Liberty Media if they are intending to go Grand Prix racing under the "FIA Formula One" banner next season! The COVID19 situation has increased motivations for lower ongoing costs in Formula One among organisers and some of the teams.
Jean Todt, FIA President, said:
https://motorsport.com/f1/news/todt-f1- ... s/4778859/In each disaster, in each crisis, you have a lot of bad but you have some good. So, among the good is that we have the opportunity of making things better for the future. And mainly in F1, we reached some heights, which for me are not reasonable and which we need to address.
Incidentally, I was calculating this morning that with what we want to impose on the teams, together with the F1 group, the budget will be with a new figure between $150 million for a small team up to over $300m for a big one, which does not include the cost of the development of the engine for manufacturers.
This is still crazy. So can you even imagine where we were? And still we face resistance from some of them.
Zak Brown, McLaren CEO, said:
https://motorsport.com/f1/news/top-team ... n/4778782/A couple of teams need to be very careful, because I think they are playing with fire, so to speak. It takes a full grid to have a sport, so if they continue to have the sport unsustainable, and a couple of [smaller] teams lose interest, or financially are not able to participate any more, they are going to be racing against themselves. And that's not going to work.
There seems to be a current impasse between teams in favour of a 125m USD budget cap and those in favour of sticking to the agreed 150m USD budget cap namely Ferrari and Red Bull (p.s., why is the cap quoted in USD and not in the EUR or GBP currencies that would be more relevant to where the teams are based!?).
I had an idea to solve the impasse: why not require power unit manufacturers to supply all customer power units for free?
F1 power unit suppliers would be compelled to supply up to a maximum of three (total) free supplies, including the works team where applicable, when requested to do so. Honda already supplies the units for free to two Red Bull teams, so no difference there. Renault is a works team, so no difference there. But it would compel Ferrari and Mercedes-Benz to support their customers with free power units.
That way the bigger constructors could still have their higher budget cap, but the cost of supplying power units would be absorbed by the manufacturers as a cost of racing in F1 -- this wold allow teams like Williams and Aston Martin to devote more of their limited budgets to chassis development, without the burden of paying out 20m USD (or more?) just for a power unit supply.
This would still help the position of the smaller teams, but without requiring the bigger teams to make greater numbers of contentious job cuts -- unlike a lower 125m USD constructor budget cap which require Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari to slash their workforce.
I think such a provision could be workable (on top of other provisions like no historic bonuses, but instead a substantial baseline Liberty Media team payment that's the same for all teams, with only a small WCC-weighted prize component on top of that), to help improve the economic situation of Formula One. What do you think?
On a similar topic, there are doubts over the continued participation of certain manufacturers and constructors regardless of the commercial deal. Some are concerned Renault may discontinue their F1 participation, Honda are only contracted until 2021, while Mercedes-Benz are also rumoured to have not yet committed to on-going F1 participation.
Particularly, as WLTP emissions initiatives compel manufacturers selling Europe to invest heavily in electric vehicle research & development -- an expensive cost, at a time when new vehicle sales volumes are decreasing across most sectors. Furthermore, aside from the high cost of going F1 racing, that the F1 product is hybrid-based rather than EV-based could be another factor viewed unfavourable by car manufacturer executive boards.