gilgen wrote:The concorde agreement is to do with distribution of money, and not the basic rules, which are still in a state of flux. Why, KERS still hasn't been decided on, despite being in the rules. So there is no reason why a satellite team could be admitted. That was even under consideration for this season. Constructor points could be amended to read "team points", so you could have " Marlboro Ferrari" and also "NART (Ferrari)" racing for seperate team points.
There are better informed people who can tell you that the concord agreement indeed deals with such basic things as "third" cars, "customer" cars, "constructors" and the like. Those are very important things to the signatories of the concord.
Besides the "two car" rule is also engraved in the sporting regulation and will not be lifted. Anybody with a cursory knowledge of F1 history will confirm this. Luca has the majority of the teams, the FiA and Bernie shoulder to shoulder standing against him. The discussion about this issue it is completely ludicrous and nobody understands his whinging.
Red Bull has fought the FiA, the teams and FOM for years to be able to run a "customer" team. They finally had to give in to the powers of F1. I have taken the quotes from the two top men at STR from
Joe Saward's blog. Does anybody doubt these men would go through the exercise of designing their own car if Newey designed customer cars would be in their reach?
Franz Tost wrote: This is a landmark year for Scuderia Toro Rosso as the new regulations demand that we go it alone in terms of designing and building our car in-house. After four years of working in collaboration with Red Bull Technology, the STR5 is the first car that is 100% down to our own endeavours. Creating the necessary infrastructure to tackle this task has been our biggest challenge, possibly more difficult than actually producing the car itself. We have taken on an additional 80 staff and expanded our facility to accommodate them, including a machine Shop to increase our production capacity. In addition, we have commissioned a wind tunnel in Bicester, England, which we bought from Red Bull. It will take time for the highly skilled team we have assembled to learn to work together as efficiently as possible.
Giorgio Ascanelli wrote:By the end of last year, we had already increased our staff to around 150 and now we have 200. At the end of March 2009, we got the green light as to what actually constituted being an F1 constructor. That was the starting point for building up our operation in such a way that we could actually design a car that was achievable in engineering terms, working in a different way to the methods we had adopted in the past. Being recognised as a constructor involves owning the intellectual property rights to what are defined as the listed parts: these are effectively the monocoque, the safety structures that are subject to homologation and crash testing, which means the rear and front structures, primary and secondary roll-over structures and the complete aerodynamic package, the suspension, fuel and cooling systems.
Before even thinking about producing a car, we had to acquire the right tools to carry out these tasks and also hire the people who are to use these structures. Finding 50 people and putting them in an environment where they can do their job has been a tough task.
