Comply or Die.

RasputinLives

No passing through my dirty air please
Contributor
So the current Red Bull engine saga rumbles on and due to the fact it appears that the average race fan despises Red Bull, Horner and co the real.implications of what is going on are being missed. This whole thing is a war between Teams and Manufactures and its been raging for quite a long time now.

Red Bull have treated Renault very shoddy like and I guess thats why people are annoyed with them. Lets remember though that the Renault engine is the reason that car is not competitive so as much as they are going about it the wrong way they have a point. Also whats not talked about much is that despite having an inferior product Renault are still hording their development tokens. Could this possibly be because they are saving them for their new forthcoming works team?

If you take that theory and couple it with the recent proposal to allow teams to be supplied with B Spec engines (for cost saving reasons obviously) then F1 is really turning into a monopoly. All the 3 main engine suppliers (I'll come to the 4th soon) will have their own works team soon. It will not be acceptable for these teams to be beat by their customers. Therefore that leaves quite a lot of teams stuck between a rock and a hard place. It actually leaves them with only 3 options

Comply:

This is the option Williams took. You take the customer service graciously offered you by the manufacturer. You even let them have shares in your team. You run their drivers and say nice things about them and your results look pretty good.

Its a resurgence! The media proclaim. No wins though, no title challenge either and in fact you'll be hard pushed to find a time they ever beat their 'parent' team.

Try:

This is the Mclaren option. Find another engine producer and try and go your own way. Problem is the current regulations are controller by the current manufactures. So basically there is no testing time, restrictions on what you cand change and huge wacking great penalties for changing things you shouldn't.

The result? Really bad results that leads to bad PR, which leads to mocking, which will probably lead to the engine maker pulling out of the sport again due to sheer embarrassment. All of which won't matter because the team will have gone bust anyway because they will not have been picking up TV money or sponsors.

Die:

Just give up. Let the big car makers have their fortnightly advert for cars and just clear off and do something else taking your talented drivers with you.

Manufacturer teams are the worst thing that can happen to F1 and the continued political playing behind closed doors makes it more and more their sport. Have a laugh at Red Bull if you like but their plight will be repeated by all eventually.
 
Ron Dennis made a very good point about spending engine tokens. Honda has tokens left to spend but there is no point in spending them if you have nothing to spend them on. You need real working upgrades before you can spend the tokens. I suspect Renault are very much in the same boat as Honda in that regard. Its not that they are saving them for a works team it is the fact they have no upgrades that are ready.
 
Possibly but I still don't think there was anyway Renault were going to help Red Bull along too much if they knew their own team was coming.

I still think we're looking at a monopoly with the actual racing teams of yesteryear doomed to fail.
 
So if Renault step in and save Lotus, will they be a works team? And are Red Bull any nearer an engine for next year?
 
Just a minor couple of points.

Redbull complained about Renault even when they were winning and after FOM/FIA allowed engine manufacturer's to catch up with Mercedes in the previous "era"

I don't believe Mercedes have shares in Williams. Toto Wolff has shares from before he joined Mercedes (and worked for Williams) and I believe he has sold 1/3rd -2/3rd of them.
 
So Toto Wolff has no sway at Williams anymore? Funny how his wife was test driver for so long.

Working for one team and having a shares in another is a conflict of interest. Not to mention he manages one of the race drivers! I'm sorry but we can all only put our fingers in our ears and go la la la for so long. Williams are being propped up by Merc and will never challenge the works team.
 
That was kind of exactly my point in the thread. The situation is being created by F1 having 2 (soon to be 3) major manufacturers. The other teams have no choice but to either become lackey or just fade away to nothing (Willians nearly did).

Engine makers. Racing teams. Thats how F1 has traditionally worked (except for Ferrari but thats a whole different ball game)
 
I agree with Brogan and have said in the past that manufacturers were a bad thing. Unfortunately the man with the strings and money seems to like cosying up to them. Unfortunately anyone who is appointed in his place will be in the same position, having to extract the maximum money for FOM.
 
You're not saying that Manor are being held back by Ferrari are you?ROFL

No but they are about to pushed forward by Merc - probably with a Merc driver. Which is great news for a team like that.

However there is only so far you can go with a strategy like that and that is to the Mercs rear wing. Fine with a couple of teams but when you are getting to the point where you have a ten team grid and 7 of them are in a position where they can never challenge ever, the F1 soup is going to become very stagnent.
 
Formula One should not be in that situation where teams are not allowed to compete against the works manufacturer. It just goes against the spirit of competition in F1

You saw Ron Dennis having a rant about the current cost control too restrictive and there is no opportunity to catch up if you get it wrong from the start

I also see that some teams performance have moved forward because it is down to the engine not to the chassis. I would say that Mclaren have a better chassis than either Williams, Force India or Sauber but their achilles heel is the engine.

I do not want to see an F1 field supplied by 1 or 2 engine manufacturers...this is F1 the supposed cutting edge of technology not a 1 or 2 make series like DTM.

Basically we get to the point where F1 becomes a bit like MotoGP .. you have factory teams - the main contenders and then satellite teams using their engine or spec who will and now race the main contenders but never beat them over a season
 
I have never had any major problems with Red Bull. Certainly not more than I've had with Ferrari. But I think there is something wrong with Formula 1. Because for a manufacturer it makes no sense to supply a costumer team with the same budget as them with a power unit (+ fuel + maps + ...). After spending half your budget on engine R&D and manufacture, you have considerably less money to spend on anything else. Your customer team don't spend half their budget on engine, they buy that at a considerably lower price and spend a lot more money on those other things. So it'd be really hard and extra challenging for a manufacturer to beat their customer with the same budget, all things being equal. Looking at it like this, manufacturer gets a raw deal. I don't think building everything in-house would compensate for possibly hundreds of millions of euros or whatever. And last time I saw Red Bull had a bigger budget than Ferrari too.
 
Ron Dennis made a very good point about spending engine tokens. Honda has tokens left to spend but there is no point in spending them if you have nothing to spend them on.

That was an interesting interview. He also said that the tokens do not limit engine development, only the upgrades that you can actually stick in the race car. So I get the impression Honda have hundreds of different development directions they are trying and testing and then eventually will pick and choose the ones that give them the best results. I guess it's obvious when you think about it.

Personally I don't buy it that manufacturers are bad for F1, take away all the manufacturers and you kill the sport completely. Money=performance in F1 and that has always been the case, in the past there have been a few cases of a small team punching way above their weight, but that was mostly because people were far less experienced and knowledgeable in general so there was always more potential to "stumble across" some neat solution that no one else had thought of.

I wonder what people's opinions would be if we talked about selling aerodynamics packages to other teams rather than engines? Mercedes giving Red Bull their engines would be the equivalent of Red Bull giving their aerodynamics package to Ferrari/McLaren in 2012 after completely dominating in 2011. Sure it might create a more competitive championship but how does it make any sense? Or like Barcelona telling Real Madrid that they can borrow Messi for half their matches?

If Williams wanted to beat Mercedes they would have to invest a similar amount in the sport as Mercedes (possibly including an engine development programme). You can make arguments for cost caps etc. I suppose but I really don't see how the current situation is any different to how F1 has been for years. How may times in the history of F1 has a customer Ferrari team beaten the works team, I wonder?
 
How may times in the history of F1 has a customer Ferrari team beaten the works team, I wonder?

I don't know if and when a customer team placed above Scuderia Ferrari in the championship, or just how many times they finished a race ahead of them. But never mind winning a championship, there has only ever been 1 race won with a Ferrari engine outside of SF, and that was Monza 2008, Sebastian Vettel.
 
Williams do not have a budget like Mercedes but there are times when they could have won races and they seem to go for a very conservative strategy which leaves people dumbfounded considering Pat Symonds was a good strategist at Renault ( no mention of Crashgate please )


Formula 1 is not about one or two engine manufacturers... it should be the cutting edge of technology where we get all the grandees involved as well as allow teams to show their technical innovation
 
MotoGP has this all figured out. There are Works teams (factory teams) and Independent teams and the Independents get more tire options, more fuel capacity and more engine allowances. Formula 1 could do the same thing and Fernando Alonso suggested as much last year. I also think Max Mosley's idea of teams that spend less than X dollars have more freedom.
 
But the problem with Moto GP is that unless you have a works bike you aint got a chance of winning a race and let alone fighting for the championsip

The last rider to win a race on a satellite bike was nearly 10 years ago and the last satellite rider to win the championship was Rossi who pretty much got full factory support in 2001

This is where I worry that F1 is going the way Mercedes and Ferrari are monopolising the field with engine supply
 
The idea of having homologated engines was to save money; once a car was registered development would effectively cease and the garden would be lovely.

The first thing that went wrong was arguments about just engine spec would rule messed designers about. Mercedes had established a lead before Ferrari and Renault got going whilst Honda gave everyone a year start just to be fair to them. Because of the imbalance it was decided that there would be some improvements allowed, fortunately non of the engine design/development employees had been given their cards. Then the decision turned out to be tokens, each team could spend their tokens whenever they had an upgrade. Since Ferrari and Renault were lagging behind and needed race points they had to use their tokens as a matter of urgency, Mercedes having a big lead could use their tokens more sparingly.

Honda were a special case but did not get a realistic way of catching up this season. So now they have decided to continue developing their engine but by not fitting the enhanced engines to the McLaren car they are doing this work without using tokens. They also need to do testing to ensure that they are going in the right direction, they will not get this until after the end of the season when they presumably will not need to use their tokens until the homologation date next year.

So in a clumsy attempt to stop the engine makers spending money the result has been that if anything more money has been spent and the chance of anyone ever catching up with Mercedes effectively been postponed. Don't you just love F1?
 
problem i see & that red bull are playing on is f1 at the moment, we've got sky high costs which means that very few teams knocking on the door, we cant afford to lose red bull because then that's 18 cars on the grid & worst case scenario that marussia dont improve & haas have the same performance as the previous new teams HRT Caterham Virgin in their 1st yr we have 14 competitors on a grid.

so until costs come down to manageable level so privateers can comfortably compete without being skint. we will continue to be held "hostage" by the teams because we need them more than they need us
 
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