F1-Blog

Has ‘mad’ Max finally made a sensible decision?

The FIA have circulated a letter to the F1 teams this week. It basically sums up the recent talks the teams had about budget caps, and engines.

The letter says that the FIA are going to go ahead and introduce the budget caps in 2009, and also details what will be exempt from the cap.

So far it looks like Drivers, Engines, Marketing and Team Principle salary’s will not have to be found out of the rumoured 150million dollar budget.

Instead it seems the budget is directly targeted at lowering the cost of Aero development, as CFD and wind tunnel usage is not cheap (BMW own a 12-teraflop supercomputer for their CFD usage called Albert2).

The letter also eluded to the rumoured change to the 10 year engine freeze, it seems that it will certainly be lowered to a 5 year freeze, so we are already half way through it, which is good news.

The budget capping is certainly a better idea than the mandated limiting of CFG and Tunnel usage that was first planned by the FIA.

Budgets and Engines

It seems that the FIA have finaly cottoned onto a proper way to limit the spending in F1, and that is to limit the spending in F1 (about time geniuses)

The FIA have proposed to limit team spending to 150 million dollars a year, and to reduce the engine freeze to only 5 years, with the possibility of a new engine regulation to be brought in (probably smaller turbocharged engines, as they are better on fuel and emitions).

Most of the team principles have agreed to this (with Ross Brawn actually pushing the idea).

I say most, it seems that one of F1’s biggest spenders don’t like the idea. No not Toyota, instead Ferrari.

It would impact them quite badly, as there driver lineup would account for a good chunck of the 150 million budget.

I like the idea, it’s worked in other sports for years (Basketball, American Football, Baseball for example).

Toyota for Williams?

A piece on grandprix.com is speculating about the Toyota and Williams engine deal that has been touted for some time.The rumour has it that Toyota will supply V8 engines to the team re branded as Lexus to try distinguish between the teams, and improve the brand visibility.

Other things that they speculate about are the Red Bull/Toro Rosso engines, with TR possibly running the 2006 spec RB2/Ferrari car, and Red Bull themselves switching over to Cosworth in a new Newey designed chassis, and the VAG rumour that I commented on is back.

The thing is, if Williams get the Toyota lump, where does that leave MF1? Toyota will not want to supply 3 teams. There could be a Cosworth deal for them to have customer engines, although apparently they are going to try for Mercedes/Ilmore V8's. The problem there is that McLaren are well known to want to run a second team with Jean Alesi and Direxiv.

Next year and 2008 could be as interesting on the engine front as it looks to be on the driver’s front.

Rumours and thoughts

My Curious Bystander this week takes a look at the VAGroup. It seems that few people can understand why they are not in some way tied into F1. Yes the old argument that they are in Rally (with Skoda) touring cars (with Seat) and Le Mans (with Audi) goes some way to using the companies competition budget up. However can it stay that way for much longer?

Both BWM and Mercedes have got 'big' teams in F1 now, and if VW want to compete at the same level selling cars surely they need to compete at the same level in racing.

Technical and Teams

The Technical and Team section is now up. I've started on the Renault and the McLaren teams first and will work my way through the others over the next few days. Please if you see an errors or omissions then let me know (just comment on it) and I'll do my best to sort it out.