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Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone said on Friday that Honda’s withdrawal from the sport provides a “wake-up call” to overspending teams and underlines the need to cut costs.
Honda’s announcement in Tokyo that it was pulling out due the slowdown in the global economy didn’t surprise Ecclestone, who had spent much of the year campaigning with FIA president Max Mosley to get teams to reduce their costs, principally by agreeing to a standardised engine.
“This is a wake-up call,” Ecclestone told Sky News television.
“If you and I wanted to run a Formula One team, we wouldn’t need to have to spend what they are spending at the moment – probably 200 million pounds a year to do it.
“The trouble is the teams are basically run by technicians who should probably be at home playing with their PlayStations rather than spending fortunes to win races.”
Ecclestone believes the sport needs to start engaging with its fans again.
“The average guy in the street doesn’t care how many cylinders the car has, doesn’t know, or what the capacity of the engine is, doesn’t care,” Ecclestone said.
“We are in the business of entertainment and we should be building race cars to race.”
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