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The topic of new teams buying customer cars to compete is one that has come up a lot in Formula One in recent years.
Officially they’re banned, though teams push the letter of the law with technical tie-ups with subsidiaries, such as the one between Marussia and McLaren Applied Technologies.
One upon a time the customer car industry in Formula One thrived. The likes of March made a living from it, as did Brabham and even McLaren in the early years.
Stirling Moss bought a private Maserati, and when he started embarrassing some of the factory drivers, was offered a contract. Jack Brabham raced a customer Lotus until Ron Tuaranac had finished work on the first Brabham.
Companies existed purely to sell racing cars to other companies. They’d lump a Ford Cosworth DFV in the back and, with a competent driver, be somewhere there or there abouts.
It was the formula by which Williams established itself in the sport, before the arrival of Patrick Head. Frank bought cars from March which was headed up by one Max Mosley until the team was in a position to develop its own car.
Not long after the team won the championship with Alan Jones, and just to prove it wasn’t a fluke the team won it again a couple of years later, with some Finnish bloke with a moustache.
Quietly though the practice was phased out, at about the time the franchise system was bought in during Mosley’s reign as FIA President. Where once anyone rich enough to buy a car could enter a Grand Prix, it’s now restricted to only the ten or twelve officially endorsed teams.
There was once pre-qualifying, where drivers and teams battled their way just to reach qualifying proper.
A few years back there was talk about reintroducing customer cars. New teams and budget caps were mentioned, and it seemed on paper to make sense. The big teams could subsidise what they were doing by selling last year’s kit, while the new teams would get a boost by becoming more competitive sooner. Prodrive had hoped to enter the sport with a McLaren customer car.
What that situation failed to address was the Williams Principle.
At the time Williams was neither a front runner nor a backmarker. It was squabbling in the midfield where every point was potentially worth many millions of dollars come season’s end.
It raced against Red Bull, McLaren and the rest, but the arrival of another pair of McLaren’s or Red Bull’s, even if only the previous year’s cars in different colours, is unwelcome competition. It could cost millions of dollars come the end of the year.
Of course Williams is not the only team which would potentially be harmed by such an arrangement. Force India, Toro Rosso and Sauber all reside under the same umbrella. Even Lotus, if it has a bad year, could feel the pinch, while it’d almost certainly undo the hard work at Caterham.
On the flipside however there was nothing other than the team’s current liabilities (factory, equipment, technical staff, ego, etc) that said it couldn’t simply buy a ready-made, race-proven car off the shelf like the new teams.
Bernie Ecclestone has recently suggested allowing new teams to use customer cars for three years. His suggestion has merit, as new outfits would spend time and money tooling up and investing in their futures rather than wasting their infancy desperately trying to match the development might of Ferrari.
While some may suggest Ecclestone’s concept is radical, it’s only such when taken out of context of the sport’s history. What the sport has now is unique in that the concept which allowed so many teams to get going in the first place is banned.
Ecclestone’s comments fail to address the Williams Principle.
With commercial interests to protect, any change to the regulations which may create competition in the midfield will meet harsh resistance from the teams.
Unless that situation is to change, Formula One will continue to be a spending race, despite whatever arrangement the teams allegedly have with one another, with a top, middle and bottom, and ever-widening gaps between.
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