“I’ve been pushing, pushing, pushing for single chassis, single engine, and run it exactly the same as now, but they [the teams] can’t muck around with it [the car].”
“So you do that with four or five teams and you leave the constructors alone. You let them do what they want to do.
“You would make all the chassis the same, and then we would do a deal with one of the engine suppliers. It should work.”
And so went Bernie Ecclestone’s customer car vision of Formula One beyond 2017; a concept feverishly discussed by the Formula One Strategy group in May.
As a cost-saving measure, it makes some sense. Dispensing with the outlay associated with constructing your own chassis would redeem close to half the expenditure of the minnow teams, but of course they would still be left with a hefty engine bill of around $20 million from the top two engine suppliers in Mercedes and Ferrari.
With the Strategy Group made up largely of said suppliers, it’s no coincidence then that a customer car proposal would be brought forward in earnest given the main players stand to gain a lot more than their customers. Likewise, why would a sponsor want their name on a cheap knock-off knowing most of their money is syphoned off to the real McCoy?
What then, is a minnow team to do? Formula One has long trod out the sanctimonious (if not downright duplicitous) notion that the purity and history of the sport (i.e. the Constructors Championship) is not up for deliberation; that standardisation would undermine the DNA of competition.
Cough!
Let’s talk history. When Jos Verstappen jumped into a Minardi PS03 at Mugello, he was in actual fact sliding into an Arrows A23 recently rolled off the back of Tom Walkinshaw’s truck; which was in-turn offloaded to Super Aguri in an ‘only used on Sundays’ deal which served them well for a few seasons.
Even Williams, during their lean years, recycled their chassis during 2012-13, further illustrating the elasticity of the Constructors Championship guidelines.
This is history. This is Formula One. So what is good enough for the main players is surely good enough for those at the bottom-end of the food chain. Rather than lose their status as constructors and their very existence, now is perhaps the time for teams like Sauber, Lotus and Force India to bite the bullet and take destiny into their own hands with a core car model.
If the above mentioned teams shared the cost of developing their own survival cell and associated chassis they would not only save time and money on research and development, but also stand a reasonable chance of keeping abreast with the heavy hitters without being beholden to their technical information.
A group ownership of the intellectual property of the chassis design would not only give the collective parties the financial freedom to choose their ideal engine manufacturer, but with it the ability to sell those designs at the end of the year.
The scope of possibilities for composite design and associated technologies could generate a much needed revenue strain – as employed by Williams Advanced Engineering and KCMG’s composite venture currently growing out of Taiwan and Dublin.
The minnow teams’ mission statement of ‘exist to race’ is well overdue of an overhaul, otherwise the only competition left will be merely racing to exist.
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