New Teams may get excited about the prospect of having a ‘newcomer’ dominate in such fashion at the beginning of the season. However, the Brawn car was really financed by Honda without a budget cap, used one of the best engines from Mercedes, and developed in the 2008 season. This allowed Brawn to gain much more development and testing time, on a great engine.

Based on the 2010 rules and regulations (that we know so far), it is going to be almost impossible to reproduce the Brawn success. Why?

ENGINE
New Teams will all use the 2006-specs Cosworth engines, trimmed back to 18,000 rpm. As they are finding out, these engines are less fuel efficient than the competition. Since refueling won’t be an option, the newcomer cars would most likely be the heaviest on the grid. New Teams may have a better chance to score points next season if they can acquire engines from one of the manufacturers.

BUDGET CAP
We still don’t know the hard amount limit that Teams will be able to spend in 2010 and 2011. All we know is that the costs will be back to “early 1990’s spending budgets”. My guess is that the cap will be in the hundreds of thousands, well above what new Teams will be able to spend. The good thing going for USF1 is their cash on-hand in order to compete as they will try to offset the disadvantage of running the Cosworth engines. They had enough capital behind the Team that they felt confident entering the upcoming season without a budget cap (unlike Campos and Manor).

This will be quite a bit to overcome for a new Team. The cost-savings initiative from the FIA was a good one for the sport. The ‘knee-jerk’ reaction to add anyone on the grid who has $40M, may not have been the best idea. In the end, after weeks of breakaway threats, the final agreement was more supportive of the existing manufacturers than for the new entrants

THE FUTURE
In my mind, Formula 1 has always been a manufacturer’s class. The sport would fare much better with more of them. Having names like Peugeot, Ford, Porsche, Audi on a grid would be pretty exciting for the sport. Financial incentives should be made available to manufacturers to join and continue to operate in Formula1. The longer they can commit to racing in F1, the bigger the incentive.

photo credit ©DPPI

Author: Laurent