Newsgroup: it.sport.formula1.moderato
Titolo: [ENG] The battle for Formula 1

Source: 
grandprix.com
http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns12803.html
Next week the Formula 1 team bosses will gather in Monte Carlo for two
days of talks about the future of Grand Prix racing. Although billed as a
chance to discuss everything, it is more likely to be a meeting at which
teams will be faced with harsh realities and will have to conclude that
if they wish to stay in business they must accept the terms being offered
by the FIA. The new FIA regulations for 2008 have drawn a line in the
sand. The teams do not have a say in this if the FIA chooses to ignore
them. But the fact is that the GPWC's proposals were less attractive to
the majority of the teams and drove them into the arms of the FIA and the
Formula One Group. The new rules will allow costs to be reduced if only
because some of the manufacturers are going to leave the sport rather
than accept things like a common electronic control unit (ECU) and as a
result the money supply in F1 is going to be squeezed. This is the only
known way of reducing costs in F1 because if money is available engineers
will replace track testing with dyno and rig work; they will find new
materials and get around tyre restrictions.
The problem is that almost everyone has now reached a point at which the
sport is too expensive. In many ways this is like an arms race with
everyone spending vast sums of money on weaponry simply to have the same
or more than the opposition. The sport gains nothing from this because
the same teams are at the front and the difference of few miles per hour
adds nothing to the spectacle.
The GPWC's failure to give everyone a fair and transparent deal has
finally nailed the credibility of the organisation. Team bosses were
outraged in Malaysia when they were leaked copies of the Memorandum of
Understanding to find that Ferrari, Williams and McLaren would all get
more money than the smaller teams. Once that document was out, the GPWC
was fatally flawed and the irate team bosses were soon talking to
Ecclestone about breaking out of the current deadlock.
The GPWC is not in a position to fight back because its members are not
sufficiently committed to the sport if the current trends continue.
Ferrari has reached a point at which it cannot justify the spending
required on F1 because its car sales are (and have to be) pegged at 3000
a year to maintain the exclusivity of the brand. To get around this
Ferrari began to rebuild Maserati and it is possible that one day the
Maserati brand might replace Ferrari in F1 but even then Maserati's
10,000 cars a year is not a big enough market to justify the cost of a
successful F1 programme. The Ford Motor Company is having similar trouble
justifying the Jaguar programme and that is based around much bigger
numbers of car sales. Jaguar's image is changing and sales are rising and
so one can argue that the F1 programme has already been a success but
paying to go to the next level is not something that Jaguar can justify
without huge support from Ford or from new corporate sponsors. Ford is
also aware that it has the capability to make money in F1 by being a
simple engine supplier via Cosworth and does not necessarily need to have
its own team once the specific aims of Jaguar have been met. Costs are
also an issue at Renault which is being flattered at the moment by the
sales figures of its partner Nissan. With a new management coming into
the French firm in 12 months from now, there are no certainties.
BMW has a different problem in that it does not have its own F1 team. And
Williams is well aware that as costs go up, it is going to be shouldering
a lot of them rather than BMW. Williams is a privately-held team and so
building up debts and spending too much are serious fears for the men in
charge and even the threat of losing BMW as an engine supplier is not as
worrying as losing the whole business.
And that leaves Mercedes-Benz. The management says that the firm is
committed to Formula 1 but a new boss is coming later this year. Even if
he is a believer in racing there are still fears that a change at the top
of parent company DaimlerChrysler could tip the balance. Jurgen Schrempp,
the top boss, is under attack from all sides. Since he engineered the
merger or Daimler-Benz and Chrysler in 1998 the company has lost huge
amounts of market capitalisation. There are people trying to unstitch the
Chrysler deal and at the same time Schrempp's globalisation policy is
failing. His refusal to continue to invest in Mitsubishi Motors means
that in effect DaimlerChrysler has nothing left in Asia. There is a small
shareholding in Hyundai but this too is surrounded by conflict and will
probably not survive. Questions are now being asked about the entire
corporate culture at DaimlerChrysler with The Financial Times wading in
yesterday about what it called "serial bungling" at the company and
called for Schrempp to go.
The GPWC therefore is an unsteady edifice and many in F1 believe that Max
Mosley's new 2008 regulations will ultimately lead to the collapse of the
GPWC. Once that happens (and the denouement will probably be at the
Monaco meeting) it will be a question of seeing who is going to stay and
who is going to go and then putting together a commercial settlement for
the future of the sport.
That is not going to be easy. Ecclestone is in a powerful position but
his past success (some call it greed) has left scars and there is a
strong desire not to let him do the same thing again. At risk is the
health of the FIA Formula 1 World Championship in 2008 because if the
deal on offer does not make any sense some team owners will just give up
and do something else. They are all wealthy men and a lot of them are
getting towards retirement age and they do not like to see their teams
struggling for cash, knowing that so much of the money which is being
generated is leaving the sport. And young men look at the figures and
conclude that the risk involved is too great for an attempt.
In order to attract more cars, therefore, it is possible that the
federation might try to moderate the situation by insisting that
Ecclestone clears up the issue of who is in control of the Formula One
Group and then comes up with figures which are more generous to the
sport.
Ironically, it could be that the F1 teams and the FIA will end up
fighting alongside one another in an effort to get more money coming back
into the sport, rather than watching it go out to bankers and trust
companies in obscure parts of the tax-free world.
The battles over the future are far from over but at least there is now
hope that a solution will eventually emerge.
Copyright 1988-2004, Inside F1, Inc.
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Abbastanza interessante l'angolatura da cui si guardano le cose. Mentre
grandprix.com
 decreta la fine nei fatti della GPWC per qualcosa che si
può semplificare come mancanza di un progetto coerente e condiviso,
nell'ultimo numero di Autosprint si dice come le modifiche proposte da
Mosley siano "cervellotiche" e che i costruttori sono pronti a far da
sé.
Non è difficile immaginare una visione Ferrari-centrica dietro il
settimanale italiano e FIA-centrica dietro la webzine inglese; buona
norma sarebbe quindi non credere in toto né agli uni né agli altri,
anche se forse bisogna fare dei distinguo. Infatti GPWC non è
necessariamente "i costruttori" che hanno obiettivi diversi a medio
termine, e forse anche a breve; e anche LCdM che di GPWC è stato
lungamente un promotore afferma che dopo il 2007 (scadenza dei contratti
e del Patto della Concordia) ogni soggetto prenderà individualmente le
proprie decisioni. Come dire che che davvero GPWC non ha più spazio, e
se qualcosa di alternativo a FIA-FOA (Bernie&Max) deve nascere,
dev'essere riprogettato.
-- 
Alessio F. Bragadini		
ale...@sevenseas.org
http://www.alessio.sevenseas.org/weblog/