Ecclestone will stop new teams coming in – Haas

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In the round-up: New team owner Gene Haas says he expects Bernie Ecclestone to prevent others from entering Formula One.

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Haas F1 staff to begin working in UK this month (Autoweek)

"If Caterham doesn’t come back there are going to be nine teams so we will be the tenth team and I don’t think Bernie is going to allow start-up teams any more."

Marussia Formula 1 team collapsed with £31m debt (Autosport)

"Marussia's ninth place in the constructors' championship last year put it on course for £35 million prize payment this season, but the team would have to race to qualify for it."

McLaren-Honda 'in contact' with the FIA about controversial 2015 engine 'loophole' (Sky)

"McLaren-Honda has already been in contact with the FIA with regard to this issue, but we do not wish to say anything further at this time."

Jean-Pierre Beltoise: Memorable impressions (ESPN)

"Matra had wanted to check out their car so, pour la gloire de la France, the police had simply closed off the road and allowed Beltoise to blast up and down to his heart's content. That V12 with its six chrome exhausts made a stupendous sound; talk about a call to the faithful."

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Comment of the day

The FIA has just thrown up a barrier to exciting driver moves happening in the future:

It’s useless over-regulations like this that meant a driving god like Sebastian Loeb could be stopped from driving a Toro Rosso several years back.

How will we ever get another John Surtees style cross-discipline champion with pointless regulation hurdles like these?
Ken (@Whatevz)

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On this day in F1

Happy birthday to world champion Lewis Hamilton who is 30 years old today!

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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81 comments on “Ecclestone will stop new teams coming in – Haas”

  1. Woah, Lewis is already 30? Dang !

    1. I was surprised as well. I still think of him as the 22 year old back in 07. But he still has many years left at the top.

    2. I was surprised when reading that as well. Time really does fly by. I’ve always thought of Lewis as a young driver in his mid-20’s with a career ahead of him. He’s a 30 year old double WDC with 33 wins now.

      1. He and I share a birthday and it’s quite a surprise to suddenly look round and realise 3 decades have passed.

        It’s probably a bit nicer when you have two WDCs to your name.

    3. Time has wings…

      1. Fortunately these wings are legal.

        1. The solution is to outlaw aging. That will fix the problem of time.

    4. So I guess people will start calling for his retirement this year then.

    5. Somebody tell Lewis that Alonso has un-followed him on Twitter

      1. Not on his birthday, such news will ruin his day, he will be completely gutted.

      2. I read F1 racing magazine (February 2013) and remember that Hamilton said that his relationship have been much better with Alonso than on McLaren years and he said that it was more Alonso that change from bad to good, from that I conclude that Hamilton blame Alonso in 2007.
        I’m not surprised that he unfollowed Alonso, he still have revenge on him.

        1. …why does 2007 always need to come up when Alonso and Hamilton are mentioned in the same sentence!!!

          Bloody move on already!

    6. 30 and balding!

  2. @Whatevz

    This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the new points system. Although I agree that that there had to be some sort of criteria a driver needed to meet to be in F1 so that the Maxt Chiltons and Marcus Ericssons of this world dont gate crash the party, perhaps this was a step too far.

    Ive always dreamed of the likes of Valentino Rossi and Seb Loeb racing in F1, just so that the world could see how good they fared at the “highest echelons” of motorsport..which is why Andre Lotterer’s drive at Spa last year was just awesome!

    1. Did Chilton and Ericsson really detract overly much from the racing this year? Enough of a problem to warrant this?

      Besides, it’s not as if the teams would go for inferior drivers unless they didn’t have a choice (See also: Sauber, who have had to turn to pay drivers as a matter of survival. That hasn’t really been their approach for most of their life). The money they brought enabled other drivers to run in a second seat who were picked more on what they could do with a car than their purse – Much like Diniz paying for Hills seat in 1997.

      If you don’t want pay drivers, don’t make them necessary. As it stands this may just drive up the costs to enter the chosen feeder series due to demand, having the very opposite effect.

      1. But Pay drivers have been part and parcel of F1 since forever, vast amounts of money was required to race from the start..unless you had a wealthy benefactor, or were hired by a works team, you couldnt and still cant go racing.

        However, it is the quality of the pay driver that is in question here. How many of them actually deserve to be in F1? Hence, this points system, or at least its intention, is to provide some kind of baseline, that allows only drivers who have performed consistently well in the 3 preceeding years to be considered for F1, salaried or pay drives.

        In an ideal world, with Marrussia and Caterham financed to Ferrari proportions, would they have hired Chilton and Ericsson respectively? Probably not…would Sauber have hired Nasr anyway? Probably yes..

    2. Mind you, Lotterer would still have more than comfortably qualified for an F1 seat under the new point system.

      As for Loeb being refused the opportunity to drive, Loeb gave an interview a few years later where he said that, in retrospect, the FIA’s decision to refuse him a superlicence was probably actually better for him – he has since decided that his physical fitness and stamina probably would not have been high enough for him to have competed a full season in F1 at full competitiveness.
      Rossi, meanwhile, never actually expressed that much enthusiasm for racing in F1 – whilst he did do some tests as publicity stunts, his main passion was, and remains, motorcycling, and he did not want to compete in another series which might have distracted him from that.

    3. I feel it does adress an important issue that drivers coming through so young aren’t giving the previous (current drivers) a chance to cement themselves a place in F1, Vergne being the real standout in this point, he had a decent year for TR, was in with a big shout of landing the RB drive for next year, instead he finds himself out of the sport, seems like the line between fortune and misfortune is very very narrow indeed, slowing down the guys getting to F1 will help ease this. So I do agree with a system of sorts however I feel it could be much simpler, any driver to earn a super licence through the junior categories must have either won the top feeder series and I would make GP2, WSR3.5 and the new F2 equal standing or have finished in the top 5 for 3 consecutive seasons. Also any driver deemed good enough to get a driver in another top tier should have access to a super liscence at the FIA’s discretion, so transferring from indycar, DTM would still be possible… Finally I would use a promotion system to get to GP2, F2 and WSR 3.5 based on results in lower categories. This has surely got to be the way forward.

  3. @whatevz great comment

    Now I really, really hope Verstappen will have a fantastic seaaon.

    1. Max wil do beter then most people think.He will kickass ans score points special in the wet raceses

  4. I know the new point system is not perfect, but by the nature of things, the series worth more points will be filled with more talented drivers and the series with less points will be filled with younger drivers. I also like it because better drivers will be heading to F1. Of course not every driver with a super license will be worthy for F1, but struggling teams will be picking pay drivers from a group of Palmer, Buemi and Lynn instead of Ericsson, Chilton and whatever rich kid can drive an F1 car for 300km and not crash. I also disagree with the statement that the system is bad because guys like Alonso and Ricciardo would not have qualified. If Alonso and Ricciardo were up and coming races in their teens today, then they would be learning their trade in series like GP2 and F2. Yes, extraordinary talents won’t have exceptions made for them, like Verstappen or Raikkonen for example, but weren’t those talents criticized for going to F1 too early in 2001 and 2014. In fact drivers like a certain Lewis Hamilton who would have had loads of points if this system was in place back then had no one saying he wasn’t ready for F1 after his first few Grand Prix.

    1. I know the new point system is not perfect, but by the nature of things, the series worth more points will be filled with more talented drivers and the series with less points will be filled with younger drivers

      @theo-hrp Uhmm… Can I be the cynical one? I get the feeling that series now worth more than just the experience and publicity will be a lot more attractive to people with money…

      1. @fer-no65 Yes but you have to still be successful in the feeder series to qualify for a super license. The below par drivers with huge backing will of course all want to race in GP2 and F3, but they will have to finish as a minimum 4th, 5th, 5th in GP2, and 4th, 4th, 3rd in F3 respectively. No longer can you turn up with a huge budget, do two seasons finishing just inside the top 10, then pay a team like Sauber to do 300Km and qualify for a Super License.

        It will hopefully mean that backers will place their money with young drivers who actually have a chance of finishing at the top of a feeder series, and therefore have a shot at F1. A team like Sauber will still have pay drivers, but at least they will be of a decent standard and therefore more likely to score points and not make stupid mistakes.

        Yes it favours certain series over others, but this will always have to be the case and people will always get upset when their series is deemed not as worthwhile. We can all have our opinions on which series is worth the most etc etc but at the end of the day something needed to be done and I think that this is a good step in that direction.

        Is it perfect? No, but then what is?!

        Will it benefit F1? Yes, I honestly think so.

        1. Point is, that GP2 is already too expensive for talents without backing from a huge sponsor @tthwaite and this will only urge FOM to even up their earnings/prices for competing in the future, making it even harder for a talented driver to succeed.

    2. Sergio N B Perez
      7th January 2015, 10:03

      Great comment. I also agree that these point systems benefit F1. I would probably add a suggestion to add certain legendary races to have exclusive points, like the Macau Grand Prix, Le Mans and Indy 500.

      As for those not happy for the Formula Renault 3.5 points, I see it this way: the points system merely prevents Formula Renault 3.5 to be an immediate step for F1, like a Karting season and immediate jump to FR 3.5 meaning immediate access to F1. It simply makes the step to GP3 / F3 essential, with relative success, so that a victory in F 3.5 allows access to f1. I think this is fair. As for the F4s and Renault 2.0 championships, well, these are really almost the bottom of the barrel. Personally think Formula 3 should be an essential part of a young F1 pretender career path, then either GP2 or F Renault 3.5 (or F2 if it eventually comes into existence…)

      1. Sergio N B Perez
        7th January 2015, 10:05

        Also think DTM and Japan Super GT should be in there somehow. Some great talent nurtures there, and those cars are practically formula cars in disguise…

        1. Mercedes hired a DTM kid…

        2. I agree. There will probably (hopefully) be some tweaking of the list to include other series in due course, but in principal it’s a good idea and a good starting point.

      2. I don’t agree with your assessment. FR2.0 is on F3 level, not F4 level. FR1.6 is the one on F4 level.

        The FR1.6/FR2.0/FR3.5 ladder has proven to be a very good ladder to make people ready for F1. It should be sufficient to perform well in these to make it to F1.

        There is absolutely no reason why winning F3 is in itself sufficient for a superlicence, whereas winning FR3.5 is not sufficient and even winning FR2.0 and back-to-back doesn’t deliver enough points.
        FR3.5 is pretty much on the level of GP2. Yet winning GP2 is enough and FR3.5 nowhere near.

        It simply makes no sense. This is a very poor execution.

        Aside from that, GP2 is a lot more expensive than FR3.5 and it has already become a playground for experienced drivers with lots of money who drive there for 4-5 years in the hope of winning it and making it to F1. So this ruling could backfire as well: talented drivers without as much backing will have a much harder time because they can’t take the cheaper Renault route anymore and need to take part in GP2.

        1. To be honest, I would say that this system only makes sense if it applies to junior series as well.

          So, over that 3 years, you need (as an example) the same number of points as a 5th place in that championship. This would prevent the drivers who have rich backers but little talent from locking out the highest points championships, and make the more talented drivers more attractive to backers (as they are more likely to make it to the higher levels).

          Unfortunately, the FIA don’t run all the series so they can’t do this. Unless of course, they made it a requirement that they do it to make the series eligible to score points.

    3. I also think this sytem is a change for the good, but the points awarded to some series have to be changed.

    4. I have to say I was also pleased to see the push for a more clear ladder to F1 with weighting “F2”, F3, etc. But it seems premature to come out with the points system when there has to be so much changed to make those the premiere feeders series’ (like one not even existing yet!). That I just don’t understand.

    5. Well said, Theo Parkinson.

  5. I have to say, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some sort of illegalities involved in the exclusion of FR3.5 and Indy Lights from the points system. Don’t know what sort of laws govern the FIA, but surely it could be classed as anti-competitive.

    Obviously I don’t have a law degree and have little knowledge of these things, but if there wasn’t some way that the management for these series couldn’t threaten some kind of legal action. After all, it is a large part of their business (in the case of FR3.5 at least, much less so Indy Lights) to breed racing drivers for F1.

    1. That’s the kind of case European Commission likes to have a look, legislators in Strasbourg and EU officials in Brussels could be great allies to some series now.

    2. I agree, pretty dodgy and clearly giving an unfair competative advantage to FOMs toys GP2/GP3 (well and a maybe future FIA F2 championship – maybe this is the start of the FIA granting someone to operate that for a big chunk of money) @vmaxmuffing, @jcost.

  6. I’ve been thinking about the points system and I got the impression that it will cause more harm than good.

    WSR3.5 will suffer hard because FIA’s system is an effective Price Schedule. Sponsors will push prices down making the life of series managers a bit harder, in 10 years time we will have one or two healthy feeder series and a bunch of moribund formulas trying hard to get by.

    1. Well said @jcost, I think that is exactly what will be happening – and the series that get more points might also get stocked with well sponsored people, not with talent that needs to find funds, meaning that less, not more talent will be available for F1.

  7. Fritz Oosthuizen (@)
    7th January 2015, 6:49

    Would maldonado have had a superlicence? What does that tell you?

    1. ColdFly F1 (@)
      7th January 2015, 10:25

      not sure – he still had to pass the theoretical test ;-)

    2. @fritzoos He won GP2, so yes.

    3. I still don’t get a lot of the hate towards Maldonado.

      The guy’s won an F1 race & been in contention for a few more podiums in the 1 season in F1 where he had a half competitive car (2012) & On top of that he’s won races & been very competitive in most of the category’s he’s competed in & did win the GP2 championship in 2010 beating guys like Sergio Perez & Jules Bianchi so he’s clearly got enough talent to warrant an F1 seat.

      1. Yup. He might be a controversial driver, but the fact that he would have qualified for the Superlicence doesn’t mean these rules are worthless. It actually rather implies more people should question their criticism of Maldonado.

      2. I’m not a fan of Maldonado, but I see the hate towards him like some kind of trend, like saying that Kobayashi is awesome or Hulkenberg deserving a top seat.

        1. Had you Hülkenberg with Räikkönen, I might have agreed wholeheartedly.

          1. * had you replaced

  8. We can fairly say that the 2016 regulation will prevent forever women to race F1 cars, the same for brilliant people from all other series. We can predict that all pay drivers will go to the series that will allow an f1 ticket. What will be the global outcome? To prevent one verstappen and one chilton, and in order to exist, Todt uses the weapon that we french are so proud, regulate a mountain for tiny or non existent problems, therefore begining a war between regulations and loopholes exploited by people who can afford to find them. Surely 17 years is too young for these machinery (or it means that they are no different than gran turismo), maybe one year experience in a very large panel of series would be ok, but to believe that this will work like football with divisions is totally naive. F1 share an equal part of entairtment, brand exposure and sport, we see moving machine and as long as there is no danger to let somebody drive these machine, let the constructors of this very expensive machine put who they want

    1. > We can fairly say that the 2016 regulation will prevent forever women to race F1 cars,

      How come? I think I’ve missed something.

  9. I think the point system will need some tweaking over time to counter act destructive trends, especially that FR3.5 isn’t on the same level as F3 bothers me a bit too, besides the exclusion of LMP2, but I still like the basic idea.
    Reason is that I’ve been watching F1 since the late 80s and while pay drivers were always part of the sport and some young guys always got a chance from time to time but the trend of giving inexperienced drivers permanent seats resp. have pay drivers for the whole season is something that needs to be countered and this system definitely addresses it. Will it work? – I don’t know – but at least it’s a start and if it doesn’t they can always change it.

  10. Another perfect example of answering a question nobody asked! I can imagine that for safety reason one adds regulation to expect a certain level of experience, but why should FiA enter the part about quality of drivers; this should be at the discretion of teams?

    I just hope Verstappen would have a magnificent season and particularly free of dangerous incidents for himself and others to really leave FIA with eggs on their face.

    1. The question asked was the problem of pay drivers and drivers spending too little time in junior categories.

      1. @paeschli

        drivers spending too little time in junior categories

        Why is that a problem?

        Drivers arriving in F1 with too little experience might be a problem, but I don’t think there’s any evidence to prove it is. Did the likes of Kevin Magnussen and Daniil Kvyat have more crashed in their debut seasons last year than their predecessors ten years ago?

        1. Agreed! and don’t forget Kimi who is a multiple F1 race winner and World Champion and he had what? 27 pro races before joining the F1 grid?

        2. @keithcollantine

          But is it a bad idea to make a GP2 or a WSR3.5 season obligatory? No, if a driver is talented, he will thrive in those two categories two. When I was talking about spending too little time in junior categories, I had Verstappen in mind. No one can argue this should never happen again, whether Verstappen will be succesful in F1 next year or not. This move is all about Red Bull wanting to make the headlines while an extra season in GP2 or a WSR3.5 wouldn’t hurt him.

          But all that is secondary to the main problem I was talking about: pay drivers.

          1. @paeschli

            But is it a bad idea to make a GP2 or a WSR3.5 season obligatory?

            I don’t agree that the rules specifically do that, particularly in the case of Formula Renault 3.5, in which they discourage participation compared to other championships.

            What I object to is the FIA telling teams how to pick drivers. It should be for them to decide who’s good enough to race in F1 – that’s part of the sport.

            This move is all about Red Bull wanting to make the headlines

            I don’t agree for one moment that Red Bull have put Verstappen or whoever of their previous drivers in F1 “to make headlines” – they’ve done it because they think he’s good enough to earn the chance.

            While it’s clear most of Toro Rosso’s drivers ultimately haven’t been considered good enough to race for Red Bull, not one of them was unsuitable to participate in F1.

            Of course I agree teams should be discouraged from hiring pay drivers but that discouragement should come from the fact that they know they won’t be competitive with them. Instead, because the sport’s prize money is so unfairly distributed, and because the richer teams have blocked cost-cutting measures, smaller teams increasingly have to turn to pay drivers.

            This is what the FIA should be trying to fix. But as usual they reached for the sticking plasters instead of the cure.

  11. ColdFly F1 (@)
    7th January 2015, 8:29

    I agree with most that the points system is over-regulated and somewhat artificial.

    But there is some logic to such a requirement as well.
    Look at many football/soccer leagues. In most instances you have to go through the ascending leagues and classify near the top to be promoted to the highest level league!

    1. No, not true. It’s the Teams that have to go through ascending leagues, not the individual players. Talent spotters sell or elevate promising players directly from being unknown to joining Premiership teams on ability alone.
      Racing teams might have to test their management and organisational ability in other formulae (Haas, Manor etc) first. Drivers should only have to prove their safety and competence apart from demonstrating their overwhelming natural talent.

  12. I find it laughable that the experienced F1 drivers get annoyed with young drivers “driving like they’re in GP2” making needless contact when they get wheel to wheel yet now the FIA’s saying drivers need to spend more time in these formulae. Well, I guess it worked for Maldonado…

  13. Thomas Christensen
    7th January 2015, 9:36

    What I couldn’t (and still can’t) understand throughout the whole administration debacle was why Marussia’s creditors seemingly did not even try to collectively bargain with the administrators to reach an agreement about funding the team’s participation for the last couple of races in order to then claim the prize money. There’s always questions of taxes, other expenses etc., and obviously funding the last couple of races would cost some as well, so it’s perhaps unlikely that the £35 mio. prize money would actually have covered Marussia’s entire deficit at the end of the season, but I can only think that the team would be in a much better financial position to pay off their creditors with that prize money than they are now.

    When Marussia went into administration shortly after Caterham I thought it was more or less a convenient way to save money (by not racing) whilst maintaining their position in the championship and hold on to their prize money. I thought they would eventually do just what was necessary to get the prize money. After all, if they were already £31 mio. in the hole, it seemed a bit arbitrary to pull the plug just before a more-or-less guaranteed sizeable cash payout.

    1. AFAIK, the only way for them to claim prize money for last season (2014) is to race this season (2015). As there are regulation changes, this would mean a lot of work designing a new car, crash testing it and building it. I don’t know how much of this season they must take part in: I would guess a significant amount, as if it was just 1 race, I would expect that the prize payout would be able to cover minimal development to comply with the regulation changes (not worrying about being competitive)

      1. ColdFly F1 (@)
        7th January 2015, 10:23

        Correct they have to race 2015 to get the £35M price money.

        Running another year will be quite expensive (I recall from an earlier article that Marussia spent some $60-65M over the 2014 season).

        However, with the new FIA points system they can potentially create a new source of income. Aspiring 2016 F1 drivers for who have no chance in hell to get the required 40 pts could buy 5 race entries in a 2015 Marussia!
        Or for an extra couple of $M buy 15 race entries which gives them a Super Licence for 3 years!

  14. @whatevz A lack of interdisciplinary guest appearances in F1 is the least concerning issue with a system that has some major issues…

    a) It is fatal for FR3.5, a series that arguably has a better record in producing F1 frontrunners than GP2 – The mere thirty points allocated for a championship victory means that an additional ten must be found elsewhere.
    b) Poorer junior drivers will never have a chance – The Oliver Rowlands of the world who cannot afford a full season in the highly scoring series such as GP2 can give up on F1 hopes.
    c) The music has stopped in the pay driver market – Since Sauber and Lotus rely on driver sponsorship as an income stream, and since the points system effectively kills the pay driver market, Ericsson, Nasr and Maldonado can feel safe in their jobs.
    d) It could kill teams reliant on driver sponsorship – again it is Lotus and Sauber that I speak of. Are pay drivers not worth it if they keep teams on the grid?
    e) It pours millions in driver programme investment down the drain – Red Bull’s GP3/FR3.5 system is no longer viable, nor is Mercedes’ method of using their DTM squad as a feeder for Mercedes powered teams. One can imagine McLaren is hurriedly trying cancel a direct debit to the DAMS FR3.5 team and place De Vries in GP2 instead.
    f) It promotes skills irrelevant to F1 – The FIA now appears to be of the opinion that weaving in and out of GTE traffic or being competent on an oval is more important the speed, consistency and downforce confidence promoted by FR3.5 or GP3.
    g) It is gratuitously skewed in the FIA’s favour – I will say no more than point out the fact that a FR3.5 championship victory is worth half an FIA F2 championship victory, and that DTM, the series that gave us Paul di Resta and probably boasts the finest grid of drivers outside F1, is not recognised at all.

    Is all of this destruction really necessary just to cement the status of FIA F2, Jean?

    1. I’m going to say it: this policy is even worse than double points.

    2. Agree with your points regarding the new points/superlicense system. It is completely self serving of course and on one additional level as well. It somewhat removes potential liability from the FIA by not granting exceptions to drivers, like Raikkonen for example. Raikkonen obviously proved himself worthy in F1, so no exposure for the FIA there. But, what if they were to allow an exception to a very young under-experienced driver who then had a terrible accident involving injury or death? The FIA legal team were likely terrified of the liability prospects with such a vetting system as it was.

      So, the FIA now has a marketing tool that promotes the hand picked series they favor and the lawyers are happier to have a bit less exposure than previous.

      All in all, a fair and verifiable system to establish credentials to race in F1 is a laudable exercise. These new regulations are transparently self serving and really do little good, if any, toward improving the sport of F1.

  15. I have just realised another issue with the points system for a superlicense.

    A possible route into F1 at the moment is to become a test driver for a team. While this does not always (often?) work, I think it is seen as a last resort for drivers struggling to get in.

    Lets say you amass your required points and are taken on by a big team as a test driver for a year. They clock up a lot of miles in the simulator and in practise sessions. One of the team’s drivers quits at the end of the year, but the next year the test driver doesn’t have enough points to take the seat (dues to points dropping out of the 3-year window), and hasn’t started any races. He has a large amount of experience in the car, albeit not race experience, and has made the cut points-wise for last year, but is barred from taking up the vacant seat at his team.

    1. point well made too @drmouse. If testing restrictions didn’t make being a testdriver a way to stall your career, this will put the nail in the coffin for good

    2. @drmouse You need a superlicense to participate in official practice sessions, so in theory this would not be an issue.

  16. why should Honda have to play by last years rules? If they would have joined last year, would they have been able to run a V8 engine?

  17. Surely Renault can insight legal action against the FIA for this system?

    1. My thoughts too @CountryGent . Surely this could be viewed as anti competitive (in business terms, not racing!) and the FIA are abusing their position in an attempt to enforce their monopoly.

      I think its the Competition & Markets Authority in the UK but I suppose it would depend on local law, presumably French, if Renault were to attempt to take action.

      1. @countrygent @s-w-webb1 As an international entity, surely it’s another ‘EU’ thing. But alas, a UK MEP has failed to really get any cromulent response out of them despite two decent-sized companies going bust with a loss of ~500 jobs because of the current regime, so what hope would an auto manufacturer have about a sporting matter?

        1. I wouldn’t be so sure that it did nothing @optimaximal. Its just that action from the EU might come a year after the facts.

      2. @optimaximal @s-w-webb1 @bascb The EU does have a charter in which it sets out the “ethics” of commercial conduct, and since both Renault and the FIA are organizations that pay tax within the EU, it is a dispute within the EU’s jurisdiction. It appears to me that Renault’s single seater motorsport division is commercially dependent on the FIA, a mutually beneficial relationship before now, with Renault providing the FIA with young F1 stars, and the FIA provides young Renault drivers with a target to aspire to: a contract may have even been signed between the two parties.

        However even without a contract, if Renault can prove that the FIA has been previously obliging to a business model requiring their cooperation, and that there is little justification for this association to end, Renault may have a case to block this policy. I would imagine it would also have support from Red Bull and Mercedes, whose junior investments are all but burnt to cinders by this system, and ITR, the organizers of the DTM, a series completely ignored altogether by the FIA: powerful allies.

  18. So the year after going to Bernie for some money in exchange for rulemaking powers over F1, the previously cash-strapped FIA launches regulatory changes forcing drivers (and their paying sponsors) to spend more time and to actually be successful in junior formulae, the FIA’s series in particular.

    This should force the new Maldonados of the world to spend more money trying to be successful in the FIA-backed series promoting competition at that level and a long term increase in revenue for the cash strapped FIA protecting it in case something were to happen to the Strategy Group fund.

    Politically, on the one hand it provides the FIA with more control of F1 by controlling the influx of it’s entrants and also putting itself in position to take the reins back from the Strategy Group should the EU see any issue with the current setup. The remaining privateer teams would likely have been eradicated by this point anyway which will probably be the natural end for that group. On the other hand it does at least remove some of the headaches seen over the past few seasons with money issues at private teams making the news and drivers seen to be paying large amounts for test drives to keep them afloat.

  19. If the FIA go on like this, there won’t be any drivers left eligible to race in F1 in 10 years! Or maybe that’s the plan, they clearly feel they don’t have enough control, it’s the only explanation for these stupid rules they keep implementing.

  20. I can see what the FIA are trying to do with the points qualification system but as it stands I think at best it needs some major modifications and at worst it’s a complete write-off. Surely they can see that a system which denies the likes of Ricciardo, Di Resta, and going further back Button, Raikkonen, and even Senna (Ayrton) a chance at F1 cannot be right (yes I just wrote Di Resta and Senna in the same sentence, deal with it!). A few people have already pointed out there are serious ‘weighting’ issues in that some categories are overvalued, some undervalued and some not valued at all. Another problem I have is that under this system results can mean everything, and circumstances nothing. There is no place for talent spotting in a system where many of the most talented drivers may be driving in uncompetitive teams or just had horrible luck causing them to lose places and vital qualifying points which could leave them short of the 40 point requirement.

    The aim of the system I guess is to reduce the impact of pay drivers on F1 and allow only the successful (usually meaning more talented) drivers to qualify for their superlicense. But even this could cause an issue for the teams which currently rely on pay drivers. If they are forced to take lesser funded drivers it could cause another dent in their finances which they almost certainly cannot afford given how expensive it is to field an F1 team these days. In a perfect world, the sponsors currently backing ‘pay drivers’ would be forced to support the ‘talented drivers’ if they wanted exposure in F1 – but this may not necessarily be the case.

  21. With the new rules, less-talent-more-money drivers can go get a seat in GP2, get the required points (maybe multiple seasons) and become a pay driver in F1. And we’re still to face what FIA has in store in form of F2.
    These rules can effectively stop talented drivers making it to F1 and can also kill some racing series.

  22. Interesting formulation here in light of the questions over ufair competition within F1 / by the FIA already having been raised:

    McLaren’s engine supplier Honda has called for “fair competition” in F1 after it emerged last week that it would not be allowed to exploit a loophole in the rules regarding engine development this season.

    Read more at http://en.espnf1.com/mclaren/motorsport/story/188471.html#WdKDJpFFATuXgOjK.99

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