Two-tier engine supply a “dangerous route”

2015 F1 season

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F1 team principals are concerned a proposal to allow teams to buy year-old engines at a reduced price would be a “dangerous route”.

Sauber team principal Monisha Kaltenborn warned it could lead to having two difference classes of teams. “We would not support anything which leads to a two-tier system,” she said in today’s FIA press conference.

Manor already uses year-old Ferrari power units
Kaltenborn also cautioned against the move as it might pave the way for similar arrangements around chassis, creating the kind of ‘customer car’ scenario many of the sport’s smaller teams have long opposed.

“It’s a dangerous route and we should make sure that it is not a precedent for other areas,” she added.

Franz Tost backed her view. “I’m totally against the usage of a one-year-old engine,” said the Toro Rosso chief, “because then we have a two-class team on the grid and this will not close the gap [to Mercedes], this will even increase the gap.”

“Then we have, I don’t know, five, six, seven cars which are running away, we will have after ten laps, 30 seconds gap and races will become totally boring.”

Mercedes motorsport director Toto Wolff also said he was “not a fan” of having two different engines. “You don’t want to have two classes of competitors,” he agreed.

However he pointed out that allowing teams to run older engines at a lower price could help them invest money elsewhere in their infrastructure, as Manor has done this year with its 2014 Ferrari power units.

“But if you can supply an engine for a much cheaper price because you can run it longer on less harder power levels and the difference in price is considerable you can give somebody a choice,” he said.

“I don’t think that many teams are going to take that up,” Wolff added. “We just wanted to throw another possibility into the game, not expecting that it would generate lots of interest.”

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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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24 comments on “Two-tier engine supply a “dangerous route””

  1. Why don’t they have like F1 used to have, teams that ran turbo-charged engines and non-turbo engines, then make them equal power in bhp and then, those struggling or up coming teams could go non-turbo till which time they could change to turbo engines. It would make sense, rather that 1 or 2 year old engines.

    1. The thing is, when they last tried running turbocharged and normally aspirated engines under an equivalency formula in F1, the system did not work particularly well – the turbocharged engines were still fairly dominant.

      If you were to equalise the power output of the engines, I suspect that the higher fuel efficiency of the current turbocharged engines – which would shave a considerable amount off the initial fuel weight – would make them overwhelmingly dominant.

      Furthermore, would a normally aspirated engine necessarily be all that much cheaper than the current turbocharged engines? The prices of the V8 engines were artificially held down, but even so they were not that much cheaper than the turbocharged engines.

      1. I don’t understand why the fia went down this route at all. Why did the fia (a motorsports organisation) design an engine and then tell engine suppliers (who design and make engines for a living) to make them?

        Why didn’t they say to the engine manufacturers

        ‘You can use 100kg of fuel(diesel, petrol, ethanol, carrot juice) and as much energy recovery as you want’
        And then let them design their own engine it is after all what they are good at!

        1. +1
          Totally agree,
          Must be hybrid with energy recovery and no more than 100kgs of fuel used during the race. Let the manufacturers come up with weird and wonderful innovations, which is what a lot of us enjoy about f1.

          1. @chris (whoever?) “Which is what a lot of us used to enjoy”!

        2. it’s not really like that. You see F1 is limited to 100kg/hr, WEC is limited to 93+ Kg/h, it’s how the FIA keeps things orderly.

          The 100kg over race distance is for show, it’s to promote an ethos. It also punishes non factory teams, just as the fuel restrictions in MotoGP. A lot of people seem to be ignoring this commonality between those two series. Both of which are now exceptionally dominated by the manufacturers, and the independents are being left by the wayside to beg for hand outs, MotoGP is about 6 years ahead.

          You could say the major manufacturers have always had a strong foothold in F1, but teams like McLaren could still fight for wins, not any more, well they tried to get around the current rule set, but it seems to be punishing them even more. This is progress, if your last name is Stalin.

        3. that would be too much like common sense for formula one!!!

    2. because Bernie is dead set against it no matter how incredibly awesome it would be. they could even offer a couple of Constructors points for efficiency and longevity! How cool would it be to Audi rocking a diesel?

      1. you mean the engine that will be named as “audi f1 tdi bluemotion quttrosonic” diesel?

  2. If the new engines are costing upwards of £15 million, which means for some teams that’s between 20-50% of their budget, yeah, I could see investing elsewhere possibly having payoffs. It’s probably worth considering in a year or two once the engines have been developed more extensively and you start seeing diminishing returns.

  3. We’ve already got a 4 (or more) tier F1 anyway, so I don’t quite understand the problem.
    Mercedes and Ferrari are in a class of their own.
    Red Bull and Williams are behind them.
    Force India, Sauber, STR and Lotus are struggling to keep up.
    McLaren and Marussia are bringing up the rear.

    F1 has never had a level playing field, the works teams will always have an advantage over customers, if using year old engines can save the customer teams a few million pounds a year that they could invest elsewhere then it looks like a good option to me. The manufacturers should always have to supply the latest version of the engines at a fixed cost if the customer wants it, but the customers should have the option of taking an older, cheaper version, if that’s what they want.

    1. I completely agree. F1 has never been entirely equal, so if a team is prepared to put up with a performance deficit by buying last year’s power plant at a reduced price – all well and good. Perhaps they expect to make up ground in the tortoise/hare manner, or perhaps that’s as far as their budget stretches.
      I’d rather see a full grid in those terms rather than a depleted grid in any other. The only other viable alternative that I can imagine is a ‘spec’ series. Just imagine a full grid of W06 cars!

    2. @beneboy, agreed, question ; As a team owner would you rather be running 2014 MB engines or (A) 2015 Honda or (B) 2015 Renault engines.

    3. I’m more concerned about the loss of the wind tunnel and having spec gearboxes. The wind tunnels have already been built and are already integral to the teams so dropping them isn’t going to save anyone money and face it, as Monisha said, they’ll likely be reintroduced anyway.

      And spec gearboxes is just one more step closer to a spec series and that is NOT F1. Not at all. It’s bad enough there is no testing and engine developments is frozen (or mostly frozen if you still have tokens, lol).

      Fingers crossed the World Motor Sport Counsel laugh these ideas right off the block!

  4. Surely last years engines cost the same to build as this years engines? in fact it will cost the engine suppliers more because they’ll have to keep the tooling for the old engines setup. It would make more sense to sell the customers a detuned version of this years engine if the goal is to provide a cheaper option for the smaller teams.

    1. Teams usually have an engine surplus at the end of the season. The engines that Manor are using this year are all surplus engines from the Ferrari stores.

    2. @sam, Unless they have thrown a rod through the block or something similarly catastrophic it is merely a matter of re-building old engines rather than building engines from scratch.

  5. US outlets reporting today that VAG is buying RBR. Maybe that’s the solution to the engine/manufacturer shortage issue.

    1. Even if it’s true (Volkswagen in F1 has been going on forever as a rumour, so it’s definitely a case of ‘seeing is believing’), it’d hardly solve all problems.

      Renault is either going to leave or buy Lotus. Let’s go for a best case scenario, the Volkswagen group buys RBR, Renault buys Lotus. While Lotus can switch to Renault engines instantly, Red Bull would have to go to an interim engine partner. Toro Rosso also needs a different engine partner.

      With Manor possibly changing to Mercedes power, Mercedes would stay at 4 teams. Ferrari would drop to three teams, meaning they can only supply either RBR or STR in the current regulations. It’s also likely it’s difficult to produce engines for more than 4 teams right now. Honda is unlikely to supply either Red Bull team, so that’d leave us at regulation and capacity changes.

      If Volkswagen buys RBR, it’s to be seen if they supply other teams, too. We could still end up with one Renault team, one Honda team, one Volkswagen team and the rest is consigned to Ferrari or Mercedes customer engines.

      If they’re going to change the engine regulations, hopefully they’ll do so in a manner that attracts more suppliers, because as much as I like Ferrari, I don’t fancy an F1 2016 season with 6 teams using their engines..

  6. I really don’t get the trouble the teams have with a two tier engine supply. It’s an unspoken rule that works teams have newer engines than customers anyway.

    Of course, F1 has backed itself into a corner with the current engine regs, hence a team like Sauber, Manor, Force India or Lotus can do little to convince a new manufacturer to supply them. I don’t mind the idea of the current power units, but how they’ve managed to only lose engine suppliers since 2003 and only had Honda return (poorly) is a testament that even the current regulations just are not allowing new parties to enter F1.

    It’s suit the teams if they’d talk about the greater issues, instead of just complaining that the parties currently involved don’t want to hold their hand and tell them they’re pretty.

    1. @npf1

      It’s an unspoken rule that works teams have newer engines than customers anyway.

      Last year they had the same specification all year long. And we wouldn’t have had the situation of Mercedes having newer engines than their customers in Italy (or Ferrari relative to Sauber in Canada) had they not allowed in-season upgrades, a situation which is set to revert back next year.

  7. A perfect storm brewing. Bernie didn’t help Lotus from the goodness of his heart. His outrageous track fees are to guarantee a full field. With engines in the air and Redbull threatening to pull out 4 cars, Bernie may shortly get to find out what it’s like to be a pay driver.

  8. Actually I thought the idea of having a two-tier price made a lot of sense!

    It would be dangerous ONLY allowing customers to have a one year old engine, but if they can pay a bit more for a current engine, why not? What’s the problem there – particularly if the newer engine is still much cheaper than it currently is? Seems like a reasonable idea to me, and gives a more achievable platform to the newer teams and the ability to progress up to a more current engine later.

    If Tost and Kalternborn are so worried then pay the extra £3m for the newer engine, which in itself will still be £6-11m cheaper than currently.

    I’ve got sympathy for the smaller teams, but there’s “sympathy” and then there’s “trying my patience”.

  9. I’m happy that even the ones that could profit with this LeMans style destruction of the rulebook is not going forward.

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