[Journeyer]

Totally random F1 idea: a championship for engines.

It would work just like the constructors: the top 2 drivers per engine-maker will score points. But there’s a twist: the 2 drivers must come from DIFFERENT teams. So for example, you can’t have two Mercedes drivers score points towards Mercedes in the Engines Championship. One will come from Mercedes, but the other will come from the next best team (Williams, for example). If the engine maker provides engines to only one team (like Honda probably will next year), they will only have one car score towards the Engines Championship per race. This will encourage engine makers to provide the same level of high-quality engines to not just the works team, but to customer team/s as well.

What do you think? Is this idea too crazy? Or can this idea, with some tweaking, become a fully effective championship?

[Iestyn Davies]

Interesting idea. I don’t know about individual races, but you could easily have something like the ‘Pole trophy’ for engines – a winner of each race and then an overall winner.

Looking at history, I noticed that there are a handful of usual ‘winning’ engines, going by WCC:
Ferrari, Ford (Cosworth), Renault, Mercedes, Honda, Climax, Porsche (TAG), Vanwall, BRM and Repco, with the last 5 being historic. Add in the BMW from the Turbo/recent era and that’s a good engine set to pick from. There are also non-winners like Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Lamborghini or Toyota, or a new (old) brand to introduce, like Bugatti.

But, from a success POV, you can see historically that the most likely 5 for F1 are Ferrari, Mercedes, Renault, Honda and Ford/Cosworth, if they returned (if not them, then one of the VAG group – possibly Porsche, or recently Toyota or BMW). With the current rules, it’s hard to see there being more than 4 or 5 engine manufacturers at all – but you probably only need 3 to provide a decent level of competition and reduced costs for the teams.

[Author]

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