Now that the Formula One group is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange in New York, there is a solid argument that all of its financial dealings should be made public. The payments made to the teams are a key part of the system but until recently it has been very difficult to figure it all out because teams were so terrified of revealing anything. They have, after all, agreed to impressive confidentiality agreements as part of their contracts, but nowadays it seems they are less worried about retribution and so the numbers have become easier to find. This is not to say it’s easy and having someone to help is still essential, but there is less paranoia now. Once you know the system (and its many quirks) and the overall figure in the pot, one can calculate the revenue splits – as has been done in recent days. This information being made public is clearly something that is in the interest of the teams which think the system is unfair, and so they have revealed how the system works.
The thing about news leaks is that they are almost always done for a reason and the journalists involved need to understand why they are being manipulated and what impact the news is intended to have. Most don’t care. A story is a story and the impact not deemed relevant. ‘Exclusives’ drive traffic and are good for those who need recognition.
In this case, the leaks have clearly come from the disadvantaged because they want the world to see the system is unfair and for it to be changed. The big teams may be able to hide the numbers in their own accounts, but this is now useless. Will the press coverage change the situation? Or will it disillusion fans? The system has been unfair for many years, but it has not changed and unless someone rules it to be illegal then it will continue until the end of the contract, in December 2020.
The discussion now is what to do after that and obviously there is pressure for Ferrari (the Longest Standing Team) to give up its five percent ‘off the top’ share of the revenues, and for the other big teams to give up their pay-offs, which were disguised in various ways to justify them.
There is nothing wrong with the Column 1 and 2 prize money, which are basically percentage scales of payment for attendance and for results. Other funds are more dubious, such as the Constructors’ Championship Bonus, which gives the three teams which have won most races over a four-year period a big financial boost ($37 million, $33 million and $30 million). The Double Championship bonus of $35 million per year is arguable, but it would be wiser for the sport to do away with all these anachronisms and simply divide the money on an equitable basis, allowing for a small element of performance advantage.
The venerable old teams get more sponsorship, more merchandising and so in. They have innate advantages from their brand-building over the years. They don’t need more. The fact that they were given additional money was because they traded their political support for cash.
It is completely wrong that companies like Ferrari and Mercedes should have most of their F1 bills paid when their smaller opposition is fighting to survive. They will not agree to change that – turkeys don’t vote for Christmas – but a fair system, with budgets capped, would be so much better for the sport, not only in terms of finances, but also because it would probably improve the racing as well – and make it easier to promote. It would also make it more likely that other manufacturers would come. An even playing field is always attractive…
joeblogsf1 
Queue Ferrari to leave F1 stories.
Absolutely agree Joe. Perhaps all this talk of tweaking aerodynamics to get more overtaking misses the point. If we want more overtaking, one pretty obvious way to get it is to increase the number of cars racing. And that’s pretty unlikely to happen while F1 finance is so perversely skewed.
If you want more overtaking ban the blue flag. Make them fight for it and drivers that can’t overtake a back marker will be overtaken by drivers who can.
Agreed, there should be no need to jump out of the way, you are racing just as much for 10th as 1st. The leader doesn’t get the blue flagged if they are being unlapped. Blatant weaving should be off limits but robust defence yes please.
+1 – was ridiculous when Grosjean was being shown blue flags in China when Verstappen was never within a second of him. Loved the days when a lapped teammate would hold a car up to allow his sister car to catch up or get away from the competitor being detained. There were also times when the lapped car would act as a ‘rear gunner’ and help defend his leading teammate from a faster competitor too.
well, depends — in the last stage of a deciding race, there should be blue flags
+1…..always happy to vote for retro ideas!
right
Agree. And the cars should all be competitive, so a more even / sportive distribution of prize money is key (rather than standardization of parts)
If the payments were fair and the regs written correctly would the budget caps really be needed?
If the likes of Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull want more staff and to pay for the best drivers then let them spend the extra sponsorship they earn if they want to and the parent companies are happy not to make a profit.
The prize money should be split so there is only 20 million difference between 1st and 10th. Which would level the playing field out and should give the small teams enough budget to survive.
Then create regs that limit aero spending without having to resort to a cap. Engines are a fixed cost now for non manufacturer teams and although teams complain they are too high it still presents a level playing field. Where the midfield teams lose out and go bust is the unprecedented, constant and wasteful aero development race. Why not develop rules similar to WEC. You’re only allowed so many configurations that have to be homologated before first use but each team can nominate when they introduce their updates to suit them. I’d suggest a maximum of 4 updates a year. Like engine rules any further changes means grid penalties.
This should also stop those teams who push the rules until they get caught and get told to remove a part, as any ruling on a part needing to be removed would force a team to use their allocation or face being excluded from the next race.
agree
Engines might be a fixed cost now but they are still way too expensive. It’s unfair to expect the smaller teams to keep picking up the tab.
not necessarily too expensive
With all this talk (off topic) of aero, I’d like to see two races, Sat & Sun. Sat race with aero parts removed (or what I suggested years ago, each team has a hammer and gets two hits on any other car and by the end we race) and then Sundays race carries on from Sat, as it is now with full aero. (I’d love to see Mr. Newey staring at cars with hammer in hand) Lets spice it up.
Inevitable and roll on the new F1. Sad the Manor boys could not make it to this point – Banbury is missing their upstart/disruptive energy. Haas is a slick operation but it’s not quite the same.
Joe, have your sources indicated how much it costs for a race team to turn-up to 20-21 races arround the world each season? Surely this is the number that needs to be in column one. Given your own costs, I just cannot believe that the costs for Sauber and Haas are met by $36million
There also needs to be a flat rate sum for a sensible contribution towards an engine supply contract that keeps everyone happy.
Then with a sensible cap for chassis development, a success bonus per point is the only other element that needs to be addressed, so that Liberty can start to help circuits to be able to hold a successful event and even turn a small profit.
The current historic bribe payments are just obscene. As, of course, is the size of the fee that FOM (Liberty) takes for itself.
In Sauber’s case you can add some extra for their pay drivers, plus the sponsors on their car. Owners may dip into their pockets where necessary (although unlikely).
Travel costs are covered by FOM I believe. For flyaway races the British teams fly out of London, with Ferrari, Sauber and TR flying from Munich.
Saubers shortfall is the reason for pay drivers, and Haas will be covered by Haas parent company and from their perspective will be deemed marketing costs. Think of it like Red Bull…..there to win races, but they want to win races to sell their product.
Some travel costs
This is why it is specious to compare FOM “team payments”, ~50% of revenue, with talent payments in other sports, e.g., NFL, which is about 48% of NFL revenue. For NFL players those payments represents pure “profit” (income) and has no associated expenses. Not true for F1 teams. The total team payments in F1 does not come close to covering total team expenses. In fact, FOM could hand over 100% of F1 revenue to the teams and engine suppliers and still not cover their operating expenses.
The issue in Formula 1 (and all professional racing) is out-of-control spending.
I estimate that FOM payments cover only about one-third of total spending by the F1 teams and their engine suppliers. Obviously this varies by team, but that’s the average.
It obviously depends on the team, some get more than half from FOM
Or attract even more charlatans ?
they need to apply to FIA — and set uo a team beforehand
It is not a fair approach to say this but CCB is a way to fund F1’s star drivers. Obviously it means that Sauber wouldn’t be able to afford Sebastian Vettel but does he drive better because he is being paid a truckload money and not ‘just’ a few millions? I agree that the current system is heavily biased but it IMHO does not translate to R&D and competitiveness automatically. Ferrari’s extra 68 million is questionable but would 6.8 million dollars solve Sauber’s or Force India’s troubles?
/CCB is a way to fund F1’s star drivers/
Why should a winning team have additional advantage to get funds to hire top drivers?
As I stated at the beginning, it may not be a fair approach. Obviously it gives advantage but not necessarily a huge one in itself.
“The venerable old teams get more sponsorship, more merchandising and so in. They have innate advantages from their brand-building over the years. They don’t need more.”
As true as the latter sentence is, McLaren is (and Williams were) struggling to find suitably high-falutin’ brands to go with their venerable status. McLaren are a shambles, branding wise.
he meant “successful teams” I guess (Williams got some decent sponsorship and McLaren has Honda money and Alonso merchandise)
“Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”… Except twice in 2016, and probably June 8th 2017 too.
Yawn!
The money imbalance will mostly go away if the regulations are aimed at making great drivers rather than Nobel prize winners. Look at the ridiculous line of completely irrelevant technology on wing appendages and consider how these microscopic “developments”, invisible to spectators, can separate a potentially great team from a wealthy one. I’m not impressed by the explanation that lack of overtaking is due to the new “high tech” front wings. “Daddy, why don’t they just take the wings off?”
Joe, do you believe in budget caps and the real life possibility to enforce them?
Yes and yes
The teams need to realize they are custodians of the sport. It is their duty to leave the sport in a better state than they found it.
Until words like “going concern” can be attached to all teams there is still work to be done.
To those that complain about pay drivers – a budget cap is the solution.
how would you steward a company like Daimler, FiatChrysler, Renault-Nissan ? including all their internal and external communications… If there was an equal funding like Joe suggests, no cap necessary. The “surreal” amount of effort the teams undertake is a key asset to the sex appeal of the sport — not to mention that just via hi-tec approach, societal relevance being warranted — the sole justification for motor sports in the future
A budget cap is just something to be worked around. It will only play into the hands of the grandee teams because they can bury spending elsewhere in some road car development project or other.
…”turkeys don’t vote for Christmas” – unless you tell them that they can take back control.
How weak!
Nicely articulated Joe. Short concise and informative. Totally agreeđź‘Ť
Ferrari’s “skim” is scandalous, and the myriad special payments make the overall championship less healthy. 50% of available funds should be split equally between 12 team “franchises”, the other 50% can be based on CC position 1-12 as an incentive to improve. FOM keeps the money for empty franchises. Teams that cannot hit 107% in more than half the races are ejected from their franchise. New teams would have a guaranteed revenue and the old teams have something to fight for. If the grandee teams want special status, perform every year regardless.
I am a Ferrari fan and can see their argument to a point that they have been there from the beginning and have seen multiple teams and manufacturers come and go, but I also see that it is totally unfair to all the other teams.
Perhaps the way to address this is give all the teams money based on where they have finished in the championship, and then give money to the teams based on the unbroken years they have been in the sport.
So the likes of Ferrari, McLaren & Williams should get more historical payments than the likes of Red Bull and Mercedes who are more recent arrivals.
Just a thought
At the end of the day they all know the game when they set out. If they don’t like it don’t take part. Life isn’t fair.
Life isn’t fair but sport should be.
PERFECT !
Outside of the top 5 or 6 teams, I can’t understand why anyone would want to be involved in F1. The owners of the bottom teams stand no chance of making money from racing and their expenditure is so great that they have only been feeding the monster than tied them to confidentiality agreements and created fear of retribution for the slightest crossing of a wavy line.
I believe any changes will result in all the teams receiving more equal payments, but the actual payout by FOM will be less overall. They will claim it is necessary to reduce budgets to put all the teams on a level playing field.
In the history of the sport plenty of teams (or owners) have been content to pull in the sponsorship money and spend as little of it as possible. That’s more difficult now because there are relatively few sponsors, but there was a time when getting too close to the front, thereby requiring them to develop the car, was somewhat troubling for one or two folk. A bit like ‘The Producers’ on wheels.
Try to rediscover passion, Jonno. When he took on Manor Racing, Stephen Fitzpatrick knew that he didn’t have the money to fund the team indefinitely. I don’t believe he had a lot of time to work with the team, leaving management to his managers. He hoped to find new investors — like most other team owners.
If Fitzpatrick had expected to turn Manor around quickly, his presumption would have been corrected before he bought the team. He had the ambition to have a go — like Gene Haas, or Peter Sauber many years ago. It took Frank Williams 10 years to build a winning F1 team and Frank had more chances than, perhaps, exist today.
Your points make sense for a sport with any desire to grow and prosper. Even without cost caps a fair distribution of the monies that the sport earns would go a long way to improving the competition and securing the livelihoods of a great number of workers in the sport.
smaller teams could plan with higher basic income, hence hire more better staff and invest in facilities
If I were a betting man I would look for Liberty to move to the NFL league model for the teams. This is a league that is basically in the US and makes 5x the revenue of F1. Equal distribution of funds and salary caps make small market teams (Green Bay) competitive with big market teams like New York. Together everyone achieves more… The Dallas Cowbows are valued about about 50% of THE ENTIRE F1 Valuation! Small minds means small values- there is a lot to unlock…
@cartwheel – This NFL model is entirely different to that of F1. The 32 teams own the business between themselves, there is no FOM taking a huge chunk of the income before they share it out. NFL would see a massive drop in profits if each team had to support 250 or more well paid staff in a factory and if the game was played in cars, etc, etc.
There’s a world of difference between the two sports. As there is to golf where one player has just signed a $100m contract to use a particular type of stick to hit his balls.
Jonno, the NFL teams have stadiums (stadia?) that costs a huge amount to run, and can quite easily have 250+ staff. They have significant travel costs (taking 50 players plus at least as many support staff to away games might not be F1 global travel, but it still costs in the US and to London (4 teams, 2 games per year)).
There _is_ a world of difference between the sports, and their operating and financial model, but the costs of a 16 game season, plus (hopefully for Green Bay, oops I think my colours might be showing) a four game post-season every year is not trivial even by F1 standards.
They probably get 5x the amount of sponsorship revenue because Americans will consume 5x as much, whatever that may be.
4.5% of the worlds population, 34% of the worlds obese population.
What a classy argument…
It was a joke mate.
Whatever the reaction – stats are stats.
Yes, Yes. My hope exactly. Level the playing field!
“An even playing field is always attractive…”
Unless your name is Ferrari or Mercedes Benz.
Or Red Bull
I am not a believer in spending caps, ever more restrictions on development, drivers salary limits, or guaranteed overhead payments for the teams.
Controls used by the American Football series have certainly made the team owners rich. There are no such controls over football in the rest of the world, and it seems to broadly work OK. Some teams fail. Others thrive.Great players are paid what the market will support.
Where do all these controls lead us? To a spec racing series. Not a exciting prospect to me. A1GP’s only lasting achievement was proving this is not appealing to enough motorsport fans to be successful.
The free market approach it should be noted has brought F1 RedBull and Mercedes. Incredible teams, amazing success stories. Other teams have floundered – look how far Williams and McLaren have fallen. Meanwhile other failures spent most of their time arguing about who could use the name of a once successful team that neither had any real connection to.
No doubt there are some improvements that could and should be made. Starting with a freeze on the rules for the next ten years.
The voice of reason, drowned out in a sea of………
I strongly believe that the free market only works in the wild. All sports are based on (sporting) rules — which should be as stable as possible. I agree that restrictions in tech rules should be as minimal as possible; and that budget cap in a hi-tec sport does not suit well (opposed to ball / individual sports). (All the other motorsports feature BOPs and much more standardization and they suffer more than F1 — as in the extreme case, the guy who has the tyre pressure always righter wins in a row; which is not meaningful).
in European Football, the effort to close the (well working, more elite and still more open) Champions Cup into a Champions League is not appreciated by the majority of European clubs
Well Joe .. while I agree 150% with your conclusions theres a small bump or two in the road you’re ignoring [ ok … not so small .. huge in fact ] One being the fact that our NASDAQ is about as transparent as a brick wall … and about to become worse as the Chaos in Chief goes about deregulating anything preventing he , his cronies and his family from making an extra million/billion or two .
The other bump you ask ? The sad reality that fairness and competition among todays .1% play no part when it comes to the upper echelons of anything … finance .. sport .. anything. The wealthy get wealthier , bigger and healthier .. while the rest languish in the shadows . And honestly … the only thing in my never humble opinion that’ll ever change things is … when someone at the top with an abundance of power $$$$ and influence is willing as Teddy Roosevelt did with the Robber Barons of his day .. to kick some ( censored ) and sense into them making them realize the thing they’re going out of their way to destroy … is the very thing that created and sustains their wealth power .
Question is … who’s up for becoming the 21st century Teddy R ?
Until then though Anarcho-Capitalism , NeoLiberalism and the Gospel of Ayn Rand rules the day
F1 is a lot more transparent than it used to be…
Why FOM or any nearly-so-called company has always been under dark management and been unable to be float on a stock exchange with Mr E round the table ? Why does LM succeed immediately in the process to float F 1 without Mr E ?
I have an explanation about the omerta created by Bernie. I never read it. Are you able to write it ? Why (whether yes or no) ?
Why had the teams supported this untransparency for such a long time ? I got an idea too, but never read about that…
It’s just the way it was
And ironically one of the attractions of the sport for sponsorship is the association with the absolute pinnacle 0.001% of organisational attainment.
Whilst we as fans see through the forest’s dark undergrowth to spy our champions in true light as sportsmen, formula one remains the most conspicuous competitive consumer of elite commercial and technical activity, the very exponential growth of which, accelerated asymptomatically by zero interest rates (a scourge of harm to human life equal in suffering and loss of life to a host of plagues), are reciprocally the lifeblood of our very entertainment.
Absolutely agree Joe!
What governing body or organiser in their right mind would permit their most successful and most wealthy entrant/member even greater advantages which would further their superiority over the majority of members?! In any normal set up the other members would see this as grossly biased and unsporting and just withdraw….
I am guessing the concorde agreement between the CRH and the entrants ties them in for a period and is written on the basis that ‘this is F1, the top banana, them’s the rules, take it or leave it.’
However there must have been some inducements to the ‘other’ entrants over time to keep them sweet in the face of this glaring inequality?
the others are sports people who hope/ed to be able stepping up the ladder. And there was a more easy market of sponsorship some years ago (a phenomenon that sponsors -albeit- not queue up for joining the greatest of all sports…helping such sports people to step up the ladder, thus creating stories worth to be told)
I would dearly like F1 to reach a state where anyone who can afford the initial investment (which is obviously always going to be considerable!) would be then able to earn enough from the sport to continue to run. Subject of course to a maximum number of teams. I know you’re going to worry about no-hopers on the grid but although you don’t hear much about it lately surely the 107% qualifying rule is still in force?
No idea who said it: “the only thing that beats cubic inches is cubic money”. I think race results bear more than a little correlation to budget. So it is little wonder races feature such a performance spread when cubic yards of money go to the top teams.
right. in football there is a saying in Germany: money does not shoot goals. (OK, we know that it does, on the long run, but not immediately necessarily, as team work matters more than pure individual excellence — see Germany 🙂 In a hi-tec sport, though, it’s different, especially when tech rules remain stable or freedom of engineering genius is getting tighter and tighter. They need to shake up the tech-regs from time to time in order to allow bright brains to match deep pockets. Only feasible via fair & good distribution of the sport’s income.
Following up on my earlier comment – ’twas ever thus. Higher starting money would be paid to top teams to draw a crowd. But I think it is now disproportionate.
shunt – how do car companies earn their milliards ? Milliards, not millions. I guess they ALL are overpricing their product, not by large. But by Cosmic amount. And no matter if it’s called Daimler-Benz or Wobbly Wheel Incorporation. There, if anything, is a matter for investigation for ALL Governments and Commissions. Unless they all profit on tax and therefore it’s all going to die in the water. . . if it isn’t yet
Oh to be a Milliardaire!
And how frustrating it should be to be forever explaining for your starlet would be companions’ benefit, how meagre are those crude billionaires over there…
Aha! Solved it!
When one a lights on the hallowed steps of Milliardairedom, one merely points to a certain oleagonaut former team boss, who has a club called Billionaire, and the paltry low life wretchedness of it all is impressed on your pretty companion’s aquantive mind forever!
Racing- get rid of dirty air’s effects.
no one understood that there are still these complex front wings — apart of Red Bull (who were fighting for an “aero formula”, according to Rob Smedley) … ok, probably Ferrari and Mercedes did not want to risk their advantage over the midfield, too
I wonder whether this “financial transparency” will help the less well off teams. After all most investors are not socialists and wouldn’t appreciate money going to teams who couldn’t perform or raise sufficient money themselves at the expense of dividends to shareholders. Bernie at least was able to help teams survive in the past because it was a closed shop. Williams Jordan Minardi and Sauber are some who survived tough times thanks to BCE.
@Tony G – How exactly did Bernie help out those teams, when 2 have long gone – along with many more, most recently Manor. Getting on your knees to pick up the breadcrumbs that have fallen from the King’s table isn’t survival in my book.
most entrepreneurs / investors are sports people and such appreciate sportive business conditions [“sportive” in the sense of “fair”, rather than “challenging”]
he helped teams out here and there, but he did not provide a level, fair, sportive playing ground
Understand that their survival was a matter of survival for Bernie. He needed those vote to have a base support against either other teams or/ Balestre FIA. There are no selfless good deeds when it comes to Bernie.
Winning teams are already well rewarded through more sponsorship and also the desire of the best technical and operational people wanting to work for them. The idea that general revenue from the sport should additionally reward the winning teams seems counter intuitive to a level playing field. If you look at other sports with draft systems, luxury tax, etc, they’re trying to bring some equity to their competitions. Having the most successfully teams become un-assailable due to a massive financial advantage supported by the sporting body does not make for an interesting sport.
a level playing field was no issue until the end of the 2000s when the manufacturers dropped out, leaving a small grid behind; and Bernie did not want to change his approach
In my mind and purely amateur legal opinion, meaning that I have certainly read relevant law in the past but distant past, everything is fine until the element of deception is a factor, at which point, depending how certain information is used, criminal liability ensues.
I see no argument against the fact that the entirety if the financial arrangements are absolutely constructed in a manner that can gave neither alternative result nor alternative motivation, other than deception.
The preconditions for criminality exist.
Devil and details and hazy recollection will surely follow.
To clarify the point I’m aiming at:
Whenever you enter into any contract there are real and implied terms. Most industries have conventions. I do not explain the off plate press time unless it has a significance in effect on the operation the contract terms.
In the circumstances that I would be interested in starting a F1 team, it is important to ensure that the balance of the powers and financial issues in the sport are well understood by my team in hoping to make a successful entry.
But if I am denied the information that I had expected was faithfully supplied, by fact of the information being knowingly inaccurate or misleading, then you may potentially find I have a tort for damages arising from the following difficulties in finding or securing the support my team entry requires.
English law makes no explicit decisions about fairness. But that is too often translated as a immutable and unchallenged caveat employ.
The more I understand the business of F1 the less like a business it seems. There are too many outrageous suffer ancestors that are seemingly endorsed or permitted by the teams en block, that would not pass muster with a junior paralegal. Increasingly I am concerned that the impression of laissez faire can be thought of as tantamount to complicity.
I see it more simple (although the world is not): there is a sport, the “highest banana sport”, and people liked to compete in. They saw privateer’s success (Brabham, Lotus, Tyrrell, Williams, McLaren, Jordan, Sauber) stepping up the ladder (at some stage) and believed it was possible. As they were sports people, they have tried.
Actually I agree with you. In that context and time frame.
At the time the Ken Tyrells of this world were in the firmament of the sport, it was a firmament indeed and there was a great deal of intimacy behind the cocked noses of competition that itself seemed often a veneer to blag sponsors, the new kids on the block in their Marlboro uniforms.
It is only when the buy in is complete and nobody has their fingers crossed behind their back, that sincerity offered becomes sincerity assumed, and with everyone believing the new pitch won’t melt butter, one invites those who chill ounce blocks with hereditary aplomb.
Although this fact is probably the most frequently commented on of all, there is a distasteful reality of the Ferrari bonus that is more fully appreciated when it’s effect is delineated :
Ferrari ‘s 5% is a override on all subsequent calculations basis.
It effectively is a tax on the hard won advances obtained by the back of the grid, for rare points scores.
As a override of gross, the greater the overall pot, the greater the disparity.
Einstein declared compound interest the 8th wonder of the world. ( and indeed exponentials are the most powerful fundamental factor in life itself)
My father, a young man in savings and loans management during the great depression, called percentages in the context of pay rises and inflation the wonder of poverty’s creation.
sounds interesting. can u explain that one a bit further, please (we are not all English mother tonguers): “As an override of gross, the greater the overall pot, the greater the disparity.”
Sorry, I didn’t spot your reply until now.
Because the first cut is of gross and the second percentages taken are from the prize money less the gross percentage cut, all other quoted percentage rewards are actually understood as a much higher amount than they are.
Because only one recipient has prizes in line with the first, all others demand higher percentage amounts than they would otherwise.
You end up in inflation with pressure you cannot take away.
If the aim of the ‘leaker’ is ultimately to pressure Liberty into abandoning FOM’s long service payment to Ferrari (thereby wiping $60m from the budget that will be all-but impossible to replace in the prevailing climate), surely the greatest gains will be felt by those challenging at the front? Is the aim to make the fast cars go slower or help the slow cars go faster?
I think both ways were right. In order to make the slower cars faster, you can transfer a portion of basic funding from the “Bonus” teams to the back of the grid. Screwing on 2 sides should lead to a more even playing field in the fastest way.
I think if any team member leaked a document to benefit other teams – or indeed committed any act that would help create a more level playing field for all competitors – it should be enshrined as a true first in the history of F1!
Happens all the time
The successful will always attract more sponsors anyway so let that be their windfall, not a bigger share of the pie because they sold out to get more cash. But then again, that was always Bernies way – divide and conquer. Some homework was done on Mr E’s popularity, hence “Chairman emeritus” with no power. Thats maybe why he is quite happy to stir the pot with recent comments about the value of past deals for races.
The question is, how many of his old team will stay and how many will move on, Joe?