05/02/2009
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
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This St. Valentine's Day I expect to see bunches of flowers, with shy messages attached, arrive in Woking and Maranello. from Maranello and Woking. It is amazing what exposure to economic reality can do.
Before we get too carried away with St. Fota, bringer of peace and harmony, we should remember that the FIA is behind this year's rules. For one thing, we will not see winglets sprouting on sidepods. One of the essential points of Max's thesis is that a lot of money has been spent on developments which are completely obscure to the viewer. Formula One, whether we like it or not, is dependent on TV viewing figures. It is the excuse for sponsors to put their names on cars.
Max is right on this point, things like winglets make no sense to the TV viewer and even less sense to the diminishing number of fans at a race, who do not receive the close-ups. We couch potatoes may have grasped that the winglets directed air to the underside of the rear wing, but you had to be an aerodynamacist to appreciate the subtleties.
For every winglet which was used, there were umpteen others which were not. Teams of designers were at the problem, all being paid well and using computers the like of which are not sold on the high street. Most of the ideas were discarded, but some made it to a wind tunnel model. These then had to be fabricated to very fine tolerances by highly skilled craftsmen.
Then came the wind tunnel testing and some teams have been running two of them, 24/7. That means there will be four shifts per tunnel and that means engineers and model makers. A team will talk about employing so many people to run a wind tunnel, but there are also squads of designers generating things to put on the car.
Eventually, one winglet of all those designed, and of all those tested, made it on to a car, until the next winglet came along.
We marvelled at the £800 wheel nut, but nobody has cared to put a price on a winglet. A wheel nut can easily be priced, a winglet cannot. To get the best from one, maybe you had to shave a millimetre from the trailing edge of a wishbone, and so it goes on right until the time when Lewis gets brainfade at the first corner.
Now the FIA and FOTA are claiming all kinds of credit for coming to their senses, but they got F1 into the mess in the first place.
There has been revision to the rules, but a lot is window dressing. There will no longer be as much testing, but it was at test days when teams used to play host to those people who were not invited to dine at the table but to whom sponsors liked to throw a few crumbs. They were not going to get a seat at an actual race, but they were not forgotten. They could wring their caps, knuckle their foreheads and say, 'God bless 'e, Sir Fred.'
No matter what happened on the technical side, test days kept sponsors happy because it generated statistics. The CEO got the major perks, but he could justify the investment by reeling off the numbers of employees 'rewarded' and clients 'entertained' plus their employees 'rewarded.' This amounted to a bus to a circuit, a lot of hanging around and a buffet lunch.
There will no longer be hordes of mechanics flown to races and put up in hotel rooms so they can perform for maybe 20 seconds on a Sunday. The length of most pit stops has been determined by the time it takes to take on fuel and that, in turn, has been governed by the equipment. For the most part, the slick wheel changes have been merely for show.
If there had been a rule which said only two mechanics could change all the wheels, pitstops would have taken longer, but it would have been the same for all. The thing is that Formula One had to be seen to be slicker. Had there been a two mechanic rule, I can think of teams who would explore the possibilities of trained orang utans, which are nifty with their feet as well as hands.
What the new rules will do is to take away the less obvious excesses, but there will still be excesses. To be seen cutting back makes the sport easier to sell to sponsors and that, in turn, makes it easier for sponsors to sell it to their shareholders. The bottom line remains that there are people like Sir Fred Goodwin who want all the special passes.
I have said it before, and will say it again, sponsorship is all about CEOs having a good time in their preferred activity at the expense of the shareholders. If they love opera, their shareholders will pay for opera. Shareholders also pay for the hospitality suites and, in the case of motor racing, the helicopter rides to the circuit.
The new rules do not cap budgets - there will be no cost-cutting until rules do that - they merely divert money. If a team has a secure budget, as some do, it will still look for advantages. If there is to be no testing on actual circuits, they will increase their use of simulators and upgrade their computer network.
It may be that doing this is more expensive than running a test team. I go back to the winglet. We hear about the £800 wheel nut, but not the cost of designing a winglet and the cost of locating it precisely on a sidepod, to tolerances so fine that they have no meaning in everyday life. It is like counting the grains of salt in a recipe, and deciding that perfection means splitting a grain in three.
Formula One cars are now so sensitive that, theoretically, it matters if a driver evacuates his bowels before getting into a car.
The cost of a test team could be predicted. It had so many personnel, so many trucks and a driver or two. The trucks cost so much, the air fares and hotel bills would be known in advance, it was all clear in advance.
Running a test team was not actually a large chunk of the overall budget and testing gave teams a relatively inexpensive opportunity to reward people nominated by sponsors, sorry, partners.
Every F1 team will seek to find an advantage, will spend whatever money is available, and will look for loopholes in the rules. It is the nature of the beast. The better a team performs, the more chance it has of attracting sponsorship and the greater its cut of TV revenues. Teams will spend money saved on testing in other ways. Cutting back on circuit testing is window dressing and teams will lose more than they gain.
For a start, they will not be able to reward employees of sponsors and that means that CEOs will have less leverage to argue for them being able to fly in a company jet to races. Shareholders are beginning to feel empowered and there is many a CEO who is an emperor with no clothes.
When the head honchoes of Chrysler, Ford and General Motors first went to Washington to beg for a multi-billion dollar bail out, on the reasonable grounds that they were in doo-doo because they had been making crap cars, they spoiled their plea of poverty by flying in private jets.
There will be no real reduction in costs through the measures proposed by FOTA. It is mainly smoke and mirrors because the available budget will be spent elsewhere. The cost of supplying engines will diminish, apparently. The greater cost has always been in design, development and tooling, the cost per unit does not change a lot whether an engine is used for one race, two, or three.
A cap on engines for private teams will assist them, but the suppliers will still make money on the deals because once you have done the design, development and tooling, you more or less turn a handle and crank them out.
The only way to reduce costs, and Max is right on this point, is to cap overall budgets. That is now possible to police provided the parameters can be set. Perks can remain, like the fact that Mercedes-Benz offers a 35% discount to top people in Formula One. Buy a Merc, sell it after a year, and you make a profit. This is the reason why most drive Mercedes-Benz.
My view is that the less regulation, the better. Allow teams so many clam shells and let them spend as they wish. If they want to go testing, fine, but that comes out of a capped budget. By that reasoning, they do not have to test on a special day, they can hire Brands Hatch.
The formula which saw the greatest leap was the 750 kg formula of 1934-7. There were two rules, the dry weight of a car, less tyres, could not be more than 750 kgs and the cockpit had to be just over 18 inches wide. Back then, you did not have to be a PORG (Person Of Restricted Growth) in order to be a racing driver.
In the current situation, we are lucky to have Max, the one person in Formula One who, literally, has been strapped for cash. He has been providing leadership and it has been positive.
On this occasion, I will not dwell on his past mistakes, like selling the rights to Formula One to Bernie so they end up with CVC, one of those hedge fund leeches we all love so much.
You may be appalled at the hike in your cost for a ticket, but it's okay. The organising club may make a loss, your country may lose its Grand Prize, but your hard-earned money will aid CVC. Face it, in secret you have always wanted to work so that the sweat of your brow lines the pockets of the idle rich.
In the meantime, listen to Max Mosley. On this occasion, he is making a lot of sense. FOTA is not serious, all it has done is to make gestures without substance.
Mike Lawrence
mike@pitpass.com
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