The FIA continues to be at the sword’s points with F1’s biggest players

One of the world’s most loved sport is hog­ging the head­lines these days not for a Grand Prix but for the bat­tle of sur­vival. “What would F1 be with­out Fer­rari or Renault?” might have been a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion in the past but, God for­bid, the FIA is hell bent on answer­ing it soon.

Fer­rari, Renault, Toy­ota, Red Bull have all threat­ened to pull out and the play­ers includ­ing Alonso and Raikko­nen have expressed no desire to play with­out the big man­u­fac­tur­ers. All this has failed to budge the FIA, the gov­ern­ing body for F1, yet. The issue at hand is set­ting a bud­get limit on how much the teams should spend on oper­at­ing costs. The teams that do not fol­low these lim­its might be sub­jected to restric­tions on test­ing and auto­mo­bile design. FIA hoped to let in smaller play­ers through these bud­get caps, who oth­er­wise have no chance to sur­vive against the long-time play­ers such as Fer­rari that prac­ti­cally oper­ate with­out a financ­ing con­cern. Whereas, these vet­er­ans of the sport would not want to be hand­i­capped by some financ­ing rule and that too to let com­peti­tors edge in the game.

The point is why should the auto­mo­bile man­u­fac­tur­ers be even expected to wel­come these lim­i­ta­tions? They put in the money and take the risks. They make this sport so big and glam­or­ize it. They have suc­ceeded in their tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions and strate­gies to make this money. And now, the FIA tells them — “this is how you can use it”; well, “use it as you want but do not use more than this much” — ha! And the genius of a rea­son is to get newer teams in and since these newer teams can’t com­pete finan­cially, lets bend the game rules. That takes my mem­ory straight to this cyn­i­cal open­ing to Atlas Shrugged that builds up the mood for sub­se­quent anti-socialist theory.

Tag­gart wanted the Alliance to force the Phoenix-Durango out on the grounds that it pro­vides “cut­throat com­pe­ti­tion” to Tag­gart Transcon­ti­nen­tal in a region where the lat­ter com­pany has his­tor­i­cal priority.

So, prob­a­bly the FIA wants the major suc­cess­ful play­ers to be curbed so that those who have not yet proved them­selves may get a chance to play. It may not be exactly ‘anti-capitalism’ but I see it very much on those lines. Let the ones who can play, play. These smaller teams may be good but if you can beat the giants with­out chang­ing the game itself, by all means do it. If not, don’t expect them to live by your rules. The FIA argues that these teams are try­ing to be big­ger than the game itself but look who’s talk­ing about chang­ing the game? May be FIA thinks itself to be big­ger than the sport. And for their infor­ma­tion, I don’t think the fans give a damn about them but yes, if the Fer­rari doesn’t stay, the fans may give more than a damn.

Some big play­ers like Brawn-Merc and BMW haven’t yet taken any sides openly and it remains to be seen how this issue fur­thers. But to put curbs on the teams who can spend is like chang­ing the sport itself. I don’t see any fair­ness and I believe in mer­i­toc­racy alone. How can ‘curb­ing com­pe­ti­tion’ be help­ful ever?

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