Liberty Media planning budget cap

  • Published on 18 Dec 2016 15:23
  • 2
  • By: Fergal Walsh

Liberty Media, the new owner of Formula One, is considering the introduction of a budget cap for the sport.

Since the introduction of the hybrid engines in 2014, some teams have struggled with costs, with Caterham's F1 team vanishing from the grid.

The manoeuvres are likely to be highly controversial. Previous attempts to impose budget caps have triggered big outbursts from the top teams, who in 2009 threatened to form a breakaway championship

“It makes no sense to have teams spending the better part of $400m” said Liberty Media owner John Malone. 

“That money is not doing anything good for fans. It is just wasted on competing on technology. That has not been driven by logic and it has created a two-class society in terms of what is spent on teams. You should have an opportunity for the underdog to win.”

 

Replies (2)

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  • f1dave

    Posts: 782

    Time to follow up on the breakaway series.

    • + 0
    • Dec 18 2016 - 18:33
  • Here's an idea to rip the sport up and make it a new one. Full CFD, any wind tunnel work is illegal. This will force a focused evolution in CFD compute. More energy efficient server farms will be put to use and the same tech accessible to all teams for a price that every team can afford. Brilliance now comes down to the most innovative designs but the same lack of correlation to real world will affect all alike.

    The huge costs come from wind tunnel testing. Do away with it totally.

    At some point in the next 10 years the CFD tech will be mature enough even the aircraft design companies will abandon windtunnels totally. The math behind the CFD is what needs to be refined, because it's all assumptions for equations to model the real fluid nature of air in motion. The compute power exists but lack of focused research in this field has driven the pace too slow. F1 teams will push it to the next frontier. They are lazy now because there is no whips to crack at their rears.

    • + 0
    • Dec 19 2016 - 14:04

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