Could it Have Been Avoided?

The news of Honda pulling out of F1 has shocked the motorsports world this morning, but as we know, this has been brewing for a while now and indications something was wrong came to light in the last week when the team frantically began cutting what seemed like frivolous events. Yesterday many other F1 teams saw a rash of requests for employment from employees of Honda F1 so the writing was on the wall then.

If I were asked if any team would pull out of F1 this year, I wouldn’t have picked Honda, but instead I would have picked Toyota and then Honda later. These are two extremely large teams spread far and wide and spending money hand over fist with little to nothing to show for it. Their F1 business model is simply not suited for the economic crisis we have today. On the brighter side if you can find one, the withdrawal of Honda should serve as a wake up call for every team in F1 and so far it seems to be working. Finally!

I can’t help but wonder why the F1 world is so bent on spending money when the rest of the world is desperately trying to save money. Max Mosley (not my favorite person) has been screaming for F1 to cut costs for a long time with a vision of an F1 meltdown, a meltdown that is threatening it’s existence as we speak. I call a reaction after the fact ‘tombstone justice’ and this is what we have now in F1, a reaction after the fact.

Almost daily we have heard Max Mosley talking about a host of different ways for F1 and the team’s to cut their budgets and each time he has done so, teams and drivers scramble for the microphone to complain about and basically trash these ideas.

Bernie Ecclestone seems very comfortable charging unrealistic fees (fees he feels are reasonable) to countries hosting races. He continues to do this even when long standing host countries are standing up and saying we can’t continue and be responsible to our tax payers at these costs.

It’s not only host countries and auto manufacturer teams in difficulty, but sponsors as well. Sponsors that are heavily invested in the other teams such as Toro Rosso and Williams. The money they spend to have their name on the side, front or back of a car is massive, massive because of the out of control spending the teams condone. These sponsor companies, just like everyone else are fighting to stabilize themselves financially yet are being asked to cater to massive spending by F1 teams who do all they can to justify it. The end result is surely to be a car with no sponsor and a team seemingly too naive to know why.

Could this crisis in F1 have been avoided, of course. F1 would look a little different than it did last season, but it would be alive and financially responsible. Serious cost cutting measures that should have been implemented years ago, team restructuring with the realization that things especially in the North American Auto industry have been reaching a critical point for many many years and that the US have been on a spending free for all for a long time.

I had prepared this post to include facts and figures that included budgets and the rise in costs etc., but in the end I thought emotion as an F1 fan was best.

Tombstone justice once again.