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BGonline.org Forums
auto racing analogy
Posted By: Henrik Bukkjaer In Response To: auto racing analogy (Chuck Bower)
Date: Monday, 27 June 2011, at 1:30 a.m.
Yes sir, per team per year, running 2 cars at races.
That was why even companies like Honda, Toyota (and Renault kind of) got out of the sport. Costs were killing it for them. With the ban of tobacco and liqueur companies as visible sponsors in the majority of races, a lot of the potential income for the teams were lost.
Now there are a lot of restrictions in place to minimize costs, but it's still crazy.
Red-bull run a third car each race weekend (eg. keep it up to specs, transport it all over the world, etc.) JUST to use it for the few minutes allowed pit-stop training - instead of using one of their two race-cars. Because then they free up both race cars to work on for that period of time.
At the height, big teams were doing additional weather forecasting setting up in close proximity to the track in various directions to be able to predict (better than their competitors) which turns would get rain first when rain was closing up on the track. Now I think (this is not something I'm 100% sure of) that they have agreed to limit the use of individual team-weather forecasting services at the races, but instead rely on the feed from FIA. But I'd bet they still have spotters with cell phones!
Just the number of people, brought around from race to race, to help tires have the right temperature when they get on the car, is crazy. They tried to cut that as well, but came to the conclusion that not using tire heaters and allowing them on grid, in the pits, and so on, would lower safety (due to accidents more likely to happen if tires are not at the right temp). Tires are designed to be at very narrow temp intervals so going for no heaters/blankets would probably induce a cost of designing new tires to work with a larger temp interval!
Number of engines allowed for a season, gearboxes, tires per race weekend, etc. have all been limited.
They even have a test ban now, only allowing a few days of testing during the season, freeze engine development (you're allowed to do some, but not performance enhancement directly) and they force the team factories and R&D depts to take 2 week summer vacation, checking that they close down the facilities!!
They have started to run some standard components such as engine ECU, and parts of the KERS systems are shared, etc. And of course, a long time ago they limited to one tire supplier.
Still the costs are so ridiculous high!
All the while Bernie Ecclestone made a fortune - apart from having the commercial rights, his companies was also supplying the circus at different levels, transportation, etc.
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