Sauber team principal Monisha Kaltenborn has come out guns blazing saying that F1’s bigger teams have an agenda to drive the smaller teams off the grid and ultimately alter the DNA of the Formula One championship.
Marussia has already been forced to shut its doors and Caterham are fighting for their future, resorting to crowd funding to try and get their cars back on the grid for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Kalteborn claims that certain proposals had been made to the smaller teams which led them to believe that the bigger teams have an end goal in mind to push the smaller teams off the grid. The larger teams quickly refused suggestions they should give up a share of their revenues to aid the smaller teams with the high costs of competing in the sport.
Kaltenborn said: “Looking at the proposals which have been made you have to believe there is some agenda, don’t you? The agenda seems to be that people are looking at four or five names to stay in here, and when ideas are offered to us of a year-old chassis or engines which are maybe a different spec or series, there must be agenda. As there’s no-one reacting to it in front we don’t know whose agenda it is.
“That’s why it’s important we said what we had to on this point because these things are changing every day, but the fact is it cannot remain like this. It’s no way we want to work and can work and the more these ideas are coming up the more we three get the feeling that maybe some people don’t want us to be around and maybe the sport is supposed to be changed in a very different way.”
Kaltenborn also believes that one of the biggest problems is that the bigger teams no longer think about F1 as just a sport.
“The big teams out there use this as a simple sporting marketing platform. It’s nothing more for them. They talk of it as being a sport, about Benetton, all this stuff where is that now? We are not out here with, as they are saying, begging bowls.
“We also work quite well in times, if you look back, when you had a Toyota with a horrendously high budget, and we had our little budget but we used to be on the podium often. We don’t need to be a threat to them but we are part of the show and it’s very disrespectful to behave like this to teams within the sport and even more disrespectful towards the fans.”
“Basically it is the end of the fascination of F1,” she went on to say. “They are totally disregarding what the fans want. You are just destroying the whole series. It’s short-sighted business thinking.”
Force India’s deputy team boss Bob Fernley echoed Kaltenborn’s sentiments saying, “We were given a clear direction there is no money on the table. There is a very clear programme coming in. The goal is to move to customer-car teams and the three cars will be the interim. That would allow them to keep the numbers while the customer cars are brought in.”
He went on to tell The Guardian, “Again this comes back to short-termism for profit. Simply how much money can we generate for the shareholders of CVC. End of story.
“Sell it off and the consequences they don’t care about. They walk away from it, they’ve got the money in. It’s someone else’s problem. And the fans? Irrelevant.”
Lotus owner Gérard Lopez also weighed in saying, “Gordon Gekko said ‘greed is good’ and look what happened to him. He ended up in jail. I’ve never threatened any kind of protest but this is a £1.6bn business and teams are going to the wall for the sake of a couple of tens of millions.
“Three-car teams will be the death of the championship. People just don’t seem to care enough about the sport to do something.”
It was reported during the Brazilian Grand Prix weekend that Ferrari and Red Bull will be running three-car teams next season. Both teams have denied these reports.
Red Bull boss Christian Horner, further refuted any claims of an agenda.
“Red Bull’s position is we want to see a full grid of two-car teams,” he said.
Agreements between F1’s commercial rights holders CVC Capital Partners and the teams state that if the number of cars on the grid drops below 20, the bigger teams have an obligation to field a third car.
But Horner insisted that running a third car, which would likely cost around 40 million Euros per year, is not something that Red Bull are considering at this point in time.
“The numbers haven’t dropped significantly low enough, and we haven’t been requested by the promoter to run a third car,” he said.
“It’s not something we’re planning; it’s not something that we’re pushing for. If we’re requested to do it then obviously we’ll have to look at it at that point.
“Our preference is we have at least 10 healthy competing two-car teams.”
Photo Credits:
Monisha Kaltenborn – Sauber F1 Team; Force India team pit stop – Sahara Force India (Facebook); Christian Horner – Red Bull Racing Instagram
