The situation at Caterham
looks bleak
. The bit that builds the cars - Caterham Sports Limited - went into administration a little over a week ago, with the tit-for-tat slanging match over ownership rights raging despite the sizeable debt on the table and no resolution in sight.
Now it's up for sale and set to miss the US Grand Prix, with Bernie waving his magic wand and granting the Leafield squad permission to dip out of Austin and Sao Paolo to get itself straight. Marussia, too, has encountered dosh issues this past week. Rumour has it the team is also set to file for administration - although a few hundred million outstanding pales into insignificance when lead driver Jules Bianchi is still in hospital.
Life at the back of the grid has always been hard
This got me thinking. Money trouble has been endemic at the back of the Formula 1 grid for years, and it's a vicious circle of decline once that particular virus latches onto the immune system of a team. Poor performance means not much airtime, not much airtime means sponsors pull the plug or it's difficult to schmooze new ones. So its no surprise to see the two tail-end teams in financial strife.
Minardi, Arrows, Super Aguri and Spyker are just a few names from the modern era that spring to mind where money - or lack of it - had a bearing on the team's performance and subsequent health, with all making like Origami and folding (or being sold beforehand).
Can cost-capping work?
Cost-caps have been mooted for F1 many times in the past and indirectly implemented to greater or lesser degrees. Stricter rules governing engine and gearbox reliability have forced teams into using fewer engines per year, meaning the days of turning the wick up on a quali motor made of unobtanium for massive power went out with the cassette tape.
Williams suffered with loss of manufacturer support
Judge the success of the Pirelli control tyre yourself, but the V8 era brought in an engine freeze and therefore a limit to how much development could be done/cash spent in the pursuit of lap time. Control ECUs with bans on traction control and heinously expensive electronic architecture meant the performance of a car was no longer dependent on a team of people who could read The Matrix.
It sort of worked. The 2.4s were all within a gnat's chaff of each other for power compared to turbo engines first time round and the 3.5-litre units that followed them; the V10s that preceded the V8 screamers and the newly introduced blown sixes. Only it meant all the money and resources the cash-rich teams possessed were diverted elsewhere. Aero, mainly, and to the salaries of the most innovative minds out there to exploit double diffuser and F-duct shaped loopholes in the rules.
So yet again the wealthiest teams won, the second-string minnows restricted by a lack of investment - observe the changing fortunes and performance of Red Bull as the Austrian energy drink pumped money into the team, and Williams, as the departure of BMW took with it a good chunk of funding.
So is Audi going to sweep in and join F1?
In my opinion, cost-capping wouldn't work, mainly because it'd be difficult to police. First of all, how do you define a fair limit and then set a way of accurately measuring spend? Resources? Teams would just find a way to fudge what they buy for what purpose. Salaries? I'm sure the grid would soon favour share options and lucrative bonus schemes as a method of remunerating employees instead. Staff numbers, limiting teams to a core group? We'd see an increase in job adverts for 'cleaners' being paid seven-figure sums along the M4 corridor if so.
In my opinion, three-car teams are also not the answer. That'd just be papering over the cracks, letting those with money spend even more, further squeezing the smaller teams. I think the current measures to level the playing field in a roundabout way work as well as they can and that F1 needs to either go back to the good old days when the rules and racing were pure, or look at being more sustainable.
That's a horrible buzzword uttered in 'thought showers' in Apprentice-style boardrooms each day, but the sport needs to be more relevant.Smaller engines and electric assistance is probably helping, but when you still burn up to 100kg of fuel in an hour and a half, is that really seen by the masses as efficient?
Not while it can trade on tech transfer to road cars
It was therefore interesting to last week see Audi - a manufacturer that has heavily linked its motorsport endeavours over the last 15 years to its road car business - chuck the notion of it quitting sportscars and
DTM
to go to F1 out of the window.
A short post on Audi Sport's Facebook page vaporised forum gossip everywhere:
"Audi in Formula 1? These rumours keep appearing with regularity since years. It's pure speculation again this time and without any foundation. We are committed to the FIA WEC, DTM and GT racing. In 2015 we will add the Audi Sport TT Cup to our program."
This is good news, because Audi's motorsport programme is sustainable - by that I mean easy to explain to the accountants.
Its RS5 DTM car might use a spec carbonfibre monocoque and a bespoke V8, but it looks like the road car. It's like Honda's BTCC Civic Tourer - a standard caravan dragger on growth hormone but similar in looks at least to one people can actually buy.
And endurance racing - Audi developed direct injection and pioneered fast diesels at Le Mans - is now doing that with hybrid technology that I'm sure we'll see on an A6 or an R8 soon. It's related to its core trade and therefore sustainable. Whatever you sell, it has to be about race on Sunday, sell on Monday. It's still a business.