In a week McLaren confirms its partnership with former sponsor, Gulf Oil, it should be remembered that back in the day the team was one of several, like March, Lotus and Brabham that sold cars to entrants unable to build their own. Indeed, the right chassis, a Ford DFV and a Hewland gearbox and one was able to go racing with the big boys.

Though the sport now insists that teams build their own cars, during talks over the budget cap and the whole idea of reducing costs and levelling the playing field, not to mention the financial crisis caused by the pandemic, Red Bull's Christian Horner suggested that the big teams should be allowed to sell chassis to rivals.

F1's minnows "would save because you would just operate as a race team", Horner told the Independent in April. "You would have a limited development budget so you could quite easily operate, I would have thought very comfortably, at $80 million.

It "would be the cheapest way to address their issue, their plight, and the quickest way to be competitive as well," he added.

Surprisingly, at a time Ferrari was once again eulogising the need to maintain the purity of the sport's DNA, appreciating the financial crisis teams - indeed, the sport - were facing due to the pandemic, Mattia Binotto gave his support to Horner's suggestion.

"If the current emergency really put the existence of some of our competitors in this sport in doubt and made it necessary to revise certain cornerstones, then Ferrari would be open to it," said the Italian shortly after Horner's proposal.

"It's not even sacrilegious," he added, "given it's happened before in F1 and happens today in series such as MotoGP."

Three months down the line, and Binotto still feels that it is an idea worth looking at.

"During the COVID period, during the discussions as Ferrari we brought at least as a proposal to consider customer... the big teams, as we've eventually got in MotoGP for example, but that proposal was pushed back by the entirety of, let me say, the teams and F1 and the FIA, which we fully understand," he said, though it was actually Christian Horner who was championing the proposal.

"I think that has been a decision we all took together. Somehow, we decided that each single team should be independent, they should be capable of doing their own proper developments, I think they have the means now with the new Concorde Agreement and the regulations are sufficiently clear to do that. So yes, it will be great to have ten teams, ten different cars certainly on the grid."

The last time the concept of customer cars was on the table was in 2013, however Williams was vehemently against the idea. Indeed, a year later Claire Williams argued that customer cars are not "in the DNA of our sport", though her father had in fact first entered the sport using customer cars from the likes of Brabham and March.

In 2015, Toto Wolff said that "if we are able to keep all the current teams in the sport we don't need customer cars". However, he added that "I think we need to have a contingency plan in place for what happens if a team disappears."

"You would have thought now would be the time to put this through," said Horner in April, "but sometimes you can't save people that don't want to be saved."

Of course, given that company chairman, John Elkann has said that his team will not be in a position to challenge for wins until 2022, one wonders who might want to buy a Ferrari, be it the chassis or engine.

A Mercedes or Red Bull on the other hand...

LATEST NEWS

more news >

LATEST IMAGES

galleries >

Click to go to the main galleries section

READERS COMMENTS

1. Posted by Young Slinger, 30/07/2020 21:30

"The cost of F1 is now astranomical. What do we as fans really want? Do we want a few top teams alway winning or do we want racing. Do we want excitement on the track or, as over the past years, a pretty much dead cert on who is going to be tops. Red Bull then Mercedes in the recent years. Let us have more competitive teams, thirty or more cars racing, and I mean racing, and not costing stupid money to be there. What does it matter if they are mostly "Customer Teams" - RACING is the whole of F1 to me. Purity my ****."

Rating: Neutral (0) Rate comment: Positive | NegativeReport this comment

2. Posted by Batman, 29/07/2020 23:01

"I swear I always try to take Mattias seriously but, it's not been easy. In this case, who would be the customer and the seller? Will I buy you a brake duct and will you buy me a brake disc?
I really miss the times when the freedom allowed teams to manufacture a six-wheeled Tyrrel, a Lotus with a double body, an ATS D6 with an integral carbon fiber chassis ... and so on. I really miss this."

Rating: Positive (4) Rate comment: Positive | NegativeReport this comment

3. Posted by Superbird70, 29/07/2020 17:21

"I think you are misunderstanding Egon. He wants to buy a couple Mercedes for himself, slap some red paint on them and go be competitive. Much more cost effective."

Rating: Neutral (0) Rate comment: Positive | NegativeReport this comment

4. Posted by Paul C, 29/07/2020 16:29

"The Maserati 250F was probably one of the most famous Customer cars. If Formula 1 can simplify the cars a bit (no hybrid systems?) it would make customer cars a far less costly proposition. 80 million would go a lot farther then. The next Maserati could be a re-enginered Ferrari. "

Rating: Neutral (0) Rate comment: Positive | NegativeReport this comment

5. Posted by The edge, 29/07/2020 15:50

"Unless I’m mistaken we are well past the customer car stage already. A Ford with a custom kit is as much a Ford as a Merc dressed in pink is still a Merc. And that really is all that’s different. It doesn’t matter whether RP copied the aero or completely redesigned it... everything else is Genuine Merc, made by Merc & sold to RP... so it is a Merc"

Rating: Negative (-1) Rate comment: Positive | NegativeReport this comment

Binotto repeats support for customer cars

LATEST NEWS

RELATED ARTICLES

LATEST IMAGES

POST A COMMENT

Post your comment

READERS COMMENTS

Share this page