16/07/2010
NEWS STORY
Bernie Ecclestone is a man on a mission. He says he is "not happy" with the performance of F1's new teams and given that they joined the sport on the understanding that there would be a £40m budget cap, which was subsequently scrapped, it is easy to see why their financial horsepower is weak.
To put a stop to F1's unstable rules Ecclestone told Pitpass' business editor Chris Sylt over lunch that "we maybe need an independent body, independent from the teams and the FIA writing the regulations. There are enough people out there who could do it."
He also put a question mark over whether a 13th team will join the grid next year by simply saying that "we will have to see [whether it happens]" There's a good reason why a new team may not have enough money to join and it's not just down to the £107m annual cost of running an F1 team.
"We have told them that if they can't put 16 million in now we don't want them. If they can't find that now there is no way they are going to run," says Ecclestone.
It is a return to the days when any team which wanted to join F1 had to pay the FIA a refundable £24.2m deposit which was forfeited if it failed to race. This condition of entry was scrapped in 2008 in order to encourage new entrants and if it had been in place last year it may have prevented several of the new teams from applying.
Requiring a £16m deposit will make it harder for independently-financed teams to join F1 and Ecclestone believes that it will take at least "a few years" before new outfits backed by car manufacturers will re-enter the sport. Nevertheless, he says there is no need to reduce team budgets because "people will spend what they have got."