06/09/2017
NEWS STORY
Despite talk of various potential newcomers to the sport, FIA president Jean Todt has admitted that F1's governing body has not received a single bid worthy of opening the tender process for an eleventh team.
While Hass entered the sport - a year later than originally planned - in 2016, bringing the grid up to 11 teams again following the loss of Caterham at the end of 2014, Manor's demise saw the field return to just 20 cars again... a far cry from those heady days of the late 80s when the size of the field necessitated pre-qualifying in order to reduce it to the maximum allowed 26 cars.
Asked if the FIA has received any serious offers from potential teams, Todt admitted: "Not something I would describe as a very serious offer.
"When we see there a serious offer, as we did when Haas came to Formula 1, we understood there was some serious interest so we created a tender.
"At the moment, we have ten teams competing in F1," he continued. "We have a good championship. The maximum number of teams we would accept is 12 so I'm happy to listen to any good proposals. We are working to have an even better championship, but the agreements we have is for a maximum for 12 teams."
2010 saw three new teams join the grid, all enticed by the promise of a more level playing field in terms of competition and revenue sharing... a pre-requisite being that they all had to use the Cosworth engine.
HRT struggled for three seasons, never scoring a single point, while Lotus and Virgin, which both went through various name changes were both gone by the end of 2016.
While Caterham (Lotus) never scored a point either, Manor (Marussia) scored 2 at Monaco in 2014 courtesy of the late Jules Bianchi and another last year in Austria with Pascal Wehrlein.
That fact, together with Guenther Steiner's vision for the future, probably encapsulates why serious potential team owners are not forming a queue at the FIA HQ.