Honda to quit F1 after 2021 season

They should go 100% ethanol!

 

If the country I live in brings legislation to prohibit ICE, I will establish the ICERA = Internal Combustion Engine Revolutionary Army.

 

Personally i thought it was about promoting a racing car sport and with all sports its focused on fans and spectators ie bums on seats. Sponsors would not spend £$m on a fan base of zero. If its declining in popularity (which it is) then something has to change and that is the responsibility of the governing body otherwise they are just fooling themselves and trying to con the public.
Best
tony

 

They need to remember that this is a *manufacturer's* series.

This is where they develop the tech for your street cars.

Stop micromanaging and let the engineers do the engineering.

Displacement limit. Emissions limits (because efficient IS clean).
Then let the engineers figure out the rest.

 

Not sure i really care what Liberty Media do, the company is vast and F! is just a division of its global stature. What bothers me is the direction the sport is heading and thats the responsibility of the FIA. The sooner the FIA, LM, F! manufacturers, constructors etc etc accept the fan base is dwindling and becoming unconnected with the sport as entertainment. Yes i watch it but have done for 50 years, but i dont go out of my way on a Sunday afternoon anymore. Refuse to pay per view either.
I dont think we can blame COVID either, TV rights / viewing far outstrip track attendance imo
Best
tony

 

Only Todt oversaw the series while it lost at least 250MM viewers. When a ship hits an iceberg that big, you blame the captain, not the cook.

 

No, it's because the product they offer is poor. I'm not a footballist but how many viewers did they lose by going behind a paywall?

If F1 offers a good product, people will pay for it.

 

Bang on the money Bas, my sentiments exactly.

I dont like the hybrid era one bit and its a PR disaster from the outset.

Personally i think PPV will be / has been the demise of a lot of sports, COVID has magnified the problem in that a lot of people i know have just given up on football, motor racing etc as they have realized they dont actually miss it and paying for a subscription on a yearly basis is an expense they dont get full value for.

Tony

 

This isn't hard, William. Free = supported by advertising money. More eyeballs watching your show means advertisers will want to be on your platform. More advertisers on the platform means more advertisers on the sidepods on cars. It means more title sponsors for teams. Paywalling the show means advertising money dries up...which it has been doing since they moved to paywalling most of the races.

Do you know how many teams have title sponsors now? ZERO. I don't count teams with unicorn deals with their parents companies. These teams are Mercedes Benz, Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren, Renault, Haas, and Racing Point. The rest of the teams are sucking wind financially.

Of the best known teams, Toyota, Honda, McLaren, and Williams could not find title sponsors at all. If the FIA was paying attention, they would have seen this as a disaster in the making many years ago.

Oh yeah, F1 lost its last privateer team because they had next to no advertising money to rely upon. Memba that? Do you memba what team that was, William? Do you memba what year that was, William?

 

You know your product sucks when people don't even watch it when it is free.

 

Truth and we are at the mercy of the group and system in place

 

I'm with Seb on this one: "bring back the fooking V12s!"

 

True but that is a large loss. What amount began to pay out of that number??

 

Back in the Schumacher era, Ferrari was spending north of $300M--so I don't see the current near $400M as much more than inflationary upward drift.

I certainly agree that the hybrids have done nothing to lower team spending.
Nor have the Y-number-of-races-on-component-Y done anything to reduce costs--quite the opposite.

 

What configuration of tits ?

But think about it, the crowd burns more fuel getting to and from a single event than the F1 series burns in a whole year. {Covid excludid}
Thus, there is no utility in any of this green stuff in racing.

 

They've used the classic Claymore approach: "Front Toward Enemy"

 

Not quite--the Pirelli tires are still crap and have nothing to do with hybrid regulation.

 

Could Red Bull really take on Honda’s engines in 2022?


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Team principal Christian Horner repeatedly said on Friday when asked about Red Bull’s next step that it had to “consider all options”, but was clear that it could not simply function as a “standard customer team”.

“The team’s aspirations are extremely high: it wants to win, it wants to compete and win world championships,” Horner said.

“We need to take the time to do our due diligence on the options that are available to us in order to finalise our thinking, certainly by the end of the season, and most definitely before the end of the year.

“We’ve got to consider all the options, and then make decisions following that.”

Asked directly how practical a continuation of Honda’s engine project by Red Bull could be, Horner moved to highlight the huge expense of the current power unit regulations in F1.

“When you look at the costs involved in the engine supply, they are enormous, and that is why Formula 1 has failed in its attempt to attract new engine suppliers and new manufacturers into the sport,” Horner said.

“It brings into real focus those costs, those cost drivers through the regulations. Honda’s withdrawal is a real shame for Formula 1, but also a real wake-up call.”

“We see in this sport that sometimes the unexplainable can happen, and it’s our duty to look at what is the most competitive way forward in 2022,” Horner said.

“We have the time, Honda have afforded us that time. If they had made that decision in the spring of next year or in the autumn of next year, it would have been a far worse scenario for us.

"We’re only just halfway through the relationship with Honda, and we’ve achieved a lot in the time that we’ve been together. We aim to achieve a lot more in the remaining time that we have together, and obviously there’s the bigger questions that need to be answered between now and the end of the year.”

Throughout all of Horner’s messaging about Red Bull’s future plans, though, were concerns about where F1 is at right now with its engine formula, and whether it needs to hasten plans to try and bring costs down and make it more appealing to new manufacturers.

“I think that we really need to consider, is 2026 too far away for the introduction of a new engine?” Horner mused. “What will that technology be? What should it be?

“They are questions that are going to need to be answered quickly in order to give a road map to what the future of the sport is.”

https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/red-bull-honda-engines-2022/4888860/