No money for the eleventh team in the constructors’ standings?
The end of the Concorde Agreements in favor of individual negotiations team by team should spell the end of a grant that was awarded to the eleventh team in the constructors' standings, as Bernie Ecclestone seems to confirm.
If the relations between Bernie Ecclestone and the smaller teams, foremost among them Marussia, already seemed strained, particularly on the eve of the Australian Grand Prix, where the issue of broadcasting images of the Russian team’s cars had arisen, they do not appear to be improving in light of the removal of a clause from the Concorde Agreements.
Thus, while the top ten teams in the constructors’ standings were allocated a significant share of the financial pie, proportionate to their ranking, the eleventh team still received a package of 10 million dollars (less than 8 million euros). With Marussia having finished in this position for the last three seasons, attention naturally turns to them.
Especially since, while the previous agreements were negotiated collectively, allowing each team to be heard within the group, this season’s commercial agreements were negotiated directly and individually with each team. A process that does not give the same weight to the Russian firm, which was last in the constructor standings last season and finds itself without an agreement: “Marussia does not have a commercial agreement because they are not in the top 10. We pay the top 10, that’s what we do. For three years, we did something different because we had an agreement with Max [Mosley], but from now on, we will pay the top 10 and that’s it,” the head of Formula One Management told our British colleagues at the Telegraph.
This change in situation could result in greater precariousness for small teams, which would then find themselves excluded from any allocation in a very unfavorable economic context. As a reminder, Bernie Ecclestone had already indicated to *Reuters* in December that a grid composed of ten teams was his preference.
