Limited budgets: Todt faces the anger of smaller teams
Exasperated, the smaller F1 teams did not accept the decision to abandon the budget cap project and made it known to Jean Todt, the president of the FIA, in a letter.
The abandonment of the capped budget project by the F1 Strategy Group, composed equally of FIA representatives, commercial rights holders, and team representatives, has caused discontent among the smaller, non-represented teams.
Within the Strategic Group, six teams sit: Red Bull, Mercedes, Ferrari, Lotus, McLaren, and Williams. These teams were, among other things, responsible for ending the discussion on capped budgets, which was supposed to lead to their implementation by 2015. Bernie Ecclestone also did not push for this limit.
Autosport revealed yesterday that four teams – Force India, Sauber, Marussia, and Caterham – have expressed, in a letter to Jean Todt, their anger at the decision to terminate this project. Moreover, they appear to have openly challenged the Strategic Group, arguing that it had no authority to decide on the rules.
In this letter, the four teams in question, led by Marussia, even suggested that the current situation could constitute a breach of European competition preservation laws, indicating a possible abuse of dominant position by the Group’s teams.
The smaller teams would assert that they are no longer inclined to accept future developments of the discipline being in the hands of bodies they do not consider transparent or democratic. They even warn the FIA, which they believe could be guilty of steering the sport towards a financial disaster if a budget cap is not imposed.
Sent at the beginning of last week, this letter has, according to *Autosport*, probably influenced Jean Todt’s decision to organize a meeting with all the teams in the discipline on May 1st regarding cost reduction.
