Lotus, Larousse, and Simtek all went belly-up recently because of money problems. Minardi may be next. And, it is no secret that Pacific is operating on a shoestring. Can we expect to see smaller starting grids in the near future? Probably, unless teams begin to field three cars (see Balling's commentary in vol. 1, no. 10). Should we care? No. Why? Because Formula One is more a business, than a sport, at least to the principal participants most of the time. As Ron Dennis put it recently: "It's a sport when the flag drops at either end of a Grand Prix. After that it is all business. If you are not making money, you will not survive--simple" (On Track, July 1995: 19).
Sponsorship lies at the heart of the matter. Frequently, perhaps all too frequently, we hear people lament that some teams are destined to be backmarkers because they can't get high-dollar sponsorship. If these teams had more funding, it is argued, they would become frontrunners and winners. This is tantamount to supply-side economic thinking, and that has proven not to work.
The "we'll win if we get funded" point of view has, as best I can tell, absolutely no merit. Furthermore, it is often followed with an argument that is equally ill-founded. Some think that F1 officials need to step-in and encourage sponsors to spread their support to teams currently underfunded. Such a scheme is what social theorists refer to as redistributing the wealth.
Providing more money to backmarkers won't correct the imbalance. In an absolute sense it might help them some, but racing is a relative thing. It simply does not matter if one's speed improves from 120 to 122 if someone else is running 123, especially if that car starts running 124. Also, asking sponsors to fund weaker teams is literally throwing good money after bad. One can only wonder what Marlboro might think, much less do, if Max or Bernie asked them to reduce their support of McLaren, and start giving some of it to Forti.
Teams don't necessarily run fast because they are well-funded. They are well-funded because they run fast and get lots of air time on TV. Or, they are well-funded because they have the prospect of running fast. Three teams stand out as evidence. First there is McLaren. Need I remind anyone that they are the best-sponsored team, but nowhere near one of the fastest teams today? They are well-funded because they have a history of running fast, and the prospect of doing so again. Is their funding in jeopardy? Perhaps. Benetton, for one, has been wooing the cigarette giant. Ron Dennis may not be sweating yet, but don't for a minute think he isn't working.
The second and third teams I think merit recognition are Benetton and Jordan. How quickly we forget? This year and last have affected our collective memories. We are now all taken with Benetton's dominance. Some are even bemoaning the fact, and grumbling that F1 continues to be a one team show. These complainers seem to forget that if F1 is, and has been, a one-team show, Benetton wasn't that team until last year. Benetton has only been in Formula One for about a decade, and most of that time they were a mid-field team. They got to be number one, not because they had the most money, but because they put together the right combination of people and they worked hard. They started with money of course, as all teams do, and they built on it. Benetton didn't get to be the top team because it was sponsored by Mild Seven and Bitburger. It gets money from the Japanese cigarette manufacturer and the German brewer because it is number one. Sponsorship is demand driven.
Jordan ain't no Benetton...yet. Eddie Jordan didn't come into F1 with the support of the likes of Benetton, but he did come with a winning tradition in lesser formulae. As a result, he has been quite successful at obtaining financial support. Granted he doesn't have one really big sponsor, but he has lined-up more small- and medium-sized donors than anyone else. Mark my word. The day will come when he'll have major sponsorship. In the meantime he is going faster and faster, and becoming increasingly competitive. (Oh yes, let's not forget that Ron Dennis, who was selected a few years back as Britian's best business manager, worked himself up from a mechanic.)
When a team enters F1, it does so knowing full well what it is getting into. Accordingly, it has no basis for complaining about financial and performance inequities. If a team can't survive, it shouldn't. Darwin didn't know about F1, but his theory is as applicable to the highest form of motor racing as it is to biology. The cold, hard truth is that F1 is better off without Larousse, Lotus, and Simtek, teams that simply couldn't hack it. That is, they could not earn a profit.
Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding of F1 today is people thinking of the drivers in competition. The drivers do, of course, compete with each other on the track, but that is a total of only 32 hours each year. Several thousand hours each year are spent by each team. In a very real sense Formula One is a team sport, not an athletic event. The tifossi knows this better than anyone. They don't care who drives the car, it is the Ferrari itself that is all-important. The rest of us could learn from their example. Formula One is every bit as much a business as it is a sport. As such, a team's funding is contingent on what it delivers--how often it wins. Don't worry about having a small field. There will always someone who wants to go racing (e.g., Forti). Every so often, one of these teams will rise to prominence. The real sport, of course, is business not racing.