Skip to main content

FOTA? For Once Think Amiably


Now then... Why do you think Red Bull and Ferrari have decided to leave F1's voluntary Teams Association, FOTA?

Could it possibly be that they wanted to spend even more squodges of cash than they already do, and the smaller teams said "you're having a laugh, right?".

I'm sure there will be lots of important statements about 'wanting to work together', 'resource restrictions' blah blah blah, but this is clearly about two of the biggest teams with the largest budgets wanting to win at any cost and thereby ensuring the smaller ones almost certainly never can.

This is like Tesco joining a consortium of small shop owners, then saying 'well, we DO want to help, but we're going to charge 30p less for that pack of yoghurts, so tough titties'.

FOTA was set up by the teams partially to help them agree limits on spending to ensure the future of F1 didn't just look like Ferrari and McLaren winning all the time. Now Red Bull have 2 World Championships under their belts, they seem to have joined the We're More Important To F1 Than You club.

Oddly quiet from McLaren though. Still, the whole thing will now collapse, so keeping quiet will get them some short-lived credit.

Is there much point to F1 if the teams already at the top get to stay there simply because they can spend more cash?

Selfish gits.

(Still listening to Bowling For Soup - this time it's Live And Very Attractive from 2008.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...