For Sale: Pre-owned F1 team. No Longer Wanted Due To Impending Rule Change. Need Sold By 2010

Red Bull boss Dietrich Mateschitz has confirmed that the Toro Rosso team is up for sale. With customer cars outlawed from 2010 with a new Concorde Agreement, the junior Red Bull squad will no longer be able to run a similar car as the main squad.

The customer car row has been rumbling for a number of years now with independent teams such as Williams and Force India (under it many previous guises) fighting tooth and nail against the customer cars. We’ve already seen its impact earlier in the year with Prodrive not making it onto the grid as expected.

I’ve never been a fan of customer cars in Formula One. When I think customer cars I think of the racing in the United States. Not that it is a bad thing mind you. But that’s the way they have done it for many year there and it has it benefits. This however is F1, the pinnacle of single-seater motorsports. F1 doesn’t have a team championship, it is a constructor’s championship – and you can’t spell ‘constructors’ without ‘construct’! The likes of Toro Rosso and Super Aguri don’t do that, rather they run with modified versions of their parent teams. ‘Synergy’ is a term that has been thrown around to cover what in layman’s term can be described as using the same car. If you copy someone’s homework in class, you don’t get away with it. Why should you in F1?

One of the draws of F1 is to see teams running cars that carry the mark and influence of the team. If I wanted to see cars that were all the same, I would watch another form of single-seaters.
Prodrive abused the entry slot they were won to make it onto the grid. At the time customers cars were a hot topic, they knew this. They held out as long as they could in the hope the rules would change that would suit their entry with a customer car. They didn’t and the series lacked a 12^th team this year. Why were they allowed to do this I ask? Perhaps one of the other bidders had ambitions or resources to make their own car if it came to it and could’ve been on the grid this year. We will never know now.

Don’t get me wrong, customer cars do have advantages. They would help with the much heralded cost-cutting that Mosley goes on about.

Should the sport be diluted that much in an attempt to save money? I think not.