- 33,155
- Hammerhead Garage
All it's going to take is one team willing to spend enough to run an entirely new power unit at each race, and your system breaks.
The best solution. Take a 30-odd grid penalty in one go which will only mean a 21 place grid drop and get all the power units he needs to see out the season. If they'd only brought the parts needed to get through this race then he would only have been a few places up the grid in front of cars that aren't going to pose a problem anyway. He'll also have lots of nice new tyres and a choice of what he starts on. Without incident I can easily see a 4th or 5th place and still have a lead in the WDC.
Except you are completely wrong. I SAID must sell to ANY team that wants it. At a price set by the governing body. Nothing breaks. No one has an advantage.
Except for the manufacturer, the ones building the engines. It's all well and good to sell to anyone who wants it, but eventually economies of scale kick in - the more units they produce, the cheaper the cost per unit. Under your system, Mercedes could make twenty-one power units for Hamilton and Rosberg regardless of who they supply elsewhere.
And? They WON'T have any advantage from that. New engine for one = new engine for everyone.
Not all chassis are developed equally.
The works teams can build their chassis to work with their engines as they have a total understanding. It's the old argument of works team vs. not works. It's very unlikely you can win in modern F1 as a non-works team.
Everything, actually. Your argument is that a manufacturer would not gain an advantage by taking a new engine every race because they would have to supply every client with a new engine. But you're overlooking the way Mercedes currently have a massive performance advantage in the chassis, and so would continue to dominate. The quality of the Mercedes engine would make the other manufacturers unattractive to customer teams, driving them out of the sport unless they wanted to supply a new engine every race - but since they can't match Mercedes on performance, it won't be worth the expense of manufacturing so many engine.
They can. That doesn't mean that they will. And that's what you have failed to grasp. Under your system, manufacturers will be obligated to supply to anyone who wants their engine. With Mercedes being the best engine, and the price of engines being fixed, everyone will want a Mercedes engine. Without the threat of component penalties, they could take twenty-one engines in a season, and supply every customer with twenty-one engines. While expensive to begin with, they will be manufacturing on such a scale that the cost per unit will actually start to come down. So teams will be able to get the best-performing engines very cheaply.
The only reason the others can't beat Mercedes is the rules preventing them from development.
