I watched the teams press conference in full, if you haven't yet, it's worth watching. Every minute of it.
The best point from journalists in the whole press conference in my opinion came from the Australian about 34 or 35mins in. A lot of the redundancies could be offset by the smaller teams being able to hire more people. Boullier spluttered that the smaller teams would want to spend more money. He thinks they don't want to now????? It's not as if they would keep spending for the sake of it. It's based on results, or chasing results. Mallya mentioned Williams results this year and also Force India's vs McLaren. It's been true throughout F1 history what he said “money doesn't necessarily buy performance.” Look at Honda and Toyota. Could only win one race between them in the 11 combined seasons they competed.
Toto Woolf harps on about the market and economic laws but in the business world, in a *pure* capitalist economic system, a company doesn't receive a subsidy before producing anything. The bigger teams are guaranteed that subsidy before they've even turned a wheel or scored a point. Despite being the least needy. Given Woolf's business background, he knows better than to believe what he said, but in his position there is a big motivation for saying that.
I can only see one way out. Change the commercial distribution to be more equitable. Teams can still get more for finishing higher in the constructors, but reward performance and nothing else. This would go a long way towards addressing the problem if the smaller teams could have $15-$20m more. It would mean the bigger teams may not even have to reduce by a third. If the smaller teams can have enough to survive like they used to, they'll probably accept that as they have done in the past and fight to perform better, get more sponsorship, grow and move up the grid like teams before them. Force India managed it.
Unfortunately as we can see the big teams are determined to maintain their unfair privileges and without their approval, there can be no change. I can see the way out but the window is locked. The big teams and Bernie have the key. Monisha made a great point about DTM. Add to that WEC. A few big teams together and no smaller teams means that as one journalist said, a bigger team is going to become the loser instead. See how quickly BMW left. After one bad season they ran away like wimps despite being good enough to fight for the title the previous year if they hadn't focused on 2009. A manufacturer or two will pull out eventually, or F1 brings in artificial “performance balancing” regulations as DTM and WEC did to keep them in. It's a downward spiral.
Writing of downward spirals, one final thought on the "two leagues" idea. Terrible. Instead of having one dominant team in a single championship its conceivable a team in "league 2" could punch above their weight, consistently beat a "league 1" team and yet thanks to the two tier system, dominate the lower championship but finish "below" the league 1 team on points regardless of realities on the circuit. We have leagues within F1 already in effect in budget terms.
League 1: Mercedes, Red Bull, Ferrari, McLaren.
League 2: Force India, Enstone, Williams
League 3: Marussia, Caterham, Sauber
At least if a team punches above their weight, as Williams has this year to be best of the rest, they aren't undermined by two separate championships.
I wasn't old enough to really be aware of the years leading up to and the open wheel split in the U.S. from which it has never fully recovered. I wonder if what we see in F1 is similar to back then. Between stupid rules to fix problems that were created by earlier stupid rules and the collusion of the big teams and Bernie to drive out the smaller teams to bring in 3rd cars, the sport is tearing itself apart. Eventually those left will notice they've eaten down to the bone and have nothing more to feed on.
Edited by hittheapex, 01 November 2014 - 10:43.