It's a very strange sport, but perhaps it's generous to even call it that in the first place.
Most sports I follow have salary caps, or drafts.. equalising the competition year to year and keeping things fresh over time. You have 'tanking' which is a bit of a drag but you also have cycles with teams rebuilding and coming back and teams at the top fighting to stay there. Either way, there is a constant battle at the top that is ever evolving or changing.. and any number of teams that can win going into a season. The teams that are financially sound are rewarded or even favoured, but only slightly so.. and it's more of a financial/profit reward rather than a performance advantage.
And then there's sports like F1. Where you can have a team like Ferrari, who is the biggest name in the sport, gets extra handouts just for being Ferrari and STILL not make profit during a season.
It's a very strange sport, but perhaps it's generous to even call it that in the first place. It becomes more and more true every year. It becomes these things play out over time because it becomes so predictable and transparent. I've seen people call F1 nothing but a "money sport" and things like that, and felt sorry for them if that was all they could see. I've often felt sorry for Bernie Eccelstone because sometimes I think that even HE doesn't seem the true greatness of F1 when it's at it's best. The magic that the drivers do on track.
But every year it becomes more and more true, even if just looking at the drivers and their impact on the car (where rookies can step into the car and immediately be on the pace)... let alone all of these other issues, whether it's teams going bankrupt or new obscure countries hosting tracks only to be abandoned a few years later or whatever else. It's very rare in any sport that a rookie can step in and be competitive it takes years to mature and come to a level of mastery that can compete with the "top dogs" but F1 becomes more and more like the cars are sort of choreographed puppets being told what to do from the pitwall and that drivers are chosen more for their marketability (or their sponsor funding) as opposed to their actual level of driving. There actual skill level of driving doesn't seem that important these days. It's even got to a point in recent years where drivers drive to laptime deltas, which is just cringeworthy when having a "race".
To this specific issue.
On the one hand, Redbull probably wouldn't want to have given others their chassis during the dominance. Fair enough?
On the other hand, if all of the teams had a chassis similar to the level of Redbull, what would happen? Merc and Ferrari use their own engine and Honda supply everyone else? Honda and Renault?
You already have a system that rewards the teams that score points (the exact opposite system sports that have a draft) and shafts the lower teams, dooming them to always being at the back. The F1 financial system is actually very similar to the worlds business economy but that's a different topic.
So yeah.. self preservation, greed, monopolies, piranha clubs, politics.. nothing new here. Maybe one day there'll just be Ferrari getting 1-2's and the rest of the private teams will be 2 seconds behind the pack with no chance.. and the Ferrari drivers will go onto the podium and spray champagne like it's the happiest day of their lives. It'd feel pretty cheap and I don't think many people would want to watch.
Until then we can at least enjoy the semi illusion of it being somewhat of a sport.
I don't think the problem is so much Ferrari or Mercedes self interest but more how the engine regs were structured in the first place. It never made sense to me.
I can only imagine the uproars and tears shed if Redbull's dominance had coincided with a period where the chassis updates were regulated by tokens and their advantage was "locked in". The uproar and cheating allegations and constant regs changes were bad enough as it was.
I find it hard to get too invested or emotional over this stuff these days. I even felt that way during the latter years of Redbull's dominance. If your team is winning championships and it seems "worse" or stale, you know something is wrong. It's the Seb Vettel's, the Lewis Hamilton's and the Fernando Alonso's that make me want to watch at all, but they rarely even get to race each other. It's a very strange sport.
F1 has become so transparent over the years. I wonder if those that take it uber seriously, if they'd want to argue for 60 pages about it.. if they have something lacking in their own lives.. a lack of personal achievements or something to focus on, that they could get so sucked into it all. Are the TV marketing ads really that convincing? Does it really matter if a driver is from your country? I don't dislike anyone in the paddock (except maybe Bernie), as they are all just doing their job and playing by the rules that have been layed out to them. So it's hard to try to label one team or driver as good and the rest as bad.
When the teams/drivers get caught up in the drama, you can understand, there is personal investment and egos at stake. They have a vested personal interest.
I feel sorry for the journos in the paddock who probably thought it was their dream job to be where the are, and then get to a point where it's like.. "this is what F1 has become?"... Or the F1 drivers who get there, seem to become complacent and ask themselves from time to time "why couldn't I have been born 20 years earlier?"
The racing on track is what matters. Having as good of a 'product' on track as possible. The fastest drivers in the fastest cars battling on track to see at the end of each Sunday who the best was. That would be nice. Instead it feels like we watch 90 minute commercials for car companies where the best driver may or may not win depending on how circumstances play out. At the moment, Alonso and Button are locked in and stuck in a car that will be going nowhere for the next few years. In some sports they could demand a trade. Would Ferrari even want to trade Alonso for Kimi? No. Because there'd be no advantage to it. Seb would still be behind the Mercs and they'd still be 2nd in the WCC. Strange sport. There used to be some sort of debate in years gone by, of how much of an impact a driver could have.. in a poor car vs a good car, but in the last 5 years it's become very hard for any driver to overcome the car they drive. A lot of interesting debates that used to happen on here are now just forgone conlusions because it's all so obvious. So there's no reason to discuss it.
It'd be nice to see the best drivers in the best cars fighting at the front every race.
The rest of it.. the politics, is only one step above celebrity gossip and Jerry Springer reruns. A lot of the time in F1, the politics stories play out more in the media than the actual racing does. Unless teammates collide, people will usually talk about the racing for a day or two. But they'll talk about the politics for months. Strange sport.
I guess this is all a part of F1's appeal but yeah, it's very strange.
Speaks volumes of economic theory vs. reality.
