The cost of an F1 car is as already mentioned mostly determined by its research value but as to the actual “build cost” these are some figures:
Monocoque $117.900
Bodywork $8.500
Rear wing $12.900
Front wing $21.500
Engine $214.300
Gearbox $148.600
Exhaust $11.600
Telemetrie $137.150
Fire extinguisher $3.200
Brake disks (4x) $4.800
Brake lining (4x) $760
Brake saddle (4x) $8.800
Wheel (4x) $7.200
Tyres (4x) $2.600
Shock absorbers (4x) $8.200
Pedals $2.200
Dashboard $5.200
Steering house $4.300
Mirrors $1.300
Steering wheel $12.500
Tank $10.700
Electronics $54.500
Under work $8.600
Suspension pieces $35.300
Total build cost is $642.610. Of course, this excluded labour costs which are high. Several parts only last one session or a single grand prix and must be replaced or rebuild often.
the cost of a F1 car & F1 team
Started by
taran
, Apr 09 2001 17:52
5 replies to this topic
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#2
taran
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Posted 09 April 2001 - 17:53
Part 2 (long)
The cost of a F1 team is more esoteric. This is a long breakdown of the costs, written by Robert Synge for an internet site.
"So, what does all this cost?"
Budgets in Formula One are cloaked in secrecy and intrigue. Telephone number-like figures are bandied around by all concerned but few people appear to have much idea of how these numbers are actually arrived at. However one thing is certain - F1 is a very expensive past time indeed and, if you want a sensible shot at winning the title, then you'd better have very deep pockets and not be shy about spending it!
All budgetary numbers in F1 are quoted in U.S. dollars. There's no particular reason for this other than the FOA (Formula One Administration) funds being paid to the teams in dollars and, of course, the fact that it allows the team owners to talk about even greater numbers with a UK pound being worth around one and a half dollars!
There are two elements to every team's budgets - capital expenditure and operating costs. If you wanted to set up your own, shiny new F1 team tomorrow, the first thing you'd require would be an entry. There are only twelve franchises available in F1 and they're all accounted for, so your only option nowadays is to buy an existing team. Both Minardi & Prost have been publicly put up for sale with price tags ranging from $50-80m. However BAR only paid $29m less than three years ago for Tyrrell although, with hindsight, they would have been better off reserving the twelfth slot which subsequently went to Toyota. This slot could have been bought effectively for free although there is the minor matter of lodging the sum of $48m with the FIA first in order to show you're a serious player. However this money is repaid over a 24-month period so, if your sponsors or capital base can survive the cashflow implications, this was actually a great deal for Toyota as there is a significant value tied up in owning one of these franchises.
Having secured your entry ticket, the next thing you require is a factory. You really need about 175,000 sq.ft of space in order to include the mandatory 50%-scale wind-tunnel, two autoclaves, machine tools, design office and R & D Laboratory. There will need to be space to house around eight F1 cars with surrounding benches as well as departments covering sub-assembly, gearboxes, hydraulics, electronics, marketing, finance and management. With a staff of around 300 people, a modern F1 team needs a lot of space. The cost of all this? With equipment and fitting-out, you need to budget around $30m.
Your next large capital outlay will be transport. Most teams operate a fleet of 8-10 trucks, a couple of motorhomes and a small fleet of delivery vans. The racing transporters and motorhomes are filled with hi-tech equipment and must all be built by specialist manufacturers. Each transporter can cost $750,000 (fully equipped and including tractor unit) and you're going to need at least six of them. The top motorhomes these days are costing close to $2m each. So that's around a further $10m to get your show on the road by the time they're all painted and customised just how you want them!
The operating costs of an F1 team depend very much on its level of competitiveness and the funds it has available. BAR, McLaren and Ferrari are the three biggest spenders this year with operating budgets ranging from $120m to $200m. Further down the grid, Williams, Benetton, Sauber, Jordan & Jaguar will be spending $70m to $90m with Prost, Arrows & Minardi getting through around $50-60m each.
The difference in these spends will be accounted for through many different factors ranging from the cost of employing drivers and star design staff to whether the team is paying for its engine supply or not.
Driver salaries are well publicised through the press but a team like BAR will probably budget around $18m to cover their two drivers and their expenses for the 2001 season. Ferrari will be substantially more due to Schumacher's fee, but McLaren, Williams & Benetton will be considerably less. In the lower ranks, the drivers may well be expected to bring sponsorship of their own to retain the drive as is the case with Wurz, Diniz, de la Rosa, Verstappen, Gene & Mazzacane.
However drivers are not the only expensive employees for F1 teams. The Technical Directors and Chief Designers are becoming stars in their own right and have saleries to boot. Adrian Newey earns $4m per year while Ross Brawn takes in aproximately $3 plus bonuses that can easily double his salary. Even lesser “names” may well expect in excess of $1m per year and, not to be outdone, most team principals will be paying themselves more than handsomely! There will also be the little matter of a further 300-odd staff and, believe me, no one employed in Formula One is on the bread line!
The cost of operating a Race and Test Team will swallow around $12m per year. This will cover wages for the sixty or so personnel engaged to operate the teams and the travel, freight & hotel costs in addition to other items such as circuit rental for testing, team clothing, a supply of "Dry Ice" at all the races and all the necessary equipment that the teams carry with them. The big two, McLaren and Ferrari have test teams that work around-the-clock, so they cost rather more, around $30-40m.
Some teams will need to pay for their engine and tyre supply, which will amount to another substantial cost. A supply of Supertec engines last year would have cost you around $23m, Mugen-Honda charged $18m, second-hand Ferrari engines are $25m and customer Ford engines cost a mere $13m. If you're not a works-supported Bridgestone team, then a supply of tyres can cost a further $1-1.5m for a season's racing and testing.
The regulations state that all F1 teams must build their own cars and this will account for a huge proportion of each team's budget. A front-running team may build as many as eight cars in a season and each complete rolling chassis will cost at least $1m each. However the really massive cost comes in the manufacturing of spare and performance-update parts during the year as every single part on the car is lifed to a pre-set number of kilometres and automatically replaced when its number is up. With carbon wishbones costing around $8000 each and items such as trackrods being lifed to as little as 300 kilometres, you can see how these numbers add up over a season of 17 races (approx. 500 kms/event) and a minimum of 10,000 kilometres of testing. Again, teams like Ferrari & McLaren cover between 20,000 and 30,000 kilometers in a year so their costs are much higher. And then don't forget the shunts - last year at Spa, BAR totalled two cars in five minutes and Craig Pollock looked like a man about to cry! Who could blame him? Overall, allow somewhere between $25-35m for car build during a year and you won't be far out.
In order to ensure that your car is going to be competitive, the pace of development must be kept up throughout the year. This means a design staff of around thirty highly trained and motivated engineers working with the very latest CAD systems and all operating in conjunction with an 18-hour/day wind-tunnel programme for aerodynamic testing. By the time you've added in a cost for R & D work as well (shaker-rig, proof testing of components, development of crazy "boffin-inspired" schemes) you can kiss goodbye to a further $10-$30m per annum.
So what have we forgotten? Well, you're going to need a Marketing Department to help you raise the $100m or so in sponsorship that you require and look after those lucrative merchandising opportunities. Reckon on at least 10 people to staff this department with some high-tech equipment on which to compile & present your sponsorship proposals. You'd best have a legal department with a couple of highly qualified lawyers on call full-time to protect you from the endless stream of potential litigation that surrounds Formula One. They'll need to be a Human Resources Dept to keep your staff under control and to advise you on the myriad problems of current UK employment law and to run operations such as the staff canteen. Of course they'll have to be a Finance Department to administer all that cash and keep tabs on the Department Heads to make sure they don't over-spend their approved budgets. IT systems in F1 teams are state-of-the-art these days and so an IT Dept of around five people will be almost mandatory if you expect your systems (CAD/CAM, Production Control, E-mail, etc.) not to crash at will - always at the most inconvenient moments of course! Finally, you're going to need some staff and budget to keep your shiny, new factory in apple-pie order and looking suitably extravagant so your sponsors will be impressed when they turn up unannounced with the Chairman of the Board in tow! All told, allow a further $8m to cover all these other overhead costs.
So, as you can see, there's not much change from $80-90m for running a competitive F1 effort and that's before you've made any sort of profit whatsoever! It pays to have deep pockets. If you divide the total requisite budget by the amount of kilometres covered in a season, you will arrive at a cost of competing of around $2500/kilometre. This means that each lap of Silverstone will cost around $7500 and that includes the installation laps as well.
I hope this answers the question.
The cost of a F1 team is more esoteric. This is a long breakdown of the costs, written by Robert Synge for an internet site.
"So, what does all this cost?"
Budgets in Formula One are cloaked in secrecy and intrigue. Telephone number-like figures are bandied around by all concerned but few people appear to have much idea of how these numbers are actually arrived at. However one thing is certain - F1 is a very expensive past time indeed and, if you want a sensible shot at winning the title, then you'd better have very deep pockets and not be shy about spending it!
All budgetary numbers in F1 are quoted in U.S. dollars. There's no particular reason for this other than the FOA (Formula One Administration) funds being paid to the teams in dollars and, of course, the fact that it allows the team owners to talk about even greater numbers with a UK pound being worth around one and a half dollars!
There are two elements to every team's budgets - capital expenditure and operating costs. If you wanted to set up your own, shiny new F1 team tomorrow, the first thing you'd require would be an entry. There are only twelve franchises available in F1 and they're all accounted for, so your only option nowadays is to buy an existing team. Both Minardi & Prost have been publicly put up for sale with price tags ranging from $50-80m. However BAR only paid $29m less than three years ago for Tyrrell although, with hindsight, they would have been better off reserving the twelfth slot which subsequently went to Toyota. This slot could have been bought effectively for free although there is the minor matter of lodging the sum of $48m with the FIA first in order to show you're a serious player. However this money is repaid over a 24-month period so, if your sponsors or capital base can survive the cashflow implications, this was actually a great deal for Toyota as there is a significant value tied up in owning one of these franchises.
Having secured your entry ticket, the next thing you require is a factory. You really need about 175,000 sq.ft of space in order to include the mandatory 50%-scale wind-tunnel, two autoclaves, machine tools, design office and R & D Laboratory. There will need to be space to house around eight F1 cars with surrounding benches as well as departments covering sub-assembly, gearboxes, hydraulics, electronics, marketing, finance and management. With a staff of around 300 people, a modern F1 team needs a lot of space. The cost of all this? With equipment and fitting-out, you need to budget around $30m.
Your next large capital outlay will be transport. Most teams operate a fleet of 8-10 trucks, a couple of motorhomes and a small fleet of delivery vans. The racing transporters and motorhomes are filled with hi-tech equipment and must all be built by specialist manufacturers. Each transporter can cost $750,000 (fully equipped and including tractor unit) and you're going to need at least six of them. The top motorhomes these days are costing close to $2m each. So that's around a further $10m to get your show on the road by the time they're all painted and customised just how you want them!
The operating costs of an F1 team depend very much on its level of competitiveness and the funds it has available. BAR, McLaren and Ferrari are the three biggest spenders this year with operating budgets ranging from $120m to $200m. Further down the grid, Williams, Benetton, Sauber, Jordan & Jaguar will be spending $70m to $90m with Prost, Arrows & Minardi getting through around $50-60m each.
The difference in these spends will be accounted for through many different factors ranging from the cost of employing drivers and star design staff to whether the team is paying for its engine supply or not.
Driver salaries are well publicised through the press but a team like BAR will probably budget around $18m to cover their two drivers and their expenses for the 2001 season. Ferrari will be substantially more due to Schumacher's fee, but McLaren, Williams & Benetton will be considerably less. In the lower ranks, the drivers may well be expected to bring sponsorship of their own to retain the drive as is the case with Wurz, Diniz, de la Rosa, Verstappen, Gene & Mazzacane.
However drivers are not the only expensive employees for F1 teams. The Technical Directors and Chief Designers are becoming stars in their own right and have saleries to boot. Adrian Newey earns $4m per year while Ross Brawn takes in aproximately $3 plus bonuses that can easily double his salary. Even lesser “names” may well expect in excess of $1m per year and, not to be outdone, most team principals will be paying themselves more than handsomely! There will also be the little matter of a further 300-odd staff and, believe me, no one employed in Formula One is on the bread line!
The cost of operating a Race and Test Team will swallow around $12m per year. This will cover wages for the sixty or so personnel engaged to operate the teams and the travel, freight & hotel costs in addition to other items such as circuit rental for testing, team clothing, a supply of "Dry Ice" at all the races and all the necessary equipment that the teams carry with them. The big two, McLaren and Ferrari have test teams that work around-the-clock, so they cost rather more, around $30-40m.
Some teams will need to pay for their engine and tyre supply, which will amount to another substantial cost. A supply of Supertec engines last year would have cost you around $23m, Mugen-Honda charged $18m, second-hand Ferrari engines are $25m and customer Ford engines cost a mere $13m. If you're not a works-supported Bridgestone team, then a supply of tyres can cost a further $1-1.5m for a season's racing and testing.
The regulations state that all F1 teams must build their own cars and this will account for a huge proportion of each team's budget. A front-running team may build as many as eight cars in a season and each complete rolling chassis will cost at least $1m each. However the really massive cost comes in the manufacturing of spare and performance-update parts during the year as every single part on the car is lifed to a pre-set number of kilometres and automatically replaced when its number is up. With carbon wishbones costing around $8000 each and items such as trackrods being lifed to as little as 300 kilometres, you can see how these numbers add up over a season of 17 races (approx. 500 kms/event) and a minimum of 10,000 kilometres of testing. Again, teams like Ferrari & McLaren cover between 20,000 and 30,000 kilometers in a year so their costs are much higher. And then don't forget the shunts - last year at Spa, BAR totalled two cars in five minutes and Craig Pollock looked like a man about to cry! Who could blame him? Overall, allow somewhere between $25-35m for car build during a year and you won't be far out.
In order to ensure that your car is going to be competitive, the pace of development must be kept up throughout the year. This means a design staff of around thirty highly trained and motivated engineers working with the very latest CAD systems and all operating in conjunction with an 18-hour/day wind-tunnel programme for aerodynamic testing. By the time you've added in a cost for R & D work as well (shaker-rig, proof testing of components, development of crazy "boffin-inspired" schemes) you can kiss goodbye to a further $10-$30m per annum.
So what have we forgotten? Well, you're going to need a Marketing Department to help you raise the $100m or so in sponsorship that you require and look after those lucrative merchandising opportunities. Reckon on at least 10 people to staff this department with some high-tech equipment on which to compile & present your sponsorship proposals. You'd best have a legal department with a couple of highly qualified lawyers on call full-time to protect you from the endless stream of potential litigation that surrounds Formula One. They'll need to be a Human Resources Dept to keep your staff under control and to advise you on the myriad problems of current UK employment law and to run operations such as the staff canteen. Of course they'll have to be a Finance Department to administer all that cash and keep tabs on the Department Heads to make sure they don't over-spend their approved budgets. IT systems in F1 teams are state-of-the-art these days and so an IT Dept of around five people will be almost mandatory if you expect your systems (CAD/CAM, Production Control, E-mail, etc.) not to crash at will - always at the most inconvenient moments of course! Finally, you're going to need some staff and budget to keep your shiny, new factory in apple-pie order and looking suitably extravagant so your sponsors will be impressed when they turn up unannounced with the Chairman of the Board in tow! All told, allow a further $8m to cover all these other overhead costs.
So, as you can see, there's not much change from $80-90m for running a competitive F1 effort and that's before you've made any sort of profit whatsoever! It pays to have deep pockets. If you divide the total requisite budget by the amount of kilometres covered in a season, you will arrive at a cost of competing of around $2500/kilometre. This means that each lap of Silverstone will cost around $7500 and that includes the installation laps as well.
I hope this answers the question.
#3
PDA
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- 1,017 posts
- Joined: July 99
Member
Posted 10 April 2001 - 00:48
When asked a similar question on the letterman programme just before the US GP, DC quoted a figure of USD 300 million per year. That includes engine costs, which in Macs case, are paid by MB.
Ferrari, as a company, have been estimated as worth "in excess of one billion pounds" (F1 racing).
On the other hand, Minardi probably operatee on a complete budget of less than 50 million US per year.
In the light of this, it is not really sensible to try to put a price on one GP car. CART cars are similar in construction techniques and design characteristics to F1 cars, but designed with production for customers in mind. Without engine, they cost about 1 million US. Engines for CART cannot be bought, they are "leased" from the manufacturer as a service over the course of the year. The price paid varies tremendously depending on whether the team is "works" supported or not. Typiscal CART annual budgets for a two car (top) team are estimated at about 30 million US, not including driver fees.
Ferrari, as a company, have been estimated as worth "in excess of one billion pounds" (F1 racing).
On the other hand, Minardi probably operatee on a complete budget of less than 50 million US per year.
In the light of this, it is not really sensible to try to put a price on one GP car. CART cars are similar in construction techniques and design characteristics to F1 cars, but designed with production for customers in mind. Without engine, they cost about 1 million US. Engines for CART cannot be bought, they are "leased" from the manufacturer as a service over the course of the year. The price paid varies tremendously depending on whether the team is "works" supported or not. Typiscal CART annual budgets for a two car (top) team are estimated at about 30 million US, not including driver fees.
#4
cartfan76
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- 77 posts
- Joined: April 00
Member
Posted 15 April 2001 - 02:21
I saw something on Speedvision a while back that in 1996 US Dollors, it cost about $2million just to show up and race for the weekend..pretty increadable if you ask me.
Regards,
Justin
Regards,
Justin
#5
Nathan
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- 9,850 posts
- Joined: February 00
Member
Posted 16 April 2001 - 10:59
Here are a few guestimates that I have come across over the years.
During the '94 season Ron Dennis was quoted in Road&Track that McLarens budget for that year was $40,000,000-USD NOT including engines, tires and fuel which was provided free by the suppliers.
'95 Renualt F-1 book stated that annual travel costs was in the area of $3,000,000-USD. They also stated that travel costs made up 5% of the annual budget. Therefore the annual budget was in the order of $60,000,000 INCLUDING engines, tires and fuels. If you consider a works Ferrari deal is around $20-M/year, tires and fuels are another $3M or so, it does come close to what Dennis had said he spent.
F1 Racing magazine had an article about Minardi when they finished 10th in '99 and got a $14-M FIA bonus which they said was a third of their budget for that year....thus making their 99 budget ROUGHLY $42,000,000.
One thing I think can be agreed apon, and thats in the last 5 years costs have doubled. McLarenn was a mid-fielder in 94 sort of like what Sauber is now. And if the est $50-M budgets of Prost and Minardi today can only get them at the back of the grid, then $80,000,000 plus engines and tires Im sure is roughly what Sauber spends to get mid field.
During the '94 season Ron Dennis was quoted in Road&Track that McLarens budget for that year was $40,000,000-USD NOT including engines, tires and fuel which was provided free by the suppliers.
'95 Renualt F-1 book stated that annual travel costs was in the area of $3,000,000-USD. They also stated that travel costs made up 5% of the annual budget. Therefore the annual budget was in the order of $60,000,000 INCLUDING engines, tires and fuels. If you consider a works Ferrari deal is around $20-M/year, tires and fuels are another $3M or so, it does come close to what Dennis had said he spent.
F1 Racing magazine had an article about Minardi when they finished 10th in '99 and got a $14-M FIA bonus which they said was a third of their budget for that year....thus making their 99 budget ROUGHLY $42,000,000.
One thing I think can be agreed apon, and thats in the last 5 years costs have doubled. McLarenn was a mid-fielder in 94 sort of like what Sauber is now. And if the est $50-M budgets of Prost and Minardi today can only get them at the back of the grid, then $80,000,000 plus engines and tires Im sure is roughly what Sauber spends to get mid field.
#6
Nathan
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- 9,850 posts
- Joined: February 00
Member
Posted 16 April 2001 - 11:03
Oh and just to expand on what PDA said...the same Renualt F-1 book quoted the price of a Williams F1 car at roughly $1,000,000-USD. I think that is about right...CART chassis's are in the order of $650,000-USD (I heard this numerous times last year) but not sure if thats with a gearbox. Engines are not that much...I know materials are expensive...but anything over $250,000 I think is a bad guess. These prices of $500,000 for a engine I think includes development costs......you use 50 some e gines a year....it costs say $25,000,000 to build and develop them...blah blah
