Full Throttle

Honda Racing CEO Nick Fry, along with newly hired Ross Brawn, have suggested a radical new vision for cutting the costs of competing in Formula One.

As background, both F1 Honda and F1 Toyota are reported to have the largest budgets of all teams in the world championship. So it’s with no less than a bit of Chutzpah (kougan in Japanese) they are proposing budget caps on all teams.

“Ross and I both think that an overall budget cap is something that should be seriously investigated,” Fry told autosport.com. “What we see at the moment, if you look at the accounts of any of the UK F1 teams, is that the costs keep going up.

“So far what we have been successfully doing is moving money from one area of the team to another. Money is certainly moved from engines to aerodynamics, because that is the next best area of performance advantage.

Well that’s just great, another impediment to what once was the most technologically advanced racing cars in the world!

Engine development: Capped. Wind tunnel testing: Capped.

And now a proposal to limit team budgets. Quick, someone check for correspondence between F1 Honda and Tony George!

Unfortunately the lack of common sense and logic isn’t capped and my crystal ball doesn’t look so good if all this is the future of F1. This might be the 2012 version of F1 Renault. A 2012 F1 Toyota? Yeah, there’s one of those also, which may compete for that years championship with this Honda.

It’s all very depressing I must say, but one hopes saner heads might prevail. Along with the hope politicians aren’t crooked by nature and Mad Max Mosley isn’t actually mad by medical definition, just mad in the pickled to the eye brows sense. (Hey! It’s a New Year, one has to be optimistic!)