Will Formula One Survive Being Ferrari-less?

Not only Ferrari - Renault, Toyota, Red Bull and of course, Toro Rosso.

Ferrari has been there since the inception of Formula One Championship. It has seen the ups and downs of teams, including itself and the sport as a whole. It is always there to support any initiatives by the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile - from commercialization, driver's safety, regulation changes, participating in GPDA, OWG, and FOTA to road safety campaign and budget cut.



The Scuderia Ferrari team has been the benchmark for other team to compare to, even when they run as midfielder. There are times when they are not winning for years - tens of years in fact - and they are still there in Formula One.

When they won for years that the FIA changed the rules just to give them major disadvantage, they didn't budge.

The fact that Ferrari has been in Formula One for so long, and so successful, and at the same time amassed a huge amount of fans that turn up on every Grand Prix weekend that translate to billions of dollars worth of money, made them virtually Formula One itself.

Without Ferrari, Formula One will lose at least half of its fans. And half of its revenue in total.

Nobody would want to race a Formula One Grand Prix without the Scarlet Car on the grid. It's like English Premier League without Manchester United. It's like World Cup without Brazil. It's like Formula Renault where all the teams are running BMW cars. All the current drivers agreed they could not imagine Formula One without Ferrari and that it would be less interesting to race.

To lose Ferrari is one thing. To lose the whole bunch of teams, is another.

In pursuit of attracting new teams to Formula One, Max Mosley should not simply abandoned the current teams. If he did, then who will guarantee what will happened to the new team once they become old and Max want to attract newer teams? Will Formula One be a second class league where teams come and go - and dare I say it, exists and then perish?

FIA and FOTA really need to find a compromise - and quick. A two-tier FOrmula One is not the solution. And definitely not a smart move. It's like having both GP2 cars and Formula One cars competing with each other in the same race. We know who'll win. It's not Formula One anymore -it will be Formula One and Two.

Many sports critiques and columnists said that the latest furore in Formula One is simply a political manouvre by the teams to steer FIA out of implementing the 40 million pounds budget cap. But for fans out there, they can feel the team. Any laymen can understand why the team would want to pull out if F1 is going to be a two-tier championship.

Here's a hypothetical scenario: If you are an F1 owner and you have 400 workers working for you, and you spent the last ten years to developed that group of people with certain set of skills, would you simply dump them in accordance to the budget cap? If you have 200 million pounds annually to run the whole operation, would you be able to maintain the status quo with a fifth of your current spending?

You ought to throw people out and that means wasting away your investments.

To lose Ferrari for sure will kill away half the excitement of Formula One. To lose them together with Renault, Toyota, Red Bull and Toro Rosso will definitely kill the sport altogether.

No, Formula One will not survive being Ferrari-less.

(Hey, let's watch A1 GP instead! With all the teams running F2004, A1 GP is technically Formula Ferrari!)