FORMULA ONE - 2019

Mike924 said:

 

As for the Racing Point/Aston Martin tie up.  I think Lawrence is biting off more than he can chew there.  He needs to work on getting RP up the grid and more competitive over a full season than buying a small Auto Manufacturer to get the name.  Heck, in reality Racing Point is the SECOND North American Formula 1 team now, because Lawrence runs it from Montreal Canada.

   

Putting it that way, it seems that owning Aston Martin would be more a distraction to the F1 team.  And he was chosen to take over Force India for the specific reason that he would be the best choice- this would end that line pretty quickly.

If the deal goes through and they go full Aston Martin a BRG F1 car would be awesome to see.

It sure would!

Mike924 said:

In terms of the Cost savings, the one thing that I feel could cut costs is the crisscrossing of the Atlantic.  I understand that certain countries are warmer at certain times of the year and some venues have long term contracts and times, however, when you look at the races here in the Americas we see Montreal  in June, Austin in October, Mexico and Brazil work.  We also see Singapore to Russia to Japan.  That is a lot of ocean crossing.  By reducing those distances or moving to a more circular plan of race organization travel costs could go way down.

As for the Racing Point/Aston Martin tie up.  I think Lawrence is biting off more than he can chew there.  He needs to work on getting RP up the grid and more competitive over a full season than buying a small Auto Manufacturer to get the name.  Heck, in reality Racing Point is the SECOND North American Formula 1 team now, because Lawrence runs it from Montreal Canada.

   

That wont save anywhere near as much as you hope. They are still going back to England/Europe after most races, if not all the cars and equipment, the huge crews are going home. It would cost more to put them up for the 2 weeks abroad then fly them home, plus you lose the productivity. In reality, the cost of fueling the jet a little more may seem a lot to normal people, but it is really a tiny amount of their budget. A quick google says it costs around $24k to $27k per hour to operate a 747. So it cost the same to fly a jumbo jet across the Atlantic as it cost for a new front wing on the race car.

What if I told you Pirelli intentionally created E36 M3 tires so all the teams would vote to keep the 2019 tires?

Still have a few more weeks to go before the 2020 season kicks off testing.

So this can be debated here- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/aston-martin-nears-deal-sell-065613691.html

I'm very torn about this, and really don't trust Mr Stroll with even a minority stake in AML.  But it's good exposure for Aston Martin that is struggling to sell cars.

In reply to alfadriver :

It's fine, except I suspect that this means the Valkerie hypercar is going to be more of a road car project. With convergence Hypercar is going to die anyway, so I suppose it's not a huge loss.

Other than that, I'm surprised that AM went with this route rather than selling out to Geely like Lotus, considering how well Volvo and Lotus have done under their ownership.

In reply to Dave M :

I'm not sure if the hypercar is going away- the FIA seems to be writing their top endurance class around the hyper car, which I had thought AML had comitted to build one of them.

For their sake, I hope it's not going away so fast that their investment is wasted....

I'm ambivalent on Stroll, but much as I love Aston Martin I still think the company has no business in F1. Their revenue in 2018 was only just over $1B USD. That's nothing when you consider that top teams spend almost  half that to put two F1 cars on the grid. And that was 2018 when things were still going well for them, 2019 was a bad year with profit earnings drop in sales and emergency funding to keep going. . Also much as the Valkyrie and Vulcan are incredible cool, I'm not convinced they are really in keeping with the understated, luxury but sporting GT image that Aaron have cultivated. It's not that they shouldn't do cars like that, but they should be seriously flush with cash before taking on two hyper cars plus a race derivative. The CEO needs to be shown the door. We all complain about bean counters, but at times you have to keep a better eye on the coffers. 

Or is Papa Stroll looking to build value in AM using the F1 team?  He is hurling a bunch of dough at the race team anyway, buy a company that might be a tax shelter... Maybe he sees it as under valued just now, and since he's already spending a chunk of his cash, why not throw in a bit more and see what happens?

The dude sells high end clothing.  He has several large buckets of cash, and womens clothing doesn't seem to be coming off anytime soon...

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

That sounds more like it. I'm not sure what AM is paying to sponsor the Sport Pesa team, but F1 sponsorship for lousy teams is not necessarily out of sync with other marketing costs. Would you rather have one minute of super bowl advertising or a whole season of F1 team name

Just watched a Formula World news videos proposing the idea that Aston can become a full works team.  The theory being that the hyper car already has the hybrid system and that Cosworth has designed an engine that would meet the current spec.  

Well, if that happened, that would certainly give them excuses for Lance Stroll being at the back of the grid for 4-5 years.

Possible, sure.  But not all that likely.  Especially when the 2021 specs kept the engines identical to the current spec, which meant that Cosworth and other companies who were interested are not going to be there.