The strange world of A1GP, customer cars and the importance of preparation

The recent Antipodean rounds of the A1GP series, at the narrow, twisty Taupo, and the dustbowl-ish Eastern Creek circuits, were both dominated by the German car driven by Niko Hulkenberg, and the elegant New Zealand entry, driven by Jonny Reid. It seems a little odd at first - Hulkenberg was good, rather than outstanding in German F3, itself a championship with nothing like the standing it once had, in the days of Schumacher, Wendlinger, Frentzen et al. Jonny Reid has, until now, been a relative non-entity in the world of Japanese F3. There is, in short, nothing in the CVs of either driver which would suggest they would be able to see off former Minardi F1 driver Alex Yoong, Would-be F3000 champion Tomas Enge, promising young French hotshoe Loic Duval or one-time British F3 champion Robbie Kerr for instance.

Nothing, that is, except for the fact that they both drive cars run by experienced GP2 operators SuperNova. Last year, it quickly became apparent that a DAMS-run machine was the passport to success, and France and Switzerland basically shared out the wins between them. This year, it is clear that veteran David Sears' boys have learned something about the odd-looking F3000 based Lolas that has so far eluded all the other teams.

There is nothing particularly unusual in this. In the first two years of GP2, the title has ended up in the hands of Frederic Vasseur's ART organisation on both occasions. In the dying days of F3000, predicting the champion was a simple matter of checking who the lead driver at Arden was that year. In the F3 Euroseries, ASM is a surefire passport to success, while over in British F3 in recent years, Raikkonen-Robertson Racing and Carlin have vied with each other to establish themselves as the leading team.

GP2, A1GP and F3000 all use, or used, ostensibly identical chassis, while in F3, theoretically one can use any chassis which meets the regulations, but in practice, everyone uses Dallaras. Yet despite this, there are clear differences between the teams. It wouold be easy to speculate that the differences are not as great as they seem, that the leading teams simply have the greatest access to the most promising drivers. While there may be a grain of truth in this, it can't be the whole story. In A1GP, for example, the New Zealand team are restricted to the not exactly over-flowing pool of New Zealand talent. And remember how Timo Glock went from being nowhere in particular to being a real frontrunner in GP2 when he moved from BCN Competition to ISport in the middle of the season. For sure, ISport needed Glock, as it turned out, but Glock certainly needed ISport as well.

What is easy to forget is that although spec-formula cars are relatively simple when compared with Formula 1 cars, they are still enormously complex pieces of engineering. If they weren't, then probably anybody would be able to buy a Dallara F306 for the price of a Ford Mondeo. The result is that modern racintg cars are really quite difficult to engineer - there's a lot of variables that can be adjusted, and they can affect each other in unpredictable, non-linear ways. To make matters more complicated still, what works at one track will most likely not work at another - and what works at any given track on any given day may not work at the same track a month later when the temperatures are completely different. While its all but impossible for anyone to understand all these factors perfectly, that doesn't matter. All you need is someone who understands them better than any of your rival teams do. As a result, a few good engineers can be worth an awful lot in the world of motor-racing - even when working with fundamentally the same raw materials.

This brought me back to thinking about customer cars in Formula 1. Last week's article got mixed reactions, with one commenter coming out firmly against allowing customer cars, and another two coming down in favour of them, and noting that it will almost certainly happen anyway. My first thought was that this would be very bad news for Spyker and perhaps for Williams too.

But on second thoughts, I'm not so sure. Its hard to know how big a part the fundamental quality of the car plays in ensuring how competitive teams are in F1. After all, in Champ Car last year, everyone ran the same Lola chassis, and yet the gap from the best teams to the worst was much the same as in Formula 1. Other factors clearly play a part. Look at last year's Toro Rosso, for example. Everyone knows that this was just a rebadged Red Bull RB1, and yet in the hands of the former Minardi crew that ran the team, it rarely ran anything like as quickly as it had done last year - even allowing for the engine rev-restrictions. In short, the team simply didn't have the experience or the technical strength in depth to engineer the car very well. And I wonder whether things would really be any different for teams buying off-the-peg customer cars from the big teams. After all, most teams might be happy to sell last year's car to Dave Richards or whoever, but they'd be far more reluctant to give them their current car. And even if they did, what are the chances that they would get the development parts? Or even the previous year's set up sheets? And how much use would these be, if the track temperatures were 10 degrees lower, or if the wind was blowing from a different direction, or if Bridgestone's tyres were markedly different from the previous year.

The example of the junior formulae shows that there is an awful lot more to running a succesful racing team than simply having the right chassis. Having an experienced, talented team in place to run that chassis is just as important - and probably all the more so in the more rarefied, complex world of Formula 1. If I were Spyker, I might be a little nervous right now. But, on reflection, I'm less sure that Frank Williams need worry about the boys at Super Aguri and Toro Rosso.

Customer Service

Every other year, it seems, come the first race, there is a dispute over some aspect of the season's new rules that threatens to derail the Grand Prix circus and leave the sport in a quagmire of court battles.

A while back, there was the threat of arbitration over the 2.4 litre engine rules that hovered over 2005. For those who can't recall the tedious details of this dispute, a couple of the manufacturers who had produced the best 3 litre V10s questioned whether the FIA had the power to change the engine regulations before the end of 2007 under the rules stability agreement signed by the teams. The FIA more or less claimed that they had the power to do anything that was deemed necessary on the grounds of safety - which rather leaves one wondering what the point of rules stability agreements are in the first place.

The same went with the rather more vexed question of the special dispensation to Squadro Toro Rosso to run rev-restricted V10s last year. All the more so because the right to run such engines was being decided on a case-by-case basis - i.e. the rules were not the same for all teams. In the event, the cars wee so uncompetitive that all bar Midland, who were rather preoccupied with their own survival, didn't really care. Going back a bit, there were the rows over Mclaren's trick braking systems, the detailed workings of the whole-race tyre rule and the question of what to do about the deliberate retiring of healthy cars to get around the two race engine rules. Back in 1982, there was even a strike over new driver contracts, led by none other than Niki Lauda. Not a natural comrade of Arthur Scargill, one wouldn't have thought.

These things tend rapidly to blow over, but this year, the arguments are over something rather more fundamental - the question of whether teams are required to run cars that they themselves have designed. And because of the implications it has for the survival of some of the lesse teams, it may all take a rather longer to sort out.

On the face of it, there is little to dispute. The rules state that teams cannot run a car bought from any other team. They must own the Intellectual Property rights to their own car - end of debate. This, of course, the two teams around whom the debate is centred - Super Aguri and Toro Rosso, claim to do. Nonetheless, few expect the Toro Rosso to look radically different from the new Red Bull RB3, or the Super Aguri to depart significantly from last year's Honda. Understandably, this is something which pleases Spyker, in particular, not one bit. Without a similarly close relationship with any of the major teams, they are going to struggle to produce anything which can outpace a late-model Honda or a rebadged Red Bull, especially with guys like Sato and Liuzzi at the wheel.

If, in their view, the new Super Aguris and Toro Rossos (which are being kept carefully under wraps at present) are 'customer cars', they intend to take the matter to court. What, realistically, though, are their chances of success? The actual Concorde Agreement rules are confidential, but reports suggest that the key question is over who owns the Intellectual Property rights to the car. It may be that there are provisions to prevent one team selling IP rights to a previous year's car to another team, but even if that is the case, then it may well be that only the most minor modifications to the old car would be needed to make the case that it is, in fact, a new car altogether.

After all, there have been a number of cars that have looked rather, how shall we say, similar down the years, and the FIA has declared each of them legal. Who honestly believes that the previous Toro Rosso was anything more than a 2005 Red Bull RB1? And what of Sauber's 2004 'Blue Ferrari'? Going back a few years, the similarities between the Briatore-owned 1995 Benetton and the Briatore-owned 1995 Ligier are rather striking. To my knowledge, the only entries that have ever been refused under the 'no customer cars' rules were the 1992 Andrea Moda (a reworked Coloni - they quickly reappeared with a Simtek/BMW cast-off) and Middlebridge Racing's attempt to run a rather striking looking year-old Benetton for Emmanuele Pirro in 1987.

If the FIA are inclined to accept a car's entry, then there is clearly little that any other team can do, short of going to arbitration against the FIA itself - something which risks leaving the team with a very powerful enemy, even if they are successful. And given the FIA's stated position on the legality of customer cars in 2008, it is pretty clear what Max Mosley's attitude towards the matter is.

So if it is going to happen anyway, does it matter? I'm agnostic on the point. After all, customer cars would not represent some absolute break with previous tradition. Such efforts were common enough until the major teams, under Bernie Ecclestone's FOCA umbrella, got them outlawed in the early 1980s. At that time, they were little missed. Customer cars were usually run at selected races by bit-part players, running rent-a-drivers in old Marches, etc. In earlier times, though, there had been some pretty serious non-works efforts in Formula One. Lotus, for instance, took their first win not with the factory team, but with the rather better prepared Rob Walker Racing team, who ran a Lotus 18 for Stirling Moss. For a year or two at the end of the 1960s, Frank Williams ran a pretty effective operation with a customer Brabham, and all kinds of people ran non-works Coopers through that decade. The aforementioned Walker even had plans to run a customer Ferrari for Moss in 1962, before his career-ending shunt at Goodwood put a stop to that plan.

Nonetheless, I'm far from sure that the experience with customer chassis elsewhere in top-line single seater racing has been entirely positive. Take Champ Car, for example. They have always allowed customer chassis, and back in the early 1980s, there was a wealth of different manufacturers, and plenty variety on the grid. Gradually, though, the biggest players - namely Reynard and Lola, became so dominant as to wipe the smaller players off the grid entirely. They made clearly better cars than any other manufacturer, and economies of scale were such that they were able to build them ever more cheaply than their competitors to boot. When Reynard's 2001 chassis proved less than entirely wonderful, everyone migrated over to the Lola chassis, and the series became a de-facto one-make championship. In the end, it didn't even do Lola any favours, as, faced with a de-facto one-make series, series bosses introduced a de-jure spec-formula, and gave the contract to make the cars to Panoz, as exchange rates meant they could do the job more cheaply.

A similar process led to a one-make series emerging in F3000 (Lola, before Dallara won the GP2 contract, there's nothing new under the sun) and IRL is already heading in the same direction, with everyone running Dallaras. Formula 3 isn't quite so clear cut, but its been a long time since anything other than a Dallara won a championship of any standing.

Could it happen in Formula 1? It might seem far-fetched, but given enough time, I think it could. Imagine that Mclaren, for example, make a couple of their cars available to a satellite team. Those customer cars don't win anything, but they do enough to wipe out any real opportunities for say, Red Bull and WIlliams to score points. A couple of years later, Red Bull find themselves wondering why they are spending so much money on designing their cars when they could spend considerably less on getting hold of some customer Mclarens. For Williams, pride is at stake, but in the end, in the face of extinction, Frank swallows his pride and buys some Mclarens too. The money coming in from Williams, Red Bull and the original satellite team enables Mclaren to invest still more in their design for the following season, and up their production facilities. Increasingly, the workds Renault, Toyota and BMW teams, or rather the shareholders in the parent companies, wonder why they are spending so much money finishing 10th behind a pack of Mclarens every other weekend. Uninterested in running Mclarens, they sell their factories to the leading GP2 teams, who are more than happy to buy customer cars - its what they've done all their lives, after all. A decade down the line from the rule change, F1 has become a spec-formula (and Ron Dennis richer than Croesus).

Would it really happen that way? Maybe not. Maybe F1 is different, maybe the sheer level of technical know-how involved would get in the way of the kind of volume-car manufacture undertaken by Lola or Dallara. But that does rather tend to be the way it works out (although the F1 engine market provides an intriguing counter-example).

So what reason could there be for allowing customer cars? Well, there was a reason. Jaguar pulled out of F1 a couple of years ago, and other manufacturer teams could follow (watch Toyota....) There won't be a soft-drinks billionaire around to buy all of them. The cost of establishing a Formula 1 team from scratch. In the last 10 years, only Toyota and BAR have done so, and only then with the resources of the world's second largest car manufacturer and a tobacco conglomerate, respectively. And look how wrong they got it, initially!

If new teams are to come in, there's a strong argument that it will only be possible by allowing them to run cars bought from other teams. Could Super Aguri have come into being in 100 days if they hadn't owned the rights to the old Arrows A23s? What chance would Prodrive have of building its own cars in time for 2008?

So what is the compromise solution? A championship for drivers, open to everyone, and a manufacturers championship open only to those who design and build their own cars? Perhaps, but as Joe Saward pointed out recently, the risk is that Mclaren, Ferrari and Toyota (who probably have the resources to do it) would run satellite teams, purely to take points off their rivals, and soon half the grid would be made up of teams running under orders not to race the 'A teams'.

No, to me, the best solution is simpler. New teams should be allowed to purchase year-old cars from rival operations (To my mind, though, they should not be able to buy from any team which finished in the top 5 in the constructors championship - this would provide a useful revenue stream to a team like Williams, for example, and prevent the big teams running strategic satellite teams). They should be allowed to continue doing this for up to 3 years, while they build up their operation. At the end of the 3 year period, though, they should be required either to enter their own car, or continue running with a 2 year old design (perhaps modified by the new team itself). The three year period coincides neatly with the period that any new team is required to be in existence for before becoming entitled to any FOM money - neatly solving two problems at once. That way, there is a route for equipes wishing to move up from GP2 or suchlike, but at the same time, no risk is run of heading down the Champ Car/IRL road. A perfect solution? Well, has anyone got any better ideas?