Red Bull quit FOTA because the teams association had ceased to have a good purpose, Dr Helmut Marko said this week.<\/p>\n
Late last Friday, after many international news editors had already called it a day for the week, the team as well as Ferrari confirmed that they had pulled out of the Geneva-based body.<\/p>\n
Formed amid the political war with former FIA president Max Mosley, the alliance gave the teams a strong negotiating position as well as a platform to reduce costs with the gentleman’s ‘resource restriction agreement’ (RRA).<\/p>\n
It is the RRA that caused the tension, with Ferrari struggling recently despite having F1’s biggest annual budget, and Red Bull accused of breaching the spirit of the cost-cutting rules.<\/p>\n
“FOTA fulfilled its purpose in the crisis period,” Red Bull F1 consultant Marko said on Austrian Servus TV on Monday, “and so there was a reduction in costs, but as far as achievements there was nothing else.”<\/p>\n
Agreed team boss Christian Horner: “In the last twelve months it hasn’t quite been clear what was the purpose of FOTA.”<\/p>\n
Added Marko: “If at the meetings we cannot agree even to the lowest common denominator, one wonders what is the point of all the effort.”<\/p>\n
Some believe the FOTA split gives Red Bull and Ferrari powerful individual positions to negotiate lucrative deals with Bernie Ecclestone under the next Concorde Agreement.<\/p>\n
Others worry that F1 teams will now return to the unsustainable financial arms races of the past.<\/p>\n
“We have decided at this time to withdraw and now we will see how it develops,” said Horner ambiguously.<\/p>\n
For the moment, the divide has F1’s biggest spenders Red Bull and Ferrari on one side, and powerful competitors including McLaren and Mercedes on the other.<\/p>\n
“I think it is absolutely vital that FOTA is existing,” carmaker Mercedes’ racing chief Norbert Haug told reporters on Monday.<\/p>\n
France’s autohebdo.fr reports that the remaining FOTA members will meet for talks on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Said the Mercedes team’s chief executive Nick Fry: “We’ve certainly hit a bump in the road but I believe that work will continue in the background to try and resolve this and we will do whatever we can to support that.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Red Bull quit FOTA because the teams association had ceased to have a good purpose, Dr Helmut Marko said this week. Late last Friday, after many international news editors had already called it a day for the week, the team as well as Ferrari confirmed that they had pulled out of the Geneva-based body. Formed …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[5262,5340],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14514"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14515,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14514\/revisions\/14515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}