MARCH 25, 2006

Entry list due April 28

The FIA will be publishing the entry list for the 2008 Formula 1 World Championship on April 28. This will give the teams "accepted or rejected in its absolute discretion" by the FIA the chance to be involved in two months of discussion about the regulations. The period will also allow the holder of the commercial rights of F1 to consider the package on offer and decide whether it is sufficiently interesting to go ahead with the deal to take control of the commercial rights of the sport. The deal cannot be fully completed until CVC Capital Partners has sold Dorna, the company that runs the MotoGP World Championship as European Union clearance for that deal will not be given until that has been done. There are expected to be two or three new teams presenting themselves as possible F1 teams and with chassis and customer engines available this means that the budgets of such operations will be much smaller than those of the big teams. However, there is little doubt that teams without manufacturer backing are going to struggle to be competitive, although Williams is currently showing how that can be done.

There are many ways in which the manufacturers can maintain their position in the sport, even allowing for the FIA's attempts to pin them down as they can simply pull back and become engine suppliers or they can take over smaller teams that need help once the rule-making process is over or they can accept that the FIA has the power to do as it pleases and accept it and sign up. What is very clear is that the federation is trying to re-establish the power that it lost at the end of the FISA-FOCA War in 1982 (when, ironically, Max Mosley was on the side of the teams rather than the federation).

The new sporting regulations also see every reference to the Concorde Agreement being deleted, which is significant as it means that the FIA is trying to get the rules and regulations out of the control of the Concorde Agreement, which means that they will no longer be negotiable as part of the commercial package, something which has caused considerable problems.