JUNE 16, 2006

The effect of cost-cutting in F1

Cost-cutting has been mumbled endlessly in recent months by the people who are trying to cut costs in Formula 1. It all sounds splendid but usually cost-cutting has no effect at all. In the case of an engine freeze, however, there are going to be cost savings, but what no-one has bothered to mention is that a reduction in costs means that there are also going to be a lot of people out of work. At the moment there are people who are busy designing, developing, testing and building engines. With a freeze there is going to be less need for people in all four areas and for companies that exist only to build racing engines (which is the case in most of the F1 operations) this means that there will be people left with nothing to do. And, of course, big companies do not like paying people to do nothing - and that means redundancies. The only thing that is not clear at the moment is just how many jobs are going to be lost but it does not seem to matter much which set of regulations under discussion will eventually be adopted as all of them will result in much the same level of job losses.