It’s not really that Renault are too big to throw out but that too many of the major manufacturers are leaving because they cannot afford it. Honda left last year, and BMW are leaving this year.
Honda supplies all the engines for Indy Racing League. Maybe they just don’t want to spread themselves too thin?
I’m never really watched F1 like I do NASCAR or IRL when I can catch it, but always felt it was too much about gaming the rules and too little actual racing in F1. While I understand the fascination with the cars, and enjoy it in the other two leagues, F1 has too many rules restricting who can pass who wear for my interest.
On another note, anyone else like road courses better in NASCAR and Grand Prix? The open wheel cars in F1 and IRL are too fragile. Any contact between them and both shatter, NASCAR and Grand Prix can survive occasional contact so they can be a little more aggressive when passing and it doesn’t turn into one long game of follow the leader.
Well, the naive explanation for this is that Renault 'fessed up unconditionally, while McLaren obfuscated and dissembled, and generally tried to pretend they hadn’t done anything.
More realistically, though, neither punishment would’ve ever been sufficient to cause the team in question to leave the sport. McLaren are a fairly secure competitor; F1 is their raison d’etre. So really, they were unlikely to leave no matter what the punishment. Renault, by contrast, were clearly wavering even before the Piquet revelations; they may yet go. A significant sanction would’ve seen them out of the sport for years. Mosley can’t be seen to have chased out such a major manufacturer, any more than he could be seen to have rid the sport of McLaren; he has commercial agreements to honour. Hence (when combined with their prompt sacrifice of Briatore and Symonds) the relative leniency shown to Renault.
What Mosley clearly wanted, however, and what he’s got, is to see the back of Ron Dennis and Flavio Briatore, two of the leading lights in Fota. Make no mistake, this is a massive coup for Mosley, and one which will see his influence on F1 continue for years to come, even if he is perceived to have been edged out of his Presidency by team power. He doesn’t want to see teams out of the sport; he wants them reduced to the point of manipulation. And this is what he’s got.
Regardless; this all just shows what I said earlier in the season: the racing on the track has become entirely subsidiary to the power plays of incredibly rich men. We’re not watching a sport; we’re watching a soap opera with petrol overtones. Whether it was ever anything else is up for dispute, but this season has made it clear beyond all argument.
Some of my favorite racing to watch is Aussie V8 Supercars. Speed Channel here in the states used to fill its winter months with replays of the previous Aussie season. But not anymore. NASCAR road course events (especially the Nationwide road courses) are too often repeated parades under yellows punctuated by a few frantic laps of green. If they did more than 2 a year, they’d probably be better at it. 
In terms of exposure there’s no contest between F1 and the IRL or whatever it’s called now. F1 one of the world’s biggest draws, both in terms of sponsorship money and audiences, even with the big dropoff of the last few years. The IRL is largely ignored outside the US and Canada, and even here it’s a niche sport nowadays.
NASCAR probably offers close to the same sort of exposure as F1, given the size of the US market, but nothing else in motorsport comes close.
I can’t imagine that it costs Honda more to field an F1 team than it does to supply 40 engines per IRL race (even considering the monster budgets in F1 now), so that can’t be it.
I don’t follow the trials and tribulations of F1 much, but this strikes me as a mind-boggling story. Piquet crashed his car into a wall, deliberately, in order to manipulate the running order of the race behind the safety car? Seems like madness - how fast was he going when he crashed? I’ve seen pictures of his wrecked car, did he plough it straight into the crash barrier at speed? Or was it a relatively low speed collision and the car crumpled up?
It seems a level above the usual F1 bullshit. Piquet must be mentally disadvantaged to agree to something like that.
Piquet was fighting for his seat. He simply wasn’t up to the standard of the other F1 drivers. And it gave him the perfect blackmail material.
Interesting - but not unexpectedly - to see that Bernie and Max are backpedalling furiously, saying they wanted short-term suspensions.
But he’d have also had the blackmail material if he’d refused to obey the order.
I don’t see him ever getting a seat now - he’s been fired for poor performance by a boss who he could blackmail, and he’s now known to be a cheat. Just how bad must he have been for Briatore of all people to sack him?
I saw that. I can’t believe Bernie doesn’t understand how much damage this could do to the reputation of F! among sponsors and investors. They need to cast the players right out, in order to reassure the sponsors that F! wants to Do The Right Thing.
I disagree: if he hadn’t obeyed it would have just been hearsay.
Agreed. They could have relegated him to test driver for a couple of seasons, then quietly dropped him or put him back into Formula 3000(?) where he regularly challenged Lewis.
Again I agree.