Report: Cosworth is done

The independent British engine manufacturer´s foray into F1 is over, rivals say these days.

Coming back in 2010 to supply engines for the three newest teams on the grid, Marussia, Lotus and HRT, as well as Williams, but only the latter team managed to score points that year, finishing 6th in the championship. 2011 was a step back for Cosworth it seemed, when all their teams finished at the back of the grid, with Williams again being the best of the four, though only scoring 5 points of the season.

For this season only two teams are left with the Cosworth engines, HRT and Marussia. Williams and Caterham, the former Lotus team, both switched to Renault, but the immediate future looks grim for those final Cosworth powered teams. Rule changes from 2014, mean that the current V8 units are history, replacing them with Turbo charged V6 engines, and it´s a big question of Cosworth can even stay for the final season.

Speaking to motorsport-total.com, Renault´s Jean-Francois Caubet said:

“Cosworth, for sure, are finished.” Caubet is pushing for FIA to ‘relax’ the rules so that engine suppliers can have more than four customers. And last year Caubet said: “I am pushing for an open market because we are in formula one and regulations cannot solve all the problems,” he added.

So what´s left for the teams to choose from? Craig Pollock, who we know as former team principal for the BAR Racing Team, is ready with the answer. His PURE engines have been under development for some time, and expects to be ready to take on customers when the new rules for 2014 are introduced.

“Cosworth cannot be there in 2014. They just can’t make it in time now, no matter what anybody says,” Pollock said. “It’s an absolute impossibility.”

When BMW and Toyota dropped out of F1 before the 2010 season, the engine diversity dropped too. For the first time in 30 years, only four engine manufacturers supplied engines to the teams.

Cosworth have supplied engines to such teams as Lotus, McLaren, Matra, Brabham, March, Tyrrell, Surtees, Hesketh, Lola, Williams, Penske, Wolf, Ligier. From 1969 to 1973 every world championship was won using the powerful DFV-engine, Double Four Valve, winning 155 races out of a total of 262 between 1967 and 1985.

Mercedes ‘close to quitting’ rumours gathering speed

Depending on where you get your F1 related news stories, you will see that Mercedes is either very close to dropping out of Formula One or is not at all considering such a thing. And everything in between.

Since F1 correspondent Kevin Eason wrote an article in the Times, claiming that Mercedes will pull out of F1 because the team did not receive board member seats, which were offered to Ferrari, Red Bull and McLaren, the many varieties of the story confuses the matter, rather than explain anything.

“Mercedes, which is estimated to have spent more than £1 billion on grand-prix racing in the past two decades, is on the verge of quitting Formula One as the company is denied a seat in the new boardroom that will control the sport when a Stock Exchange float is completed,” the Times reported on Monday.

“Red Bull, the relative newcomers to grand-prix racing, and Ferrari have both been promised boardroom places by Bernie Ecclestone, Formula One’s chief executive, as he lines up a float that could value Formula One at up to £6 billion. Mercedes, who registered their first win of the modern era in China only last month, have been isolated with McLaren, their former part-ners, also being handed a place.”

F1 will be looking forward to a flotation on the Singapore stock exchange soon, Mercedes were not invited to join the new board. The new Concorde Agreement has been signed by eight teams, leaving only Mercedes as well as the three new teams to sign up. As for the three new teams, their value are so low that they have no negotiation power, only Mercedes is still in a position to get a good deal with Bernie Ecclestone. However, he is not about to make any proposals, as he does not regard the current Mercedes team as a development from Tyrrell, but rather a new team which entered the scene in 2010. That means, in his view, the value of Mercedes is lower or as he puts it:

“Why should Mercedes have the same deal as the others?” Bernie Ecclestone is quoted as saying. “What have they done in formula one? They won a race and that is it.”

Respected journalist, Joe Saward says:

“If one looks at the ownership of the various F1 teams one could extrapolate any number of daft stories about who might be on the board of the Formula One group. As to whether Mercedes will pull out of F1, the story is similarly misleading. Yes, Mercedes may have totted up how much it would cost them to withdraw from F1, but they might also have worked out how much lawyers fees would cost to mount a challenge to the Formula One flotation and realised that lobbing a law suit would certainly get the attention of the financial people and would probably screw up any hope of the float taking place.”