Ferrari's True Power in F1 Revealed

The myths about Ferrari's true power wielded in the F1 politics runs long and deep. Rumors of Ferrari being able to veto and lots of other stuff, well apparently, a lot of it is true.

[QUOTE]A few weeks ago Italian newspaper Corriere dello Sport shed new light on one of the longest-running rumours in the history of Formula One. It claimed that Ferrari has a veto over any change to F1's regulations and it added that Max Mosley, former president of motor sport's governing body the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), awarded the privilege to the team in 2005 to prevent it leaving.[/QUOTE]

In addition, Ferrari apparently has it written into the contracts that they get more prize money too.

[QUOTE] It gets preferential treatment because it is the only team which has competed every year since F1 began in 1950 and has won more titles than any of its rivals. Ferrari is also the only car manufacturer involved with F1 which directly signs contracts with the F1 Group rather than using a subsidiary company to do so. This gives recourse directly to Ferrari itself if the contract is breached whereas a subsidiary company could easily be shut down.

So important is Ferrari's status as the longest standing team that it even has control over the race weekend. Page 177 of the prospectus reveals that the F1 Group has "agreed to give to the Longest Standing Team, if it is a manufacturer of GT racing cars, a right of first refusal to run an international motor sport series for its cars as a support event (i.e. to be included in the track programme of an Event as a support event to the World Championship) on terms and conditions no less favourable to the Longest Standing Team than those granted to other entities." [/QUOTE]

That is crazy. A lot of the language in the article is very legalese and hard for me to discern but it's crazy that Ferrari gets that much preferential treatment just because it's the longest-running team in the series.

Here is a link to the [URL="http://en.espnf1.com/ferrari/motorsport/story/104589.html"]full article.[/URL]

"Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."

Yikes...

As motorsports go F1 stopped being interesting years ago. The only good thing about it is available TV coverage of motorsport.

So again, not losing any sleep about that either.

This is been the fact for quite a while now....I guess ESPN is just slower to realize this...RBR after winning 2 championships managed to negotiate their prize money scheme to equal to that of Ferrari's, only to have Ferrari to renegotiate it to be above RBR's again last year...