Is it all about the money?

[edlalu]

Hello F1 fans! I have been over in the NASCAR forum trying to get some info and maybe kick a little dust up. The thread can be found at:

http://forums.motorsport.com/forums/showthread.php?t=115917

In summary, I read that some NASCAR team have as many as 18 cars in thier stable for a single driver. These cars are purpose built to suit a specific track. As a MotoGP fan where riders get a primary bike and a backup, I find it inequitable that NASCAR allows those with the biggest wallets to have such an advantage. I know there are alway the haves and the have nots, but wheres the equal playing field?

Someone responded in the thread saying that other series (specificly F1) are similar. So I ask the expert fans:

How many cars does an average team field per driver in the season?

How much does devlopment of an F1 car cost?

Many thanks!

[RJL25]

F1 teams generally have 4 or 5 monoques (the bare chassis) to share between the two drivers for the entire season, however the cars rarely turn up to a race meeting in the same specification as it was in the previous race meeting. Aerodynamics in particular is tuned for specific circuits.

An F1 team will be operating somewhere between 100 and 400 million bucks, which is considerably more then most nascar teams, the difference is that most of that money goes into develpment, whereas with nascar the rules are so specific that there isnt alot of development left to do (relitive to F1 anyway) so they spend all of their money on cars which have different rigidity characteristics to suit different tracks. Nascar competes on a number of different styles of circuit from your big massive super speedways to the tiny little bullrings and even some road courses, and obviously all these different circuits demand different characteristics from the cars. F1 on the other hand generally race on the same types of circuit all year long, so the need for specific cars for specific tracks isn't the same as in nascar.

Also dont forget that F1 teams have new cars every season whereas nascar teams will quite often keep the same cars for years and year and years and years, so those 18 cars per driver has been built up over the course of 5+ years in many cases

[BeansBeansBeans]

Money is an important factor, but it isn't a guarantee of success, as Toyota continually prove.

4 or 5 monocoques is a little bit of a low estimate for F1 teams operating at the top end of the budget range, since it doesn't take account of test cars.

Pat Symonds said at the launch of the R27 that they would be building 7 chassis for the season, but testing would probably account for two of these.

Fernando Alonso drove the same chassis (R26/04) in every race last season. That's very unusual, but just goes to show how a car can be massively altered between races even if it's the same monocoque.

One major difference between the chassis concept in F1 and NASCAR is that F1 uses a monocoque while NASCAR is a tubular space-frame. It's fair to say that when an F1 carbon-fibre monocoque has a crash, the idea is that it stays intact whilst all the rest of the car breaks, something which just isn't possible with a steel space-frame. A space-frame will be pretty much scrap after it has a major impact with an oval wall, so it probably would account for NASCAR's best-funded teams having quite a few chassis to play with through a season.

However, because the initial cost of manufacture for a space-frame chassis is a lot smaller, wiping out a number of chassis probably doesn't have a massive impact on running costs. Unlike the IRL, where I seem to remember Chip Ganassi losing something like 20 chassis in 2005.

[blakebeatty]

As a MotoGP fan where riders get a primary bike and a backup, I find it inequitable that NASCAR allows those with the biggest wallets to have such an advantage. I know there are alway the haves and the have nots, but wheres the equal playing field?

[not a formula 1 comment, but relevant to a previous post]

if you have ever toured the race shops in charlotte you will see that it is not a case of haves and have nots. Everybody has excessively large race shops (as large as [Penske Racing] 480 000 square feet), and everybody has 15-20 cars. Even single car teams like Robby Gordon Motorsports, Hall of Fame racing, Morgan-McClure Motorsports are not lacking. The big money teams have an advantage, but it is not from the number of cars in their inventory