Speaking in the wake of Honda’s announcement on Friday that it was to withdraw backing for its F1 team, Mosley said that Cosworth had won the governing body’s tender to supply a standard engine from 2010.
A complete powertrain - engine supplied by Cosworth and gearbox from Xtrac and Ricardo - will cost the teams an initial up-front payment of £1.68million.
That is to be followed by a fee of £5.49million per season over the three years of the agreement, running from 2010 through to 2012.
Such a figure is around 10 percent of the outlay teams have spent on engines in recent years.
Mosley proposed a deadline of Thursday for teams to sign up and it was also dependent on at least four teams being in favour.
Although the French team declined to comment, a spokesman for world governing body FIA said: “There has been a very positive response from the F1 teams regarding our engine proposals. It would be inappropriate to comment on the reaction of any individual team, or give further details, in advance of Friday’s [FIA] World Council meeting.”
Independent teams Williams, Force India, Red Bull Racing and Toro Rosso are already believed to have informed the FIA that they are considering the option. But the addition of Renault would be a significant coup for Mosley. It would also mark a significant departure for the carmaker who have supplied engines from their Viry-Chatillon base in France since they returned to F1 in 2001.
However, Renault have lost 82.6 per cent of their share price in the economic downturn – more than any other manufacturer – and Flavio Briatore’s team are now under severe pressure from their parent company to justify their involvement in the sport.
A dramatic reduction in costs from 2010 might be the only way of stopping Renault from following Honda’s lead. The Japanese car manufacturer pulled out of the sport last Friday citing the economic crisis.
While the manufacturer teams have all said they are not in favour of a standardized engine, Renault team boss Flavio Briatore indicated earlier this year that they were open to any offer which would help cut costs.
“I think we are in a very difficult position economically, what is going on around the globe and it’s a panic at the moment. Formula One is not immune from this panic,” he said at the season ending Brazilian Grand Prix.
“Regarding the question of the engines… theoretically there is no development. If everybody follows the rules, the engine is frozen and nobody is allowed to touch the engine. Whatever proposal we put together, we need to take into consideration this as well.”
While Mosley has said he will not force manufacturers to buy one of the low-cost engines from Cosworth, they would be under the same performance and development restrictions as everyone else. For a company like Renault, devoting resources and building an engine which someone else is already willing to offer, at a fraction of the cost, just so you can put your name plate on it and call it your own does not make much economic sense.
Read more on this:
Alonso Threatens Retirement After FIA Unveils Its Latest Cost-Cutting Solution
UPDATE: December 11, 2008 07:39 am
Formula One is being stifled by a lack of innovation and needs a radical overhaul to withstand the global credit crunch, motor racing head Max Mosley said on Wednesday.
“We need dramatically to cut costs and get innovation back into Formula One,” the head of the governing International Automobile Federation (FIA) said.
“We must stabilize the system with a base engine which anyone can have and which is inexpensive, as well as a standard gearbox. That will stabilize Formula One until we can bring in new energy-efficient engines which undoubtedly will be the future.”
Mosley has also been a strong supporter of the KERS system, due to be introduced next season, which captures energy generated under braking and transforms it into short bursts of additional power.
Some teams have called for the system to be delayed, while others have said they will start the season without it.
Mosley said the response from manufacturers was widely divergent.
“What is wrong with Formula One today was wrong before any of the present economic problems cropped up. Essentially it’s the rules, which have become ever more restrictive compressing the work of the engineers into an ever smaller area,” Mosley said.
“We’ve finally found a serious engineering challenge for the teams in KERS,” Mosley said. “Some manufacturers have risen to this challenge . . . but some leading teams, such as Ferrari, have said that they don’t like KERS because it is ‘too complicated.’ Could you imagine the great F1 engineers like (Lotus founder Colin) Chapman or (Cosworth co-founder Keith) Duckworth saying, ‘I can’t do that because it is too complicated?”’
“Success in Formula One today consists of optimising each little bit of the chassis, which is ever more costly and completely absurd,” Mosley said in addressing the opening day of the Motor Sport Business Forum.
By way of example Mosley pointed out: “A Formula One team spends 1,000 dollars for a special wheel nut imported from California and uses 1,000 per season, so that produces an overall bill of a million dollars a year.”
He added that the constant search for new, lighter materials “has created a mentality in Formula One which forces the engineers to refine as opposed to innovate and that is slowly destroying Formula One.
“It’s all very expensive and that’s not really an engineer’s mission.”
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