Not now, though, with Ferrari and FIA heading for the courtroom over the 2010 regulations and the champions threatening to quit the sport.
FIAT-owned Ferrari will seek an injunction in a Paris court on Tuesday to try to stop the FIA from introducing a 40 million pound ($60.82 million) budget cap.
“For us it (Formula One) is very important, it’s our life,” said Ferrari boss Stefano Domenicali last week. “We want to fight in order to make sure that we will be in the championship in the right way.”
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Even if Ferrari win the first round, the fight will not be over. The FIA has said it will appeal, a move sure to keep the pot bubbling through the weekend’s showcase Monaco Grand Prix and beyond.
“I once said that they were the most important team and that got immediately interpreted as that meant that we gave them special treatment, which we don’t and never have,” FIA president Max Mosley told reporters after meeting the teams in London on Friday.
“From a public point of view, they are the most important team and that’s reflected in the fact that they get the most money from their deal with (Formula One’s commercial supremo) Bernie (Ecclestone),” he added.
Ferrari, the only team to have competed in every championship since the first in 1950 as well as the most successful, and the FIA have been at loggerheads since the budget cap was first raised.
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So to have Ecclestone, who on Friday branded the team ‘idiots’ for pursuing the legal action, and Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo.
The two men had a sharp exchange last year, with Montezemolo saying that Formula One did not need a dictator, and should be run instead in a normal, transparent manner with the teams getting a far bigger share of the revenues. Guardian.co.uk
Indeed, it was by unifying the majority of the teams into the Formula One Constructors’ Association (FOCA), and then heading it, that the sport’s power-broker and commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone came to power.
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