Grandees and Garagistes.

There are a couple of ways to look at Toyota (and BMW, and Honda) walking away for their investment in F1 and the potential of Renault joining them on the sideline.

In 2010 there will be two or three grandees of Mercedes GP (formerly Brawn), Ferrari and potentially Renault. Everyone else has engines supplied by an outside manufacturer.

First scenario is that it’s back to the 70’s where there were the grandees of Ferrari, Renault and Alfa alongside the garagistes that made up the rest of the grid. They used the proven formula of a DFV engine and a Hewland gear box married to an aluminium monocoque chassis with some form of inboard suspension. Ligier always liked to do things a little differently and ran Matra engines.

Williams and McLaren are the only garagistes left from the 70’s with the same names (and I get that a lot of teams can trace lineage back to that era), not coincidentally both followed the DFV formula and both had success with it.

In 1978 (picked at random) 46 drivers entered at least one race in the championship and Cosworth powered 39 of them. Fourteen different constructors and 21 different drivers scored points.

Scenario number two is there are two or three big teams and a bunch of cars with customer engines that are at a disadvantage of not having the latest power plants. Making F1 a two or three horse race with everyone making up the numbers.

Typically there have only been one or two teams that have been totally competitive in any year. During the 70’s and 80’s Ferrari had a lot of mediocre years despite having more resources than any of the garagistes.

2010 will be a fascinating year, it’s possible someone will run away with the championship, but it seems unlikely. The teams that understand and adapt to the changes the best will do well. It’s going to be interesting to see who that is going to be.

I don’t feel that a return to the big, varied grids of the 70’s would be a bad thing. While F1 is an engineering exercise, it’s supposed to be entertaining and giving creative people a reliable and competitive engine/transmission package and letting them innovate around that could throw up a number of surprises, and that keeps the racing interesting.