Ferrari said on Tuesday it won’t enter next season’s Formula One championship unless the sport’s governing body revokes its new budget cap.
The storied Italian team, which has been involved in all 60 seasons of F1 racing, said the new FIA guidelines were arbitrary and would set a double standard. It said equal rules for everyone are necessary for the sport to continue.
“The same rules for all teams, stability of regulations, the continuity of ... endeavors to methodically and progressively reduce costs, and governance of Formula One are priorities for the future,” Ferrari said in a statement after a board meeting. “If these indispensable principles are not respected, and if the regulations decided for 2010 will not change, Ferrari does not intend to enter its cars in the next Formula One world championship.”
PHOTO: AP
Ferrari said it hoped fans would understand this “painful choice.”
FIA president Max Mosley is leading the FIA’s push to curb costs, with a voluntary £40 million (US$60 million) budget cap being made available to teams.
Teams that don’t adhere to the cap will not receive the same technical freedom, something Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo has called “fundamentally unfair.”
Ferrari has grown frustrated in recent years with what it sees as the autocratic leadership of Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone and Mosley.
“The board also expressed its disappointment about the methods adopted by the FIA in taking decisions of such a serious nature and its refusal to effectively reach an understanding with constructors and teams,” the team said. “The rules of governance that have contributed to the development of Formula One over the last 25 years have been disregarded, as have the binding contractual obligations between Ferrari and the FIA itself regarding the stability of the regulations.”
Ferrari fears the new rules will effectively split F1 into two tiers, those that can live with the cap and enjoy the technical advantages and those that can’t.
Ferrari is one of F1’s richest teams. In the first quarter of this year, Ferrari reported turnover of 441 million euros (US$600 million) and a trading profit of 54 million euros.
Mosley has said the sport could survive without the Italian giant, although Formula One drivers have disagreed.
The Formula One Teams Association has asked for urgent talks with the governing body over the budget cap.
Ferrari is F1’s most successful team with 15 drivers’ and 16 constructors’ championships. Kimi Raikkonen was the last Ferrari driver to win the title in 2007.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier