More bad news

[AJ14]

The Honda F1 team has decided to close their doors . They weren't the biggest F1 team , or the largest budget team , but when a company the size of Honda decides they can't afford to race , things start to look pretty bad . Their budget was about $300 million a year , which is mind blowing , though nothing like the amount Ferrari spends . Honda says the world wide financial problems led to this decision . There is rumored to be at least one other team that will be closing down before the first of the year .
And of course the other bombshell was Audi ending all of its' racing programs worldwide , except to run the 12 Hours of Sebring and the 24 Hours of LeMans . Their cars have dominated road racing for a number of years . They gave the same reason , the financial crisis .
The Wood Brothers have decided to run only twelve races next season due to lack of sponsorship . It will be just like the David Pearson days . Pick and choose your races . They won't be running short tracks or road courses at all .
This is going to be a rough year for auto racing worlwide . It will be very interesting to see how NASCAR weathers this storm , especially if one or more of the US manufacturerers fails . Of course if that happens racing won't be the important thing . The jobs and lives of everyone laid off will be .

[JackTripper]

The Audi thing didn't shock me as much as the Honda announcement. Audi generally jerks around every season, but even though Honda's F1 team has sucked out loud, to put it up for sale at this point in time is shocking. I didn't think Honda was doing as bad as everybody else but apparently they had an unbelievably awful sales month in November.

The irony of this all was Honda moved up to P1 in the ALMS series to battle Audi and now Honda will battle themselves, just like Audi used to.

[Gary J]

Also there are no f1 races in north america, formula 1 wants too many millions of dollars from promoters. but they go to 3rd word nations like Malaysia wher the govenment pays for it.