Yesterday, my stepson asked me an F1 question which I could not really answer - during the race, of course. It was "how much exactly does one of those F1 cars cost"? I told him that probably nobody really knows for sure because of the comingling of preseason development, team funds, secretive attitudes, etc. Also, how much development "cost" is capitalized in previous seasons, general research funds for the company, etc. Pressed further, I just gave out a simple wild type guess, saying welll - if the Mclaren/Mercedes team budget is about 500 million, maybe the two cars themselves would count for perhaps 20 million (each)? So am I way off, just a little off, or maybe just plain stupid wrong?
No you gave the perfect answer. No one but the team's accountants know for sure. Include the Engines and it becomes even harder to figure out.
It depends on what you see as "car costs". If you say that the acutal output of one season is, let's say 5 cars with a budget of 500 million, then you might as well say "100 million per car". I think you can't really answer the question...wouldn't be surprised if every team accounted for the cars on other data
What he said. A few years ago Frank Mountain bought a F1-2001 for a little over $1.1M. That included a car, a starter rig and I think the ability to run it at Fiorano with a crew from Ferrari. A spare engine may have been part of the deal, but I could be wrong. So on the open market, a contempory F1 car would likely cost anywhere from $1M-$2M. To have a team that runs 2 cars for the season probably costs around several hundred million dollars total for the season. That's for the "low end" teams that buy their engines like Red Bull and Super Aguri. Much of that cost (50%-70%?) likely comes from the manpower to service the machines and run the race and the logistics to move the team and hardware around the world. -F
Well, now it depends on how you calculate all that manpower and engineering work into the 'price' of a car. Of course, that stuff like traveling around doesn't count, but what about the loan of the engineer sitting in his office designing some aerodynamic part? What about the guy at the CNC milling some aluminium stuff? As I said, I think the actual calculation is different from team to team.
I agree...traveling around, damage repair, driver contract, general overhead, fuel,...these are not "car cost" per se. And, there is always the question - "did you really pay Mercedes (or whoever) a real fair market value for the engine?" (Or did they kind of subsidize part of it just to get their name on your car?) Tires, too. One thing that is pretty much beyond question to me, though, is that a real first line car itself must really cost far more than that "salvage value" for a postseason track privilege car as mentioned a couple posts back.
