GP2, GP3 versus F3 budget.

It is now reckoned that a season of European Formula 3 Championship costs around $800,000 for a season of racing, if one includes testing and, perhaps, a trip to Macau. However, the amount of track time is better than other championships, something that is particularly valuable for up-and-coming young drivers. In European F3 it is now possible to do as much as 5,000 miles of running if one does a lot of testing. 

GP3 is a cheaper option and is likely to result in more TV coverage, but the teams are still gouged on spare parts by the GP3 organisation and so the budget is around $700,000 and you get very little track time for the money required. It is a similar story with GP2, which is now costing a driver around $1.6 million a year, but it does at least draw one to the attention of the F1 teams and gets TV coverage - if you are competitive. The Formula 3 series also has rather more sensible rules than GP2 and GP3, without the troublesome reverse grids which often results in drivers winning races who would not normally be able to do that - and thus look to be better than they actually are. The truth is that it is virtually impossible to find commercial sponsorship in GP2 and GP3 and almost all of the money comes either from family and friends or from young driver development schemes from F1 teams. The only real chance for a talented but underfunded driver is to be picked up by one of these schemes.



The FIA wants to have a Formula 2 that costs a great deal less than is currently the case, which is logical given that the GP2 and GP3 financial results show that the series, which are owned by the Formula One group, are both producing good profits, which means that they are not being treated like promotional championships. The FIA invited bids in 2015 with a budget limited to $1 million a year, but it also required a lot of rights to be signed over. There were no takers. The word is that one of the stipulations for agreeing to the sale of the F1 group to Liberty Media was to transform GP2 and GP3 into Formula 2 and Formula 3, which would complete the task of creating an easily understandable ladder to F1. If this is indeed the case, the profits generated by GP2 and GP3 may need to be written off by Liberty. It is not a huge amount of money for them and it can probably be made back by better marketing of the junior formulae.