As suggested a fortnight ago, Sauber and Honda have gone their separate ways and the Swiss team will be sticking with Ferrari engines for the next three years. The two parties agreed a deal and it was announced back in April. But when Sauber decided to split with its CEO Monisha Kaltenborn, the relationship with Honda changed and it seems that new Sauber team principal Frederic Vasseur argued that it was better to stay with Ferrari. This led to the decision to cancel the agreement. The desire was to get a Mercedes engine, but that proved to be impossible because Mercedes could not supply Sauber if it was refusing to provide engines to McLaren and so Sauber had to accept that a deal with Ferrari, albeit for 2018 engines, was the only way to go.
This created another problem because Honda and McLaren were by this stage in a state of complete marital collapse and so the Japanese firm realised that it was facing a situation where there were no teams running the engines next year. This meant that the firm had to face up to a choice between being left out of Formula 1 completely, or to do a deal with Scuderia Toro Rosso for a free three-year engine supply deal. This was a clearly a win-win situation because it saves STR $20 million a year, gives the team the chance to do better if Honda can get its act together and also offers the possibility of Red Bull Racing getting a competitive factory engine supply for the future by flipping the engine deals, as happened back in 2007 when STR took over the RBR deal for Ferrari engines when the latter got hold of Renault engines.
The final details of the Toro Rosso Honda deal are now being finalised and an announcement is expected in the next couple of weeks. All of this means that McLaren will end up with Renault engines (paying $20 million for them) and losing the Honda sponsorship that came with the deal. McLaren is happy with this because it gives the team the chance to get better results and thus build up sponsorship revenues to secure a more solid future. McLaren might even be able to win races with Renault engines and so Fernando Alonso will, no doubt, stay - he has little option elsewhere - and Renault will be happy as it will have three good teams using its power units.
The Sauber-Ferrari revival will mean that Ferrari will once again have a team in which to place its young drivers and so it is safe to suggest that the 2018 driver line-up will almost certainly be Marcus Ericsson and Charles Leclerc, unless Ferrari takes a major gamble and puts Leclerc alongside Sebastian Vettel. This is certainly being discussed at the moment but it would be a huge risk for Leclerc and for Ferrari because the youngster would be under massive pressure to perform. Given that Ferrari chairman Sergio Marchionne has little F1 experience, he might do something this radical, but wiser heads are no doubt arguing that it is wiser to keep Kimi Raikkonen, despite his inconsistent results, if only to keep stable for Vettel. He is keen to keep the Finn, but that means that Ferrari will have less chance of winning the Constructors' Championship in the future, because he cannot produce the results needed to take the fight to Mercedes, which has two solid players in Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas.
The timing is also complicated because Ferrari would ultimately like to sign Max Verstappen, but he cannot go to Maranello before 2019 at the earliest - and even then Vettel is not going to be overly pleased because Max is not going to play the submissive kind of role that Raikkonen currently does.
A decision over a Toro Rosso-Honda deal is required quickly because Red Bull needs to get to work on a gearbox (which would be a modified Red Bull unit) rather than buying a unit from McLaren, which now does not want to build a transmission for Honda engines, as was going to happen if Sauber had stuck with Honda.
The musical chairs on engines also puts Red Bull Racing into a more solid place for the future if Red Bull boss Dietrich Mateschitz decides to quit F1 after 2020. It should be remembered that in order to create stability Bernie Ecclestone did a deal that required several big teams to commit to the sport for 10 years, in order to get access to the higher prize money. This included a clause that if the team wanted to leave F1 before the end of the agreement, it would be necessary for the company to pay substantial penalties. Most big companies are not overly impressed by penalty clauses, but this is believed to have been a huge one: $1 billion, reducing by $100 million per year over the term of the contract. Thus, if Red Bull had wanted to quit F1 in 2015, the penalty incurred would have been $500 million. This kept them in the sport. Red Bull could still leave the sport at that point but with new rules the hope is that Mateschitz will be convinced to keep at least one of his two teams in operation.
Source: JSBM
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