Virgin Racing investor Richard Branson has hit back at Ferrari's obnoxious rant this week, where they decried F1's newest teams, with Branson saying that the Italain team's views on the whole subject were "sad" to read.
An article on Ferrari's website this week hit out at the new F1 teams for their quality, as well as the issues that USF1 and Campos have had in just getting to the grid, and labelled the current situations as being a "holy war" led by former FIA president Max Mosley.
But Branson, whose Virgin Racing team was the first of the new teams to launch their car and hit the track, said that Ferrari and the other established F1 teams should be welcoming the new teams into the sport, rather than moaning.
"I think that it is a bit sad to see Ferrari carrying on with those kinds of words," Branson mused at the Barcelona circuit on Saturday.
"F1 needs new teams, and Ferrari won the battle of making sure the new teams were shackled. For testing, we built a new car and we are going to have to have exactly the same amount of practice time as Brawn or Ferrari or the others, who have had years and years and years to get their cars to a certain stage."
He added that: "We are not complaining about it, and we are happy to go on with it, but Ferrari should be welcoming new teams because [the new teams] make the sport much more exciting.
"And we will make them look better for a year or two until we catch them up. Ultimately, I think the new teams will give Ferrari a run for their money and I think will make the sport more exciting – particularly as the budgets come down to more realistic levels."
He also brought up the divisive issue of the budget cap, which was initially proposed by Mosley's FIA in order to help to integrate the new teams into the grid, but was voted down by the manufacturers after a summer of bitter arguments.
"I think it was a pity that they were resistant and I think it is foolish actually," Branson shrugged.
"I think the one thing the Virgin team will prove is that you can have a really good racing team, running very fast, within a very tight budget. There is no need to do massively expensive windtunnel testing, or all the other things that they do to get the extra second or two."
As for his own team, which has been troubled by reliability issues in their early life as an F1 team, Branson believes that it will take "a year or two" for the team to become competitive, but claimed that the current gap between the established teams and the newbies will be reduced by the time they get to Bahrain in two weeks time.
"By the start of the season I think the gap between the new teams and the old teams will be less," Branson guessed, "Give it a year or two – you cannot just build a new team from scratch and immediately start beating Ferrari that has spent £400 million on a car – whereas Virgin has spent less than £40 million.
"That is the budget that all the teams were meant to spend this year but then at the last minute changed the rules to spend the same kinds of monies that they have been spending for years. So, the budgets are a lot less but they are going to be tremendous cars. There will be a race among the new owners and then in time the new owners will start picking off some of the established teams."
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
