Green Notebook from Aspen Creek

So why have I flown north to go south to Brazil? It’s a good question and the only wordplay is to say that this is what might be termed “airfare logic” considering it is cheaper to fly to Brazil by way of Texas than it is to fly in the correct direction. So while the hardy F1 folk who are going to Brazil headed off to Colombia to transpiration planes there, I went to Texas and will fly uncontrived to Sao Paulo at some point. I was going to spend a couple increasingly days in Texas but the flights did not work out and so I am overnighting at DFW in the same hotel I was in last week and the Aspen Creek Grill is the nearest restaurant. It is a decent place.

It was a bit of a surprise to find a mountain lodge themed restaurant in Texas, but it seems that it was started by an entrepreneur who was an voracious skier. He made a fortune with a uniting of Texas Roundhouse restaurants and when in 2009 decided to try a variegated idea to vamp new customers. This was not a huge success and so without five years he sold the uniting (there were only eight restaurants) to Ultra Steak Inc, a visitor from Fishers, Indiana, where Michael Andretti is towers his new headquarters. Nearly 10 years later there are still only eight of these places, but I liked the Rocky Mountain log motel vibe, plane if the locals were a little rowdy on Monday night.

It stuff that time of year, there was moreover the MLB World Series, with the Texas Rangers (the local heroes in Dallas) playing the Phoenix Diamondbacks (the bad guys). This meant that those in the restaurant who were not playing on their mobile phones were watching one game or the other, or both. The cheering was therefore somewhat out of sync with the pictures, which was a little odd.

NASCAR is in the throes of its Playoffs, a rather haphazard knockout competition which involves a rather large value of luck which NASCAR hopes will pull in a big audience, during America’s sporting rush hours. NASCAR, of course, has a huge number of races each year, with a schedule that runs from February to November and includes 36 events, plus a couple of non championship exhibition races. NASCAR is not a racing series, it is a lifestyle. The thing is that NASCAR is powerfully a domestic series and so the travelling is nothing like as inclement as F1’s global schedule, although the pace is relentless and a lot of those who do all the races have their own planes.

I was pondering all of this, and the valuation of US sport’s teams, while eating dinner. The biggest of the big league are the Dallas Cowboys NFL team, which is reckoned to be worth $9 billion. They say that everything is worthier in Texas and that is certainly true when it comes to sporting franchises and hat sizes. Those twiddly little New York Yankees, from the MLB are second, valued at only $7.1 billion. Both American football and baseball are fundamentally one market businesses, which gives a good indication of why F1 needs to be in the US market.

The fact that the biggest F1 team is worth no increasingly than $1.5 billion gives a well-spoken indication that there is potential for more. And the TV rights revenues when this up. F1 made $780 million last year from TV revenues, the NFL recently terminated a 10-year $110 billion deal and the National Basketball Association (NBA) is hoping to land a new deal for the next decade at $75 billion.

Anyway, F1 is not doing immensely at the moment, despite the weightier efforts of the FIA to rationalization trouble. I noted that last week Citigroup upgraded the Liberty Media F1 stock (otherwise known as FWONK) from “neutral” to “buy”. The wall says that it expects F1 revenue growth of eight percent a year. If I didn’t spend all of my money travelling to races, I think I would buy shares, as I cannot see how they will go lanugo in value.

Still, in F1 one must unchangingly be ready for and unsuspicious of surprises. I remember August 1st last year when I was driving home from Hungary. I had decided to do the 1,000-mile trip in a day in order to get home to be a surprise attendee at a family event and so I set off at well-nigh four in the morning and drove… and drove. I was somewhere near Munich when I heard that Fernando Alonso has signed for Aston Martin, which came as a shock. I was not the only one who was unprotected out by the Spaniard’s Amon-Ra-like sidestep, which was followed by the news that Oscar Piastri had jumped ship from Alpine as well.

This left the team with its trousers virtually its ankles and a seat to fill. In the end they had to pay Red Bull to release Pierre Gasly, who was under contract with AlphaTauri until the end of 2023.

I thought of this when I heard that a well known Spanish F1 journalist supposed himself excited by a rumour he had heard on Sunday night, but was unwilling to say more. It did not take long to hear from Spain that Alonso may be well-nigh to embark on some increasingly fancy footwork, with the suggestion stuff that he is not going to stay at Aston Martin in 2024, although he is supposed to have “a multi-year contract”. The word is that he could pop up next year at Red Bull.

This would strengthen the champion team and at the same time wrack-up a torpedo-sized slum in the Aston Martin challenge. So that would be a double whammy. The untried team has gone off the swash big time this season, without an heady start, and it is nonflexible to imagine that Lance Stroll is going to step up and lead the team to glory. The weightier suburbanite with wits would be… Sergio Perez.

Who knows if this is all contractually possible, but multi-year contracts traditionally have options and when Fernando signed for Aston Martin, they needed him increasingly than he needed them… so he probably got the terms he wanted. I am pretty sure he would have wanted an exit strategy in specimen the team was not up to much.

It would be a move that makes sense for Red Bull considering Perez has not washed-up what he needed to do and although Daniel Ricciardo’s revival has looked quite good, hiring Fernando would probably be better. Red Bull would need to handle the drivers carefully, as Alonso can be prickly but at 42 he is not going to stick virtually forever… so he would fit the snout nicely until Red Bull has secured someone younger. Paying off Perez, who is reckoned to earn well-nigh $8 million a year, might not plane be necessary. Suburbanite contracts these days tend to have performance clauses based on percentages of a team-mate’s score. Without the Mexico City GP, Perez’s 240 points were equivalent to 48.8 percent of Max Verstappen’s total of 491. If Perez is required to score at least 50 percent of the points of his team-mate, this could be grounds for the contract to be cancelled, without the need for compensation.

This is speculation, but it is based on the logic employed in the contracts.

Perez’s popularity counts in his favour, of course, but the visualization by Red Bull to put Daniel Ricciardo into the AlphaTauri team was seen by many as a way to see whether Daniel would be a good replacement for Perez. The fact that Daniel out-qualified Sergio in Mexico was significant, as it is well-spoken that the AlphaTauri is not as good a car as the Red Bull. Perez then crashed at the first corner trying to pull off a rather drastic move, while Daniel was worldly-wise to finish seventh and help AlphaTauri move up from 10th to eighth in the Constructors’ Championship.

Would Red Bull refuse a proposal from Alonso? Such a move would wrack-up up the suburbanite market to some extent and most people would be happy to see Fernando taking the fight to Verstappen next year if the team is still as dominant as it is today.

If you squint at the numbers it adds up. At the moment the 10 teams split $1.157 billion of prize money between them. The difference between the Constructors’ Champion and the second-placed team is in the region of $10 million, although there may be spare success payments that we do not know about, such as subsequent title bonuses. In other words, getting rid of Perez would forfeit less that finishing second in the Constructors’ title in 2024 considering he could not unhook unbearable points. That is a good incentive.

Red Bull was in the news then over the weekend regarding its planned new wind tunnel facility in Milton Keynes. The story was that the team has withdrawn its planning application, which led to speculation that the project was stuff cancelled. Far from it. The truth is that the team has managed to find a unit proximal to the main Red Bull Racing facility, which ways that the windtunnel can be next to the drawing office. This has been achieved by Red Bull reaching try-on to buy the Trek Bicycle Corporation building. The transpiration of plans will rationalization some delay, but the work should still be completed in time to diamond the new 2026 car.

The interesting thing is that the original site is still owned by Red Bull, plane if it is proximal to the Red Bull campus but not quite in it. The word is that this will now be redesigned and will wilt the new British end of the Scuderia Alpha Tauri operations, although the team will be waffly its name next year. This ways that SAT can transfer the current staff from the current facility in Bicester, 25 miles to the west of the Red Bull campus, and take on new people as well. They might plane be worldly-wise to reduce the catering bills by sharing canteens… The move will midpoint that Red Bull will be worldly-wise to use the new wind tunnel for both of its teams for the foreseeable future, although it is likely that in the medium term the commercial agreements will sooner be tweaked to stop a single entity from owning two F1 teams and that the technical rules will moreover be reverted to redefine the term “constructor” to include the requirement to manufacture increasingly parts of the car, which will midpoint that teams will no longer be worldly-wise to buy as much as is currently the specimen from a rival.

The goal of this will be to make the 10 teams stronger and increasingly self-sufficient, and thus requite them increasingly value and increasingly endangerment of success. This will probably be included in the Concorde Try-on that will run from 2030 onwards, which will requite all the teams the endangerment to invest to create the facilities that they will need. Given the increasing value of the teams, the money required will be easier to justify.

Much of the focus in F1 technical matters today is on what happens in 2026. There has been a transpiration at Alpine with the visit of Eric Meignan as the new technical director for the Renault F1 engine operation in Viry-Chatillon at the start of October. The team took the odd visualization not to talk well-nigh this which was unconvincing given that any news at Alpine would be seen as good news without the blood-letting in the summer. But it seems that the team wants to stay quiet and let the results do the talking. Doing a largest job in 2024 will not be easy considering the Renault engine is the weakest and with the minutiae of the current power units frozen until the end of 2025, there is little telescopic to improve. The weightier way to find performance is to create a largest car that will mask the power unit limitations.

Meignan is expected to focus his sustentation on the 2026 project.

The FIA stayed out of the spotlight in Mexico – the President did not make the trip. Oddly, the Deputy President (Sport) was not there either and the FIA seemed to be represented only by a gars from a minor automobile club who is famous for pocketing handfuls of peanuts at gala events, and by someone who is not employed by the federation but keeps turning up wearing FIA clothing. I haven’t checked the regulations to see if one is unliable to impersonate FIA officials, but if we did this sort of thing in real life, we’d be underdeveloped for pretending to be police officers. I know this to be true considering Dave, the former Honda F1 chef, was once put in jail in Monaco for turning up, dressed as a Monaco policemen, and telling the F1 truckies to stop blocking the roads. The curry he left on the stove ended up burning… Still, this might requite the (independent) FIA Stewards the endangerment to test out their new powers to fine offenders 1 million.

The federation did issue a ramified summons to the 2026 engine rules to throne off a potential problem with teams using their oil suppliers to self-mastery dyno testing, which is not covered by the current regulations.

A lot of the limited paddock peep in Mexico related to a story in the German news magazine Der Spiegel suggesting that the Audi project could be cancelled. It was reported that the new Audi CEO Gernot Döllner is not interested in F1. This may be true but that does not midpoint that he has the power to stop it. He has said nothing on the subject because, it seems, there is a institute in the VW group that executives in new positions do not make any public statements in their first 100 days in office. However the CFO of Audi Jürgen Rittersberger has said that the various boards had taken the visualization and there is no transpiration to the project. He came out with these remarks when presenting the company’s Q3 results which revealed that Audi sold 1.4 millions cars, up 15 percent compared to the same period last year. The visitor had revenues for the nine-months of $53.5 billion (a big improvement) and made an operating profit of $4.8 billion. This is lanugo a little on last year, but quitting F1 would midpoint writing off a lot of money and would be seriously rabble-rousing for the firm’s image and credibility.

Perhaps the project is overdue schedule and the results of initial power units tests have been disappointing, but ownership an F1 team is a good investment at the moment as valuations soar and can be good for Audi’s sales and image if the programme is taken seriously.

Down at Sauber (which will wilt the Audi team at some point) there seems to be little happening in the way of investment with the Swiss team working on this year’s car but seemingly cruising towards its next name transpiration as Alfa Romeo fades out of F1. There is no sign at all of Alfa Romeo doing anything else in F1 in 2024 and the speculation is that the firm will turn to the World Endurance Championship in the future with one rumour stuff that it will take over the Peugeot LMH project in 2026 as the Alfa Romeo is a sexier trademark in the sport than stodgy old Peugeot, which said recently that it is sticking to its mass-market appeal, rather than trying to increase sales by creating low-volume halo brands and models.

As I am writing this post news has wrenched that Mercedes’s Chief Technical Officer Mike Elliott has decided to leave the team without 11 years. He says that he has no destination planned and is intending to have some time off surpassing looking at what to do next.

The same can be said well-nigh Otmar Szafnauer, formerly the Team Principal of Alpine, who was when in the paddock in Mexico for the second subsequent race, unmistakably looking for something to do in the future. The smart money suggests that his most likely destinations are either with Ford in its syndication with Red Bull Powertrains, or helping Honda as it begins its programme to supply Aston Martin or whatever the Silverstone team will be tabbed in 2026, if the current ownership decides to mazuma in on the F1 tattoo and mazuma out… If it stays as Aston Martin with the Stroll family in charge, it is nonflexible to imagine that Szafnauer will return, but you can never say never in F1.

If you would like to ask questions well-nigh any of the news in F1 at the moment, you can sign up for the next Virtual Regulars with Joe on Thursday, but clicking this link.