MARK GALLAGHER @_markgallagher
Essential guide to the business of F1
WHY WILLIAMS PLAYED ITS CARDS RIGHT IN AUSTRALIA
Despite all the evidence to the contrary there remains an ever-optimistic group of fans and media who continue to insist that F1 is a sport as opposed to a business. You need only to have followed the online reaction to Williams’ decision to ask Logan Sargeant to step aside in favour of Alex Albon in Melbourne to witness the degree of cognitive dissonance that exists.
The moment it became clear the monocoque of Albon’s Williams FW46 was damaged beyond repair, the team had no option other than to ask Sergeant to step aside.
Points mean prizes, specifically a share of the chunky prize money which the Formula One Group distributes to the teams each season. In 2023 this amounted to £964 million which, the last time I looked, is a great deal of money.
The prize fund is allocated on the basis of a base payment plus a sliding scale of financial reward dependent on where a team finished in the previous year’s world championship for constructors. The 2023 payments were determined by the 2022 results, for example.
In 2022 Williams finished 10th with eight points while last season, in its first year under James Vowles’ leadership, it leapt to seventh with a total of 28 points. Albon scored 27 of those, a fairly clear demonstration of which of the two is the faster and more consistent.
If you divide F1’s total prize fund by the number of points scored by all the teams in a season, it works out that each point is worth half a million dollars, or £400,000. Actually they are worth more than that because of the way the sliding scale is structured, but you get the picture.
The only surprising thing about Vowles’ decision to ask Sargeant to step aside in Melbourne was that it had to be made at all. This was down to the team having no spare monocoque available.
As Vowl
