It was an overcast day as Vettel and his Red Bull team-mate Daniel Ricciardo
hared around downtown Austin, but there is an even bigger cloud hanging over
Formula One as it heads into the final three rounds of the 2014 season.
Caterham and Marussia are absent, in administration, caused partly by the huge
cost of the complex engines this year, with little sign of the two teams
returning soon.
Both the Red Bull drivers’ early careers were helped by racing for teams
towards the back. Ricciardo, who spent six months with HRT in 2011 – they
collapsed at the end of 2012 – said that a smaller grid was bad for young
drivers and spectators.
“It was definitely a good stepping stone,” the Australian said. “It allows you
to learn under the radar. So for that it would be a real shame, and for
numbers in general. There’s nothing like seeing a full grid – it’s a great
spectacle. From that side and from the driver development side, we need more
cars and teams. It would be a shame if this is a permanent loss.”
A battered Tony Fernandes, the founder of Caterham, blamed the big beasts of
the grid – Red Bull, Ferrari,
Mercedes
– for his Oxfordshire-based team’s demise. The Queens Park Rangers owner
said that football was a sport in which minnows could hope to compete, and
F1 was not. “People can blame whoever, but the big teams are as much at
fault as anyone,” the Malaysian businessman said.
All this malaise around F1 does not seem to have put off the sport’s next most
likely entrant, however. The American Gene Haas spoke bullishly of his
outfit’s chances before his home event.
“They wound up making a lot of mistakes,” Haas said. The 61-year-old, a major
player in American motor racing, has hired Adam Jacobs, the man of managed
Budweiser sponsorship in Nascar to be his chief marketing officer. Clearly,
Haas thinks he can make a commercial success of a sport in financial crisis.