[Purist]

If you're a relative unknown, internationally speaking, it may not matter how good you are. You may not have the visibility for the big wigs to accept you on merit alone when you start out in the bigger pond. You may have to foot the bill to have a chance to get your foot in the door to even have the opportunity to actually prove yourself.

Since when do the top teams choose a relative unknown, like Lopez is, to pilot their machine? So, a good driver, but one who hasn't been as established on the wider stage, goes to a lower rung team, but that team NEEDS extra backing from the drivers. Are you saying we shouldn't have these other teams at all?

I'll be honest, I think there are 26 drivers in the world qualified to be in F1, but you have to be able to find them all, and have 26 cars adequately financed for them to be able to race. Obviously, it's VERY hard to put that full package together.

I'm happy to see the larger grid in F1 again. Maybe we'll see the start of another new great team. This injection of new driver blood, with more seats being available, is also quite refreshing. Not to mention, considering the other racing series i can watch, a mere 20 cars is rather piddly.

Also, consider that if the big teams have a long-term, solidified driver line-up, even a good driver may be forced to go with a lesser team to just get into the F1 show, and that lesser team may NEED a bit of backing from that driver, either to keep the team afloat, or to get that team that much closer to the front. And before you say that no driver would switch from the top of the league he was in to the lower rungs of another series, does the name Sebastian Bourdais mean anything to you?

Finally, as to why we let it happen, we don't. This is a business when you get down to it: a business in which we, mere pawns, don't particularly matter anymore. Even if we could orchestrate a mass TV boycott of F1, if the series did start to falter, it would take that big business money all over again to get F1 back to stability and prosperity. It's a cycle that I certainly don't know how to break.

P.S. The "World Driver's Championship" wasn't actually based on a having a spectrum of drivers from across the world, but having racing located across the racing world. At various points, that racing world was considered to include Morocco, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, the US, Portugal, Sweden, and Holland. F1 has yet to embody a true world championship for a number of reasons. It used to be basically that some parts of the world simply didn't have developed motorsport. Now, it's a matter of some nations not being willing to give government backing to have the, ahem, "privilege" of hosting a Grand Prix.