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Yes, F3 engines are costly to maintain. Some people religiously send their engines off for a € 10,000 rebuild at the prescribed mileage limits. Others extend the mileage and have to accept that a couple of horses will escape - those horses would make the difference in professional level racing, but less important in club racing. That €10k is just for a routine rebuild, if something catastrophic
happens, a new engine is three times that.
Monoposto F3 has two thorns to contend with (they are aware and are thinking ahead) - the supply of chassis and future supply of engines - currently the favoured option on the older F3 cars which have Toyota or Vauxhall / Opel units is to take the high-performance option (3S-GE from the Toyota MR2/Celica or Vauxhall C20XE "Red Top" from fast Cavaliers and Calibras and to use the F3 engines fitting kit. You could get a perfectly serviceable donor engine from the scrap yard for £ 100- £ 300, but those engines are not so easy to find now...
VW and Mercedes engines don't have an normally aspirated high performance option - the F3 engines created thanks to the F3 rule book, by boring smaller capacity engines, so there isn't a cheap off the shelf alternative. Those cars have high performance options, but often they're either turbocharged and/or over 2 litre capacity.
The modern chassis are mostly either Mercedes or VW and the fitting kits to add a Vauxhall or Toyota engine don't exist. Of course they could be fabricated but at significant expense.
So maybe the Monoposto cars of the future will not be carbon-tubbed F3 machines, reverting to tubular space frame cars such as US FF2000, unless the 850 Tatuus Formula Renaults that are out there decide to go racing.
For years, club racing has relied on the hand-me-downs from professional level series - F3 cars spent 3-4 years in top level F3, possibly spending a couple of years as a Class B car before dropping out when the next generation cars push them out of favour.
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