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Originally Posted by mountainstar
Certainly an idea, having to use the old car.
In HRT's case those chassis's were hand me downs to other teams in the Walkinshaw hemisphere. Ultimately how many teams are building multiple cars every year? I don't keep exact track of chassis numbers like some can, but as I recall, SBR is still circulating 05/06 chassis depending on what gets wrecked that week, DJR 04/05 chassis, Britek 03/06 cars, Tasman had older cars till recently, etc. How many teams are actually using cars built for this season and if they are how many are they building? From all appearances teams are getting at least 2 years service out of chassis as a rough average.
If you amortize the cost of the car, say $600K, use it for 2 years, sell it onward to a Fujitsu team for $300K, the car is costing you $150k a year in depreciation. Not bad really if you have several million in sponsorship per car, plus a million in VESA income per car plus merchandise sales for the top teams and other revenue streams. Looks like a sweet deal to me and many dont seem to lack for boats and other toys. If you're a team like TKR or PCR, you don't have any build costs(labor and materials) at all. You're just leasing or buying an older car, which again will likely get sold onward to a Fujitsu operation or get run someday as a revenue generating ride car. Again not a bad deal once you do some numbers.
Ultimately I'm starting to see that the more restrictive you make things, the more time and money people spend trying to find ways around it. It's an epiphany I've had in recent times with different situations I've seen.
Therefore, I'm not convinced a lot of rules regarding savings, will actually save teams any money. They'll just find another area to spend it or refine the current one.
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Damn it, your right again!! Screw them in one area and they'll find something else to exploit. Without going down the NASCAR path of a standard chassis, they'll find something else to spend the money on.
Most mid-field teams get about 2 years out of each chassis, other than HRT and T8 who have been at about 6 months. In the case of GRM for example, they do have another chassis on jig getting built at the moment, and we may see it later this year or next. More than likely the current 'No.1' chassis might get handed down internally, before it goes out on the market in the next year or two for a Dev. Series runner.
But mind you, recently reading that NASCAR has developed an engine for one of the many categories they sanction, which is apparently almost half the cost of getting the same engine from a builder, could have merit in this country, not only for main game players, but for the Dev Series and below.