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It should be noted that the reason Mercedes left at the end of 1955 was due to fallout from Le Mans that year.
Unfortunately, the business climate is vastly different today, and for F1 to remain commercially viable now, it needs the money infusion from the manufacturers and other large corporate sponsors; you can't buy the media coverage or heavily promote the races over all the other "noise" out there without it.
It used to be that companies like Ferrari, Maserati, Jaguar, and Aston Martin had sales directly driven to a substantial degree by racing success. These days though, it's much more the case that the various major series need the manufacturers to drive their profile up more than the automakers necessarily need the racing cache.
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