How Force India deal may hurt McLaren, Renault and Williams

The purchase of Force India by a consortium led by Lawrence Stroll has put a renewed focus on the controversial question of collaboration between Formula 1 teams.

Some rivals have made it clear that they fear Force India will now further strengthen its ties with Mercedes - possibly to the extent of becoming a de facto B-team.

That's why Renault, McLaren and Williams opted to block, at least for the time being, the automatic continuation of prize money payments earned by Force India in its former incarnation.

The Concorde Agreement specifies that any team emerging from administration as a new entity under different ownership has to gain the agreement of all its rivals in order to continue to receive its F1 income. That approval has not been forthcoming.

There's a bigger picture, too, involving the increasing power within F1 of the two major manufacturers, played out against the background of the ongoing discussions with Liberty over how the championship will look in 2021 - and how close those links between teams should be allowed to become in the future.

One of the key issues is the move by Liberty and the FIA to cut budgets and staffing levels, and the obvious fear that big teams will use their relationships with partners to make better use of what are supposed to be limited resources. McLaren, Renault and Williams want some clarity on where we are going.

It's not hard to see why those teams harbour some suspicions about the Stroll deal. Mercedes motorsport chief Toto Wolff has been working in the background to help make it happen; and in any case as Force India's major creditor, Mercedes had a formal legal right to sanction the sale. Naturally Mercedes wanted to get the money it was owed, but it also wanted to have the team continue to operate successfully as a home for Esteban Ocon or, if he goes elsewhere, fellow Mercedes protege George Russell.

In addition it's well known that, frustrated by Williams's poor form, Stroll had tried to convince his son Lance's current team to forge closer technical links with Mercedes. That was in the face of some opposition from Williams's management, which has always remained committed to the idea that F1 is a championship for independent constructors.

Now that he actually owns a team, it's only natural to assume that Stroll Sr will try to use as much extra Mercedes input as he can in order to boost its future performance.

"I've never been a fan of this collaboration stuff. It's not F1, it's not what this place has always been about" Otmar Szafnauer

Take a look at the 2019 grid and it's easy to see how the balance of power will play out. As now, Ferrari has two partners in Haas and Sauber, while Mercedes has two in Force India and Williams. What will be novel next season is that Red Bull Racing and Toro Rosso will have the same engine partner in Honda, and while they have both used Renault power in the past, they now share works support and all the technical benefits and political clout that come with it.

That takes care of eight of the 10 teams, leaving just two that are on their own: Renault and McLaren. The latter buys its engines from the former, but that's pretty much the extent of their relationship so far.

Both have been left stranded when the music stopped. The other major teams have hooked up with 'friends' who can help in one way or another, technically or politically.

For example, with no Minardis or Manors around, consider how hard it is for Renault or McLaren to place a young driver in another team to gain experience - without giving up his contract. In contrast, Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull all have options that they are already making full use of.

The issue of collaboration between F1 teams has been pushed further into the limelight this season by the improved form of Haas and Sauber. Both have benefited from a stronger Ferrari power unit package, and correspondingly have moved up the grid, putting an ever stronger focus on their links to Maranello, which follow different models, even if both take the full power unit and gearbox package.

The frustration of rivals with just how much extra technology Haas is able to buy from Ferrari is well documented, but things have been moved up a gear by Sauber's close commercial ties with Alfa Romeo, including Ferrari's right to a driver spot in the Swiss team - currently held by Charles Leclerc.

When in May it was announced that Ferrari man Simone Resta would become Sauber's technical director - with no gardening leave - the flames of suspicion were fanned. And so for teams such as Force India, fighting for every point in the midfield, it has literally become a case of if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

The team is strong technically in its own right, and so it will be interesting to see if and how its relationship with Mercedes will extend beyond the engine/gearbox deal and driver contracts.

"I've never been a fan of this collaboration stuff," Force India chief operating officer Otmar Szafnauer said before the Stroll sale was confirmed. "It's not F1, it's not what this place has always been about. You cannot have a senior technical person move from one team to the next within a day.

"When you couldn't collaborate, and we were all fighting against each other, everybody invoked their one-year gardening leave, so that knowledge transfer didn't happen.

"Once you have collaboration, guess what? You have moving back and forth. It's not against the rules, and those are the rules unfortunately. I saw it coming when the rules were written; I fought it back then. And here we are.

"Haas, Sauber and Ferrari, independent ownership. They collaborate because it helps all three of them. Any business deal has got to be good for all sides, so for them it helps.

"Unfortunately the value of winning in F1 is so high, that if collaboration helps you win, you have to collaborate, and to stop collaboration you've got to change the rules. If this guy or that guy buys us, the value of collaboration is still there, if you don't change the rules."

Like Force India, Williams has been a customer of Mercedes for some years, the big difference being that it hasn't used Brackley supplied gearboxes or engaged a race driver as part of a wider deal. It has always wanted its relationships with engine suppliers to have strict limits, even in the days of works co-operation with BMW.

As already noted, Williams resisted Stroll's push for closer ties with Mercedes. But in recent weeks it has been considering switching to Brackley gearboxes, a clear recognition of the fact that the times are changing.

The team is now at the back of the grid, it's losing Martini title sponsorship, prize money is taking a dive and crucially it is now losing Lance Stroll and his backing, in a deal that -somewhat bizarrely - has been in part engineered by its own engine supplier. It's perhaps not surprising that Williams was not too keen to agree to Force India getting its money.

"Being an independent F1 team in the world that we find ourselves operating in at the moment, I can't believe how much the landscape's changed in such a short period of time," Claire Williams said last month, before the Force India scenario unfolded.

"Probably the most notable thing that's having an impact on us and our performance is teams 'buddying up', or however you want to position it. Secondments, that kind of thing. That puts more pressure on teams like ours that don't have those kinds of relationships.

"Being an independent constructor, and doing it on our own, is very different, and it does make it harder. From a financial perspective inevitably this has a knock-on effect. Partners are questioning what we're doing, and what our future looks like."

Williams can't afford to be left behind in this changing climate.

"The prize money that we'll get this year is significantly less. We did a budget for 2019 based on P10 in the championship," Williams added.

"Fortunately we have a very capable CFO that's doing a lot of shuffling around at the moment. You know what Williams are like, we don't over-extend, and we spend what we have. If we have to cut our cloth accordingly going into 2019, then we have to do that."

"The level of collaboration among teams now is out of control" Zak Brown

McLaren boss Zak Brown has watched the rise of Haas with some concern. How does he explain to his team's investors and to current and potential sponsors that it has been left behind by an organisation with a fraction of the resources, and that is only in its third season in F1? It's a tough one.

"The spirit of F1 has always been that each team is its own constructor," says Brown. "I think that's one of the big secrets to its success.

"Limited collaboration in order to reduce costs for everyone is good. The level in which teams are now collaborating is unacceptable, and not something McLaren thinks is in the spirit of F1, because it is making the two strongest teams stronger.

"To have a team [Haas] that's three years old with 250 people being as competitive as they are, good on them, but I think there's a big problem with the regulations when you allow that to happen. And people are concerned over loss of headcount, then it makes teams with 600 to 800 people potentially question why are they doing it with 250?

"So I don't like the direction of the amount of collaboration that's going on. I think it's become too much, because now we've seen that collaboration not only be technical, but it's now political, it's now drivers.

"We've seen incidents in races where supposedly one driver related to a manufacturer but in a different team collaborated on track. The level of collaboration among teams now is out of control."

That's a reference to Monaco and an incident where Mercedes junior Ocon moved over for Lewis Hamilton. Force India insisted it was a simply a strategic move, but nevertheless it was seen by Brown and others as somehow symbolic of the dangers of teams working together too closely.

The rules that govern co-operation, and for example the listed parts section that specifies what bits of a car each team has to design and make itself, are not going to change in the short term.

In the meantime, to compete with the other team groupings Renault and McLaren have to find ways in which they can work together for their mutual benefit. In political terms we saw the first signs when they agreed with Williams not to support the carry over of Force India's prize money.

But what else can they do? With Red Bull now departed to Honda, and Renault no longer having to balance the interests of two customers by treating them equally, some new doors are open.

Given that they are both major players, neither is likely to start using the other's gearbox and rear suspension, so they are going to have to follow a different path.

"It'll be a new type of collaboration," says Brown. "Where the other teams tend to get stuff passed down to them, if we were to do something if would have to be more of a true collaboration, because of our similar capabilities. We're, as you would expect, speaking with Renault as to how we could maximise performance to each other's benefits.

"I'm not going to get into technically what we can do, other than to say Renault is a great partner, and the power unit now is more integral to the racecar than maybe the good old days when you bolted the engine in.

"For sure for the benefit of Renault and McLaren we need to look at how we can work more closely together within the spirit of the agreements.

"I think both Renault and McLaren share a view that we'd rather compete against each other and everyone else in what we all think is what F1 is.

"At the end of the day what we're going to have to do is what makes us most competitive.

"Us and some other teams are rightfully resisting the level of collaboration, but whatever the rules become for 2021, we're going to have to - like everyone else - do what we think is most advantageous."