Why 'Class B' isn't Formula 1's saviour

Amid Formula 1's ongoing soul-searching, you could argue that it simply needs to start looking within itself for a pathway for the future. F1's 'Class B', comprising the seven teams not way out front, has been enormously competitive this year.

Six of those seven teams have 'won' races, the exception being Williams, and half a dozen drivers are still in 'title' contention.

Currently, Nico Hulkenberg leads this unofficial championship with 193 points, six ahead of Sergio Perez, with the top five covered by just 16 points - and Fernando Alonso is hanging on in there 37 points down.

So is this F1's template? Simply curb the spending of the big three teams, bring them back to the rest and you'll replicate that competition at the front?

While F1 2018's 'Class B' championship looks like a blueprint for the show F1 is chasing, it's a mirage because of the nature of the different teams. Renault isn't a true Class B squad as it has invested and expanded rapidly, and by rights over the coming years should break away from the pack and turn the big three at the front of the field - 'Class A' for the purposes of this piece - into a big four. So it has little in common with the rest of its midfield cohorts.

That in itself isn't a major problem. After all, if you cut back the spending of the big teams that would lock Renault at its current level and all will be rosy in the garden of F1. The trouble is there's another, bigger problem.

Haas is effectively propped up by Ferrari, quite legitimately taking what parts are permitted by the regulations and even using its big-brother team's windtunnel (albeit in a programme that must be entirely separate from Ferrari's own). It's the logical, perhaps only, way for a start-up to perform credibly in F1 at the moment.

Likewise, Sauber is increasingly moving in that direction. While stopping short of the Haas model, it uses the Ferrari engine package and gearbox, and is very much in Ferrari's sphere of influence.

The Racing Point Force India team is in a state of flux. Mercedes-affiliated, albeit in a far less potent way, it is receiving serious cash injections and there are aspirations to make it a frontrunner through prodigious shareholder investment.

Contrast that with Williams, which is operating tightly as a business and, despite its struggles, is a going concern without the ability to squander too much money - or the assistance gained from writing off debts thanks to being reborn as a new team.

There's no way Ferrari would tolerate being beaten to a championship by Haas or Sauber

In between the two is McLaren. Like Williams it's an independent team. It has very loose links to Renault through its engine supply, it has relied on serious cash injections from its stakeholders to allow it to part company with Honda and, in the coming years, rebuild. Toro Rosso, meanwhile, is owned by Red Bull and acts as a driver training ground - and, this year, engine proving ground with Honda.

This is not the old model in F1 seen 25 years ago, when you used to have powerhouse teams, then a midfield packed with smaller independent operations in which the likes of Jordan, Tyrrell, Larrousse, Arrows and their ilk jostled for position and gunned for the odd big result.

Currently, it seems F1 is moving more towards this two-tier system. People rail against it, and there have been objections raised in some quarters to Autosport using the term 'Class B', but it's a reality. It's amazing to consider how F1 has moved in this direction.

Smaller teams aligning themselves with the grandees was once unheard of, certainly after the days of customer cars ended, and has its roots in Force India striking a technical alliance with McLaren-Mercedes for 2009. It's hard to see it now given the landscape, but this was a big story at the time: Force India had not only the Mercedes engine, but also the McLaren gearbox. While it made financial sense for McLaren, it was difficult to come to terms with for those inside the team.

It would be wrong to say that from that moment, Force India built up to the point where it has beaten McLaren in the last four seasons, but it played a part and allowed Force India to focus its investment on other performance areas. This was at a time when F1 teams would do just about anything to beat each other, and that kind of collaboration required a change in mindset.

Other teams quickly caught on. Caterham and Manor formed their own affiliations, and that built to the current situation where Haas entered F1 facilitated by Ferrari's existence by producing only the requisite 'listed parts' required to be considered as a constructor.

F1 was built on competition, and on-track and technically it needs to get back to that. Ironically, this destructive example of competition - of chasing the best financial deal - has become enshrined in this two-tier system in grand prix racing. It has become a self-sustaining closed loop.

Legitimately, there are concerns about affiliated teams becoming servant teams. Previously, these might just amount to being a voting block when trying to manipulate F1's decision making, which is unavoidable. After all, you don't need to supply parts to a team to create such alliances of convenience.

But they could now actively become the enemy of attempts to clamp down on big-team spending. Restricted in how much power unit analysis you can do at Ferrari? Well, just get Sauber and Haas to do it. Want to run some cooling experiments with Honda? Red Bull can make Toro Rosso do it.

This is a very slippery and dangerous slope. What might be termed F1's 'social mobility' has been getting worse in recent years, as demonstrated by the fact three teams suck up all the wins and almost all of the podium finishes. If the servant team model becomes firmed up, things will become far worse.

Many of these teams are dependent on the big squads for their very existence, and will inevitably be well-served to maintain their close connections. They can then, because of this pragmatism, end up being the agents for their own subjugation in the midfield.

We know that customer teams can be controlled in terms of access to certain engine modes even if they are nominally available, and there's no way Ferrari would tolerate being beaten to a championship by Haas or Sauber. Likewise, when Toro Rosso beat Red Bull in the 2008 constructors' championship (below), it caused serious ructions and would not be allowed to happen again.

So the F1 landscape would simply be locked in with four manufacturer teams - Ferrari, Mercedes, Red Bull and, assuming it progresses as expected, Renault - then the rest fighting over scraps. And the chances of a team springing from the pack to near the front are minimal.

This is about far more than simply the inequitable share of F1's revenue among the teams. It's about locking in a two-tier system that will remain even if the big teams do get pulled back. Limiting spending is one thing, but income is also the problem.

Ferrari already gets an inequitable share of the revenue simply for being Ferrari, which means that regardless of where it finishes in the championship it coins in a hefty 'long-standing team' payment and a 'constructors' championship bonus' for its historic success. That's worth over $100million - more than the rank and file would get for winning the championship. Meritocracy? Hardly. The dice are loaded in favour of the big teams.

Class B has been one of the best things about F1 this year, but it would be poisonous to fall for the trap of thinking that's a viable future

Mercedes, Red Bull and McLaren also get constructors' championship bonuses, while Williams gets $10m simply for being Williams. So even among the Class B teams, inequality is locked in.

These payments help to ensure the big teams stay big. That's not just in terms of running budget but in terms of facilities and also the build up of R&D knowledge over the years. This means there's a legacy benefit that's intangible for the big teams, so even if Ferrari was spending the same as Force India it would have priceless knowledge to work from that its old financial advantages gave it.

Often, when talking about payments, people complain about 'socialism' etc. Fine, you can reward teams based on achievement - but it should only be achievement. Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene rather fatuously described his outfit as a new team recently, and why should it get a pot of gold just for what was achieved in the past? That's not meritocracy, that's about sustaining an old order.

And while Ferrari has given a lot to F1 and nobody would like to lose it, Ferrari has also benefited a lot from its history in grand prix racing. It's a symbiotic relationship.

F1's grandees also need to realise that the small teams are also necessary for F1 to exist - and that they therefore need to be more than an underclass. You need 20 cars on the grid minimum, but there's zero chance of any new teams joining beyond those following the Haas model, which further enshrines the two-tier system.

There's no sign yet that F1's owner Liberty Media is willing to tackle this properly or risk alienating the likes of Ferrari and Mercedes. It's unfortunate that it inherited a problem, and the manufacturer teams themselves can all blame each other for driving up spending, but it's not a healthy or stable situation for F1.

Class B has been one of the best things about F1 this year, but it would be poisonous to fall for the trap of thinking that's a viable future. You can have two-tier F1 based on quality of teams and who can get the most money in; this isn't about giving every team an equal budget and if you can get more sponsorship than your rivals next door, good for you. And eliminating the financial advantage of being a big team in terms of share of revenues outside of constructors' championship position is a very different argument to deliberately disadvantaging them for being so large.

But the rich are getting richer in F1 simply as a result of their richness and the poor are getting poorer. And worst of all, you just need to look at the proportionally small profit made by Mercedes on its massive 2017 spend to show that even the rich aren't doing much better than breaking even.

The big teams have contributed to this situation, but you can't blame them. It's the leadership of each outfit's job to get as much cash as possible and to win races. But what is required now for F1's long-broken business model is to dispense with the endless talking in circles about tackling this.

F1's biggest problem is the commercial agreements. Only if this is tackled in harness with technical and sporting regulation changes will 'the show' live up to expectations.

If Liberty Media isn't willing to take on the elephant in the room head on, then its 2021 revamp will come up short.