Toyota is NOT leaving F1 this year. Toyota just announced a new sponsorship deal with ZF Sachs for 2010 and beyond. A team leaving the sport does not do that.

Also Toyota is trying hard to get Kubica and Raikkonen for 2010.

The team principal’s comments were misinterpreted.

I find it funny that there is so much hate against the Toyota team. Many of you will most definitely change your tune once they start winning races.

As for BMW and Honda having a “deep history of success”, what a load of rubbish. BMW and Honda had success in F1 *as engine makers*, NOT as full constructors.

Toyota when they entered the sport was the first team in a LONG time to start from scratch, and make their own car and engine. All the other manufacturers in the past 20 years in F1 simply bought or took over other teams.

When Honda took over BAR, they had very little success, and only now is Brawn (ex-Honda) successful thanks to Ross Brawn. Since BMW took over Sauber, they had some success(not much) and now this year with bad results BMW leaves the sport as a knee-jerk reaction.

Despite all the excuses Honda and BMW made for leaving, Toyota is STAYING in the sport. I find it a disgrace that BMW and Honda, both companies which have “sporty” reputation stopped participating in F1 at the first sign of trouble, meanwhile Toyota is committed it seems long-term. Kudos to Toyota for at least having a racing spirit to stay in the sport, despite the mother company’s financial issues.

Every other discipline is actually relevant to the manufacturers from both engineering and marketing perspectives, in the classic “race on Sunday, sell on Monday” dynamic. F1 isn’t like the premier motorcycle categories, MotoGP or World Superbike. Very little F1 tech transfers directly to road cars. Beyond “prestige”, it doesn’t give much back to the car manufacturers.

The “we train our engineers to act quickly using F1″ rationale was only lip service marketing bilge. Multinational public companies cannot and should not act the way an F1 team can and does. There are too many other considerations when you have to deal with building and selling millions of cars with 100K service intervals driven by families in all manner of road and weather conditions — versus maybe a half dozen cars per year for exclusive use in two hour bursts by one man on a manicured race track.

Bottom line: Once you cease approaching it as a sport, F1 is worthless except as a dubious, hideously expensive marketing exercise. Max and Bernie have obscured that. Getting the manufacturers to invest in F1 to the exclusion of other disciplines, I’ve always felt, was (another) way to eliminate competition for F1, this time by methods that escaped notice of the EU anti-monopoly authorities.

Lotus is backed by a big Middle-Eastern consortium – hardly the norfolk racers of old! but still, having the name and The Pitbull together on the grid should bring back some of the old racing spirit that F1 needs again

not sure if Lotus or Manor will be the best of the rookie teams – but thats half the fun isnt it? watching to see what will happen (who wouldve predicted Brawns success??)

Personally i’ll be cheering at the first race next year, and then at Australia too!

“Because it costs too much” is, in my view, an artificial excuse. Millions of dollars are, and will be, spent on aerodynamic work anyway. And the objection is easily met in any event, becuase engine costs, costs overall, would be slashed drastically through the simple expedient of banning pneumatic valve actuation and all the ancillaries throughout the car that go with it.

Pneumatic valvetrains simply aren’t a necessary ingredient to fast and spectacular cars, and going down that path is a big part of why manufacturer’s deep pockets became necessary. No private developer without that kind of bankroll could afford to develop engines with these things. That’s ironic, given that pneumatic systems were, and are, irrelevant to road cars.

That said one has always wondered how a manufacturer calculates a rate of return on its f1 investment. While one can obviously quantify tangibles like the money it would get from the FIA and sponsors, and merchandise sales, how does the average manufacturer calculate its return on investment in terms of effect on brand etc? Somehow, I seriously doubt that it is a profitable proposition even for someone like Ferrari. Porsche haven’t been in F1 for years but sell more cars than Maranello does. The lack of a F1 program at Audi has not prevented one from having to wait 14 months for a new R8 in the mad scramble to get one.

still, with these two manufacturer teams pulling out (i think it’s pretty safe to assume that toyota will fall), i wonder what would have happened had the manufacturers breakaway actually happened…. i think that BMW and toyota would still be there.