F1 Shouldn't "End Up Like Indycar"

Haas' impressive performance in Australia has teams asking where the line should be drawn as a customer team.

Formula One has been warned not to end up "like Indycar" with teams buying parts off of another instead of being required to build their own from scratch.

Without a freak double retirement due to cross-threaded wheel nuts, Haas might have been fourth in the constructor's championship heading to Bahrain in just over a weeks time. Their gains in performance have led to criticisms from some midfield teams saying that their design is eerily similar to that of Ferrari's in 2017.

Liberty Media is set to unveil their plans and vision for Formula One past the current 2021 Concorde Agreement in Bahrain to the teams with engine and chassis design as well as prize money distribution at the centre of the talks, but they have been warned that allowing an extension of the relationship that Haas and Ferrari currently have could change the sports DNA for the worse.

Chief operating officer at Force India Otmar Szafnauer has reaffirmed his position that teams should be required to build their own cars.

"Philosophically speaking I think it would change Formula One if all of a sudden you could buy another team’s car,” he said. “If you take that to infinity you’re going to end up like IndyCar.

“You’ll have one guy who produces the best car and everyone will want to buy from him. And he’ll probably want to sell because he’ll be ahead of the development curve, because he’s the one doing it, winning all the time, and then he’s selling the rest.

“And we’ll have an IndyCar-like championship, which I don’t think that’s what Formula One has ever been about. Not that that’s a bad championship, it’s just different.

“We spend the least, from what I understand, and we’re the smallest now. Yet we still do everything ourselves except from the gearbox.

“If you say that we do everything ourselves and we’re relatively competitive on the money we have and the amount of people we have, then why not model the rest of it on something of our size? We’re not that far off from a competitive standpoint. But we spend a fraction of what the others do.”

Force India's approach of buying their gearbox and power unit from elsewhere but designing the rest of the car in-house is the model that should be adopted for the future. We will see next weekend what Liberty has in store for the future of the sport.