The bells are ringing - it seems that the FIA/FOTA war is over. Autosport has reported that all the FOTA teams, including Toyota, have signed on for next season and suddenly F1 is filled with optimism and good cheer again. Of the new teams, so far four have registered an entry (USF1, Prodrive/Aston Martin, Lola and Campos) so the FIA may even be in the comfortable position of having to choose which teams will be accepted for the championship.
Mr FOTA, Luca di Montezemolo
Meanwhile, my cold has developed to the aching joints and hacking cough stage and I really do not feel like dissecting all the details today. It may be wiser to leave things until later anyway, as developments tend to follow one another very quickly in the sport and the scene may look quite different this evening. I will not go into anything in depth, therefore, and will only mention a few aspects that will be talking points in the days to come.
Note for a start that the FOTA teams' entries are conditional upon a Concorde Agreement being signed before June 12. That is something that Bernie has been wanting for some time, along with guarantees of commitment from the teams, so it is good that FOTA is pushing for it too now. Their aims may be somewhat different from FOM's, however.
Customer cars have disappeared out the window again and, instead, there are concessions on information sharing by the existing teams. With so many new teams being prepared to construct their own chassis, the matter becomes a non-issue anyway, it always being preferable that each team be a constructor.
The wording of Mosley's concession to allow the salaries of highly paid designers to be exempt from the budget becomes important now. It will be interesting to see how and at what point the line is drawn between expensive designers and the hoi polloi of the design office.
Then there is the question of whether this amounts to a big defeat for Mosley. At this stage, I maintain it is, since he was so commited to the 40 million budget cap whereas it now stands at 100 million. I would guess that Bernie has had much to do with the shifting of Max on this one and it remains to be seen how things will be painted to hide Mosley's embarrassment.
No doubt there will be plenty to chew over and argue about in the calm after the storm but at least things are set upon the right course now. There is hope for the sport yet, good friends!
Right, I'm off to lie down and be miserable for a bit. Might push out an update later if I feel up to it.