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5th December 2008

Following the announcement of the ending of Honda’s participation in the Formula One World Championship, FIA president Max Mosley has warned that there is a "serious danger" another car manufacturer could withdraw from F1.

The BBC Sport website quotes Mosley as saying of a meeting of the Formula One Teams Association that took place yesterday to discuss cost cutting measure, "If the teams don't notice now what's happened, you have to abandon all hope for them. The teams who met are all subsidiaries of these big companies and they could get a fax in the morning saying: 'We're stopping this’, which is effectively what happened with Honda.

“So if they don't wake up to it now, they'll probably get a nasty shock in the future. But our job is to take action to make sure that won't happen. That's why we've sent out a letter to the teams this morning setting out or plans to get the costs right down.

"The danger with these big companies is they may follow Honda, so if we make it possible for them to compete very inexpensively, by their standards, then the situation is much safer. The objective has to be to enable a team to say to manufacturer: 'We can actually get by without a subsidy.'

"If we can achieve that, then I think we will keep the manufacturers in. If we can't, then when they're looking to cut costs - which all of them are now because car sales have collapsed - then they will start to look at F1 and say do we really need this, and come to the same conclusion as Honda.

"Our position is very simple. We will say, these are the rules for the 2010 championship. If you don't want to enter, you don't have to. If you'd like to set up your own series with unlimited expenditure you can do so, but if you want to run in the F1 world championship these are the rules."

BBC Sport also quotes F1 impresario Bernie Ecclestone who said, "F1 is in no bigger crisis than any other company in the world at the moment but the world won't stop, that's for sure."

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