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I'm sorry for being a bit direct, but this constant budget bickering is driving me crazy.
1. To the admins, would it make sense to have a dedicated thread for this subject in a similar way we have regulation discussion?
2. ACO have no influence on the budgets chosen by the current three manufactures. This is all decided by those who are willing to be participating. We all have a pretty good feeling that the regulations are even written to suit all threes wishes of more hybrid technology, leaving ACO with less fault in this matter.
3. Wanting the ACO to controll the budget is more politics than sport. It's Big government vs. small government. There are benefits and drawbacks to both, but what is always the same is the "peoples" ability to claim the current rule to be the reason why things are going worse. Had ACO implemented cost control, limited the hybrid to make the series cheaper, then I am 100% sure we wouldn't see Audi or Toyota in the WEC.
4. As already correctly stated, all things comes and goes this spring, we hailed the racing and competitiveness as being some of the greatest of all time. Now it is all about moaning how the ACO have messed up in regard to the regulation.
5. Running a Le Mans project is not simply a matter of Marketing, this we know for a fact now, it is also a matter of R&D. Let's not forget that many of the greatest inventions in human history didn't come by researching specifically for it, but by reaching for different goals and finding it on the way. Le Mans regulations gives manufactures a package which cannot be found anywhere else, especially not in F1, so that comparison I find to be invalid.
There is a good saying: "It's better to have one bird in the hand, than two in the bush". It is easy and free for manufactures to come out and say "oh, if only things were like this and this, we would participate". Please remember when reading these stories that the ones saying this, are gaining free PR for comments which are costfree as these people are not the ones approving the final budget anyways. ACO played safe, chose to satisfy their current participants and have managed to keep Audi onboard for almost two decades, which I find impressive.
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