Masons and construction companies are up to their necks in stone. “Po-ya-que tamos involved in work we put such” is the phrase that precedes an automatic increase in the budget. This also happens to Formula 1 pre-drivers.
It is not the first, nor will it be the last, but Ralf Schumacher is hurt by how expensive it is to take a scion to the top of speed… That is if the kid is an artist, because if he is a stump it costs much more. And the problem, recognized and recognizable, is not that it is expensive; is that it can be made infinitely more expensive if you have a portfolio of unlimited resources.
In this way, the candidate Max Verstappen You will arrive much better prepared, and you will be able to beat your competitors on the road more accurately. The problem is that the costs can be almost equal to those of sending a manned expedition to Mars, and the key to the meteoric rise in costs is
the poyaques
In the driving school prior to the highest category there are some previous steps, recognizable even in the dark, and that cost a piece of firewood. Three or four years of national Karting, at least as many more in the international one, to later switch to single-seaters in an uphill climb of power and cost as increasing as the Khan Dragon Death Ramp in PortAventura. This is very expensive, but then there are the extras, and there is a long string of examples that confirm that with them it is always better. The ultimate goal is none other than to arrive better formed where they put the pears in the room and be alone on the track, with no more weapons to defend themselves than their hands.
The mother of the new AlphaTauri runner gave him classes every day so that the boy did not end up being a chump, because he did not go to class
Peter of the Rose He lived an intense career before debuting in Formula 1, and he did so after competing in 73 tests. The Catalan was going like a shot in his European journey, but when he hit ‘the growth spurt’ it was in the land of the rising sun, where in three years he disputed more than half of all those tests; he swelled up from doing miles while eating sushi. With more outings on the track in competitive conditions, more is grown, and if this was rare before, today it is common currency.
When in April 2015 Mike Schumacher made his debut in Oschersleben aboard a Formula 4 he did not actually do it in one, but in two contests: the German, and the Italian. The dough flowed and the heir to The Kaiser jumped from track to track to be one of the drivers of his level who rode the most that season on the entire planet. With three races per weekend, on two different grids, and their corresponding private or group training sessions, he covered thousands of kilometers that year. Against all odds, this has become an increasingly common practice, which increases the overall costs of a sports career. And there are picturesque cases.
Karting engine manufacturers do not usually make runs of thousands of units. Although there may be exceptions, they rarely reach a hundred, and there is always one or another that comes out better cooked. It may happen that in a unit there is a pore in the alloy, an imperceptible imbalance in the distribution of weight, or some decentralized mechanism, and therefore perform worse (or better). If they are taken one by one, and despite the technological quality in the production, there are always a few that usually give a little more power or their response is more favorable.
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They say that a few years ago the father of a boy took over the entire production of a certain manufacturer: he bought them all, the complete series. They tasted them one by one, extracting the best three. Those three best engines went on to be used by his heir, and sold the rest and recovered the investment. The joke is that that guy, without obvious concerns about the rise in Euribor, acquired the possibility of choosing the best propellants that the harvest of that year threw on the market, and with it, the chances of success of his offspring.
There are those who, like Nyck de Vries, create a life around racing. The Dutchman (it’s hard work to put this and not Dutch, heck) lived for years in a motorhome with his parents. The mother of the brand-new AlphaTauri runner gave him classes every day so that the boy would not end up being a chump, because he did not go to class, or at least not to what we know as a lifelong school. With this vital scheme he could easily spend three hundred days on a Kart, after about four or five hours of study each day. Thus there are many, unschooled runners, who live on the circuits in a family bet that points to Formula 1 as the ultimate goal. The problem is that an experience like this no longer costs the quarter of a million euros that a good season in international Karting can shoot for, but doubles it.
There are more recipes. One new destination that is welcoming up-and-coming rookies is a uniquely British category of sports car, the Ginetta. The annual cost is about 150,000 euros per year and the peculiarity lies in the fact that they admit pilots who are fourteen years old, something radically prohibited in other latitudes and single-seater categories. There are those who bet on this to advance, and they are doing it with weights, inertia, trajectories, powers, etc.
One of the axes of this increase in prices lies in the fact that the teams have established running parallel to mere competition as an increasingly important source of income. In this way we have that what drives the industry is not so much the competition itself, but the preparation and training of the runners. Lance Stroll He wore little less than half the world championship at the hands of Williams the year before his debut in the highest category. Needless to say, his father does not lack, because this must have cost what a container full of kidneys.
Within this there are levels, categories. A test day with a British Karting team with certain guarantees, without being one of the best, shoots up to 2,000 euros per day. From there and upwards everything increases exponentially, with trips to the United Arab Emirates to shoot in local competitions, throughout Europe or Asia. There are many Russian, Chinese or Latin American millionaires whose vital commitment to their children passes through here. In the years of the housing bubble the play was more frequent, although in recent years, it seems that it has returned to this path of the billionaires. The FRECA has gone to a price above half a million euros, the F3 to double, and they want to reduce it, but they don’t know how.
They say that Formula 2 could be done by million and a half; but one thing is to do, and another to win it. And to win it you need to go to a powerful team that will easily ask you for double. Add family trips, hotels, high-performance simulator sessions like the Dallara MOOG, more test days with an F2 at 20,000 a day… do the math.
And for accounts those who are throwing them to Oscar Piastri, which has yet to make up for what Alpine spent on it, and has yet to be paid back. All those who try it have in mind to tie guys like Vettel, Alonso, Hamilton or Schumacher. None of these is going to worry about the electricity bill in several lives; they already earned it. But those who want to follow his path must know that as they would say in the Fama TV series, “fame costs”. Bernie Ecclestone was not in Fame, but he said that “if you want to make a small fortune in Formula 1, you have to get there with a large fortune.” He is right. Ralf Schumacher himself gives it to him, but for free.