Quote:
Originally Posted by rich07
The reason for their withdrawal being funding which doesn't make sense-when the team was started it supposedly had a Middle Eastern supporter who had plenty of money but wanted to remain out of sight. What happened there I presume?
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the update on the dsc news item is pretty self explanatory. they projected their cashflow with their investor, and due to some unexpected pre-season costs they're not going to make it to spa. you can't just expect the investor to write a £100k cheque, or whatever it will take to make spa happen.
i'm kind of surprised they haven't had some kind of contingency fund for stuff like huge shunts and unexpected costs but i guess if the investor wasn't game for that then there's nothing you can do. i think the potentially unrelated example of an unexpected cost from the dashboard marshalling system is a good example of how the organisers cannot act as if they are in charge of f1 scale pools of resources. quite a few of the teams are operating on a marginal budget rather than the lmp1 manufacturers scale of cash, and it's wrong to think that they'll just survive regardless of what you throw at them. they have a finite amount of cash to spend and it's not necessarily going to grow, things will be sacrificed. "new boy naivity" perhaps is the case, we had both 2013 elms champion teams aiming to move up to wec this season. signatech alpine hung back because the maths didn't add up, ram stepped forward and couldn't quite make it happen seamlessly.
all that aside, barring a huge shunt or several i don't see any reason to doubt the remainder of ram's season, as long as the fine for non-competing at spa is no greater than the cost of actually competing and can be paid after their cash arrives from their investor.