Quote:
Originally Posted by bella
this post in the f2 thread got me thinking:
as john mentions, the eurocup today has 43 cars testing. barc had 25 in the opening round. the fr nec series has "nearly 40" cars entered for round 1 this weekend. the fr alps series had 32 cars competing at monza for round 1.
even if you take out the eurocup, that's in the region of 60-70 of the much grumbled about current chassis competing in individual series, plus another 25 of the fr2000 cars competing in barc alone. they're all on various budgets, in various teams with different kit and staffing levels.
meanwhile, british f3 has (as discussed elsewhere) less than 15 cars, f2 has 17 entries, fr uk ceased to exist, fford uk has 16 entrants at the first round, 7 of which are the new ecoboost thing, and intersteps has 10 as per round 1.
what are we doing wrong in the uk? are we actually doing anything wrong or is it the economic conditions? is it that racing in the uk on a cost basis is higher than on the continent? do we need to man up and accept that the reason other series have good healthy grids is by racing in more than 1 country? is that something we need to consider?
let's try and stay away from individual series bashing here, let's try and look at the bigger picture.
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I think in Britain it's as simple as getting rid of Intersteps and FR UK, and to be honest, get rid of either F3 or BARC FRenault(I'd pick F3 personally) and have a big car series in the mold of FR 3.5 or AutoGP. Next year with the new cars in AutoGP is the perfect time to take the still serviceable, and IIRC relatively cheap Lola F3000 chassis and have a big car series. Even better if the cars are modified to take stock block engines. You have a series with big heavy cars and a good amount of power, for relatively cheap and relatively accessible for competitors, one that would prepare them well IMO for GP2 or FR 3.5. Plus it would be nice to see a modern Formula A series.