Mercedes motorsport boss Norbert Haug has come up with a good compromise that FOTA have agreed to put forward to the FIA before the 29th deadline. This proposal includes a €100m budget cap and technical assistance and cheap parts for the new teams joining F1 in 2010 with the cap dropping to €45m in 2011. I believe that this is a good compromise as the drop from over €300m to €45 in one year is overkill and knee jerk. I thought of an interesting plan myself to have the money dished out in reverse; the team that finishes in 10th place this year gets the most “prize” money from Formula One Management and the team finishing first gets the least amount of “prize” money. That would level the playing field by default and teams can spent whatever they want on their car development! There is also lots of rumours flying around that the biggest protagonists in this whole budget cap saga Toyota are to follow their fellow countrymen Honda out of F1 at the end of the season regardless of the budget cap! Other Rumours flying are that Renault are also to quit F1 at the end of the season but sell the team wholesale to Flavio Briatore to compete in the 2010 championship under the name of Briatore GP much akin to Brawn GP. I also believe that BMW are likely to leave the sport either at the end of this season or the next if car sales don’t pick up. I don’t believe that F1 is a viable promotional avenue for car manufacturers; Do people buy cars based on motorsport pedigree anymore?
Another corporation that bugging me right now is Sony; why do they insist on making proprietary equipment? The latest thing to annoy me is their memory card format “Memory Stick PRO Duo”; what exactly is wrong with the industry standard SD or even XD? We borrowed a Sony digital camera from Erin’s mother to take pictures of Conner’s graduation from Pre-Kindergarten. The camera itself is really good apart from being really hard on batteries; a new set if batteries ran out in about 20 pictures with the flash on. But because of it’s proprietary memory card format; we can not get the photos off the camera; we can only hope that Erin’s mother has the cable to connect it via USB! My laptop has built in support for all the major card formats but not Sony’s format; I am willing to bet this is because of expensive licensing reasons!