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Bernie: new teams must pay £16m deposit
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New teams who want to join Formula One will have to pay a deposit of £16 million to prove they have sufficient funds to survive, according to the sport’s commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone.
Until 2008 any team which wanted to join Formula One had to pay motorsport’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), a refundable £24.2 million deposit which was forfeited if it failed to race. This was scrapped to encourage new entrants as team budgets soared to £107 million annually. But according to London's Evening Standard newspaper, the last and thirteenth spot on next year's Formula One grid will only be filled if a team can prove it is healthily funded. "We have told them that if they can't put £16 million in now we don't want them," said Ecclestone. "If they can't find that now there is no way they are going to run." In the past two years BMW, Honda and Toyota have left the sport due to the high cost of competing. The US F1 team failed to secure enough money to race this year. |
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