FORMULA ONE and the FIA have received a “revolutionary proposal” that would allow three new teams to be added to the grid, according to reports.
However, the sensational plans would see the new teams compete without the ability to earn any prize money or accumulate constructors points.
The ten constructors in F1 currently share a prize pot of around £1billion.
There was a fear this pool would be diluted with the addition of an 11th team on the grid, with Andretti seeing their application to join F1 from 2026 rejected despite approval from the FIA.
But these fears could be mitigated with a bizarre new idea from Tim Milne and Lewis Butler.
According to RacingNews365, a proposal sent to F1 bosses would allow three new teams to enter F1 with some major caveats.
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Firstly, the teams would be considered as a “non-constructor”, meaning they would not be able to accumulate any championship points or earn any prize money.
The teams would race in a minimum of eight races on tracks which can accommodate 26 cars – something not seen in F1 since the start of the 1995 season.
Furthermore, the teams must be based in a region not currently represented by an F1 team and would compete in a minimum of six more races to promote specific development in their home market.
This means the teams would need to have their head office in one of the Americas, Asia, Africa or Oceania.
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All three would be entitled to paddock presence at all races to help generate revenue while they would also be required to develop streams from their own markets.
Their focus would then need to be on recruitment and infrastructure all while performing to an “acceptable” level on track over a three-year period to prove it can offer value to F1.
The status of a full constructor would be granted from the start of their fourth racing season in the sport.
This proposal is hoping to be placed into the 2026 Concorde Agreement.
Whether F1 will entertain such a large overhaul to its tried and trusted formula remains to be seen.
But Milne – who had involvement in the rejected bids of Hitech and LKY SUNZ – admits the proposal can be “significantly refined” if F1 and the FIA bosses are willing to enter discussions.
He said: “When Andretti was rejected in January, I took a step back and looked at what that really meant, which was that the FIA and F1 management had in fact concluded that it was not possible to start a F1 team and to achieve what they wanted to achieve in the space of three years.
“We had Andretti, one of the best-known motorsport brands in the world, backed by General Motors, which could not enter F1.
It seemed illogical to me that the sport would turn its back on these great brands… I felt there had to be a way to do this
Tim Milne
“We had LKY SUNZ, with a billion and a half dollars from a major financial institution and a three-year plan to expand the sport in Southeast Asia to grow, but that wasn’t enough.
“And then you had two established teams in the lower division, Hitech and Rodin-Carlin, who wanted to expand their activities from the lower categories into F1 and neither of these bids were considered good enough to participate in F1.”
“That really said to me that it is fundamentally not possible to start a F1 team from the very beginning and be on the grid within three years.
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“It seemed illogical to me that the sport would turn its back on these great brands, just like the enormous amounts of money that were available for this… I felt there had to be a way to do this.”
Millne adds that teams’ fears over the dilution of the prize pool are considered in the proposal.
He continues: “If you turn around and say that to start a new team an investor has to pay $600m before they spend a single cent on recruiting, engineering design work, all the infrastructure, the factory and everything else you need to be a competitive F1 team, then it seemed to me that you should be able to invest that better.
“If instead you said, ‘OK, don’t pay the $600m, come race and don’t take anything out of the pot’, I would be surprised if any of the new teams would object to that.
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“So instead to demand $600m, you have to let the new team invest that money in what can help the sport develop. The sport then has to decide what that could be.”
F1’s next race commences at this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix, with the backdrop of legendary designer Adrian Newey leaving Red Bull.
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