Unsurprisingly, the world’s richest sport also dishes the world’s nastiest side eye. Last week’s announcement Andretti Motorsport would seek a Formula 1 grid entry alongside General Motors went over like a jammed wheel gun on a slow pit stop. Motorsport laid out the reasons for the tepid team response compared to Audi’s announcement last year, and the biggest gripe among teams is also the most predictable: money. Any new entry on the grid will dilute revenue sharing for F1’s broadcast dollars, which number in the hundreds of millions each year. Alongside the more than hundreds of million it costs to run an F1 team each year, and hundreds of millions more to build infrastructure to support a competitive program, each new entry must pay $200 million to join the grid to offset revenue sharing lost with the addition of a new team. In Andretti’s case, current F1 teams may not believe that $200 million split 10 ways will offset money lost by splitting revenue in a sport whose popularity is growing exponentially. What’s more, Motorsport reports that most teams don’t consider Andretti to be a driving force to grow the sport further; Audi’s name recognition and global marketing machine is seen as a much larger asset to F1 than Andretti.
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