[lasadeykar]

No I don't actually. Jordan is not blessed with oil. I just don't think that the whole financial crisis is as bad as it's made out to be in the media. The actual crisis & causes/solutions are another discussion, but quite how it impacts on F1 is not unclear but the first to go are the banks. Yet there are always other sponsors to replace them.



Why not?

I don't see what 'booze' as you put it has in F1, but sponsors come & go & each reflects era. The 1990s was the high-tech/telecommunications era & that's when they started showing up on F1 cars. Banks followed from the late-1990s, & so on. The point is, sponsors make conscience choices to/not to enter.

Of course, you pick the sponsors who pay the most & are most reliable in making the transfers. The best way to survive in F1 (I think) is to have sponsor-partners, that is companies who are working with you. Take Ferrari with FIAT, Magneti Marelli, Shell, & Piaggo among others providing both sponsorship & technical support. Anything extra (such as Banks, Airlines, Hotels etc) is welcome, but ultimately the 'core' must be directly involved in the technical partnerships.

Well, having family members that work for Bank of America, Citigroup, Allianz, World Bank, and The US Department of Commerce, I can tell you, It is as bad as the media makes it out to be. Actually maybe even a little worse.

[Inenuedbabnor]

Well, having family members that work for Bank of America, Citigroup, Allianz, World Bank, and The US Department of Commerce, I can tell you, It is as bad as the media makes it out to be. Actually maybe even a little worse.

With respect, every 'crisis' is the 'worst' since the Great Depression, it's always media hype (to sell stories?) & people at the US Department of Commerce are the least complacent of all so they treat every crisis as if it was. Yes, there are some irks, but the Asian financial crisis is behind us, & everybody seems to have forgotten the 1999 crisis in the last years of Clinton.

Even without the new regulations, sponsorship would have declined & budgets would have stablised a bit due to the crisis. The fact that the cost-cutting measures coincided with the global financial crisis but one cannot help but wonder if they were a year or two earlier, where KERS could have been postponed a year or more later.

That being (& I don't want to get into it) fewer banks & financial institutions will show up as race sponsors but sponsorship is not really an issue. Honda's pull out was more the result of not having any real sponsor & financing F1 from their own pockets. Had they had several major partners (such as Ferrari & McLaren-Mercedes) then they'd probably have been well prepared for the cost-cuts. Who knows, maybe we'll see Honda back in 2010 or 2011.