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Apart from the technical changes, the least visible for the fans will be the measures taken to reduce operating costs of a Formula One team.
Most involved parties have come to realise that spending more than a million Euro per day, year after year to run 2 cars was a little out of proportion.
As such, the World motor sport council met with FOTA on 12 December at Monaco and agreed upon the following measures:
* Testing has been severely reduced from 30,000 to 15,000 km/year. All this testing will have to happen between 1 January and 7 days before the first Grand Prix of the season, as in-season and post-season testing are now banned completely. It is already widely known that this measure will reduce the workforce for most teams. Williams for instance is said to be investigating who it deems most necessary in its team as it aims to cut away the testing crew as a whole, since the race team can now do the early season testing.
* Wind tunnel testing was limited to 40 hours/week. This used to be an unlimited parameter and resulting in several teams running its wind tunnel 24 hours, 7 days a week in 3 shifts of 8 working hours. Some teams did however protest against this idea as they had just invested in a secondary wind tunnel. Max Mosley meanwhile stated that these costs are in the past, cannot be undone and cannot be a reason to keep spending at the same rate.
* No wind tunnel exceeding 60% scale and 50 m/s or 180 km/h to be used after 1 January 2009.
* Factory closures for six weeks per year, to accord with local laws.
* Manpower to be reduced by means of a number of measures, including sharing information on tyres and fuel to eliminate the need for “spotters”.
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