Malaysian F1 Team

A Malaysian F1 Team ? Huh ?? Yup, that was my initial reaction when I first read the news in the newspaper. Maybe there are others who have already seen this coming from the day Malaysia started to build the Sepang F1 circuit. And this was followed by our very own F1 driver, Alex Yoong.

But, to build an F1 circuit is already a big, fat white elephant whereby most of the time the circuit is left empty. How many racing events do you organise in a year in 1 country ? You have the A1 race, the Super GTT, Superbike race and a couple more cars or bike races. Surely, all these races will only add up to about 30 days in a year while you have to maintain the circuit for a whole long year!

And now, our Country has decided to have a F1 team. How much would it cost to run a F1 team? In these days where major car companies like BMW and Honda are pulling the plug from F1 races, Malaysia is putting both legs into the global automobile racing which is currently battling scandals, credit crunch, teams dissatisfied with the organiser etc ? To quote from today's The Sun newspaper, "Ferrari, for instance, has a team of close to 800 people, including 200 frontline crew involved in pit and technical aspects of the race" We're probably looking at spending about RM200-300 million a year! Wouldn't it be better to spend that kind of money to improve the livehood of Malaysians ? I think we should stick back to the original idea of having 1Malaysia, not F1 Malaysia.