F1 'could triple' entry fees for new teams wanting to join

Formula 1 CEO Stefano Domenicali has hinted that the sport could sharply raise the entrance fee payable by any new teams seeking to join the Formula 1 grid in future.

Currently any prospective new team has to stump up $200m to enter the sport, which is then shared out among existing teams to take into account the dilution of the prize money being distributed across more teams.

It's also a way of discouraging 'frivolous' entry bids and making sure that only businesses on a solid financial footing able to sustain a long term investment in the sport embark upon the process in the first place.

The $200m figure was originally set because it was considered to be the bottom-end cost of buying an existing team such as Williams at the time the last Concorde Agreement was signed.

• Read also: Panthera latest team linked to 2026 entry bid

But the recent success of Formula 1 since it was bought out by Liberty Media at the end of 2016 means that the cost of purchasing teams is now far higher - and Domenicali says this should be reflected in the entry fee.

"The so-called anti-dilution payment was done at $200m just a couple of years before," he said on an investor call this week. "At that time no one would have expected that the value of this business would rise up so much."

Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei pointed out that "Manor was the 11th team, and just before [Liberty Media] bought into F1 it went into administration in the UK, and got sold for £1. The world has changed dramatically.

“When we took over, we really had four goals with the new Concorde Agreement,” Maffei explained. “Create more on-track parity through putting a hard cap in.

"Putting in a less steeply-graded pay-out to the teams so that the bottom teams had a better chance to make more money.

"We put in a new series of designs which allowed more overtaking and we made the teams franchises so that the ten had value," he continued.

“Have we achieved everything on our goals? No. But we have achieved an awful lot about bringing parity and about bringing the ecosystem to be healthy and about generating interest"

"Today the situation is totally different for sure," acknowledged Domenicali. "And it's our duty to make sure that we protect the business the best way that we can, and have a bigger picture."

Andretti Global has been making an aggressive bid to enter F1 but has met with a cool response from the existing ten teams who fear they will receive a smaller slice of the prize fund as a result.

Other potential new teams have also been preparing applications, and the FIA - the governing body of world motorsport - has set up a review of the process to cope with the explosion of demand.

"The number of people who call and want to invest in a team, we could fill this room and more," Maffei noted.

"There are so many that would like to come," Domenicali agreed. "There are teams that are more vocal than others, some of them are much more silent, but they are really expressing their interest.

"The process of having another team has been launched by the FIA," he told investors. "In our governance, in our Concorde, there's a possibility to do it.

"As always in life someone has to make that evaluation and we're part of this process," he said. "And we're going to do the right thing at the appropriate time through this year."

"The evaluation has to be done together to see from the technical perspective, from the sporting perspective, for the financial stability, and to make the bigger picture, if a new team will give value to the league, to the sport.

"There will be a different position," he added, with reports in the media suggesting that the entry fee will go up from $200m to $600m to reflect the new robust health of the sport and the existing teams.

Whether that new rate would be applied to Andretti Global - which started its bid to enter F1 from 2026 a year ago, and has already confirmed it has financing in place for the $200m fee - is unclear.

But it would be viewed by many as another example of blatant hostility toward the Andretti business fronted by former F1 driver Michael Andretti, the son of 1978 world champion Mario Andretti.

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