Formula One - is the circus going to collapse?

I thought A1GP was in a whole lot of trouble, but it looks like Formula One is heading into the same valley of doom.

In the past couple of days some of the top racing teams, including Ferrari, Red Bull and Toyota, have threatened to pull out of the sport.

It all boiled over when the FIA released its two-tier regulations to put a cap on rampant spending. There are lots of folk now rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of F1 returning to its so-called glory days. Where engineering ingenuity and not wallets reigned supreme, when F1 was fun and the drivers were rakish cads or their veins flowed with blue blood.

A word of warning to those who hanker after the good ol' days - they weren't all that good, in fact they were crap. Nothing worked that well, the machinery, for the most, was held together with duct tape and lock wire and you took your life into your hands just starting the cars, let alone racing them.

If there is a mass exodus of manufacturer teams, the sport will self-destruct and we'll all be back to standing around in muddy paddocks watching glorified clubman racing. I can see that in New Zealand, I don't want to see it on a global scale.

In the case of Ferrari, it needs F1 as all their marketing hangs off it, and F1 needs Ferrari. All the teams want the kudos of duffing up the only team to compete in every season of F1.

Albeit Brawn GP is winning at the moment, saying to someone you beat the Brawn team in Malaysia, doesn't cut the mustard as much as mentioning you gave a serve to the red machines at the Monaco Grand Prix.

However, although this pissing contest between Max Mosley and the manufacturers may be interesting, it was the downright sneaky, devious, underhand and outright dastardly way Bernie Ecclestone's medal idea nearly snuck under the radar while all the above was going on.

I nearly fell out of my chair when I read Bernie's idea of awarding the championship to the driver who had the most gold medals, had been past at a World Motor Sport Council meeting.

This half-arsed (probably eighth-arsed) idea was canned earlier in the year as one of the dumbest ideas to come out of Bernie's normally astute (at times Machiavellian) brain.

The 'winner takes all' rule was part of Article 6.1 and to was to take effect from 2010. A spokesperson for the FIA said the rule had been added by mistake, and had now been corrected. She went on to say the FIA hadn't been trying to make Bernie's idea a rule without consulting the teams.

I wonder though, nothing would surprise with those devious bastards. If someone hadn't spotted it, I reckon the ruling body would've let sleeping dogs lie.

And Mad Max stating, in response to Ferrari's threat of pulling out: "Tough. Formula 1 can exist without Ferrari" only adds to the thinking - if they could have got away with it, they would've.

There's another meeting of the WMSC in October and Bernie's keen to try and have it discussed again. My guess is the F1 puppet master will somehow find a way to get his daft idea through this time.

- Eric Thompson