Sebastian Vettel, Ferrari, Circuit de Catalunya, 2019

Formula 1 teams’ prize money payments for 2019 revealed

2019 F1 season

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Ferrari will continue to take the largest share of Formula 1’s prize money despite having gone 10 years without winning a championship, RaceFans can reveal.

Liberty Media’s prize money projections for 2019, which are awarded based on how teams performed in last year’s championship, will see Ferrari recover $205 million. Mercedes, who won the constructors’ championship for the fifth year in a row last season, will receive $177 million.

The sport’s commercial rights holder expects to share a prize pot of $1.004bn between the teams. Haas has seen its prize money income rise by the most of any team after achieving its best result of fifth in last year’s championship. However it received just $10 million more than Williams, which ended 2018 last in the standings.

The income teams receive from the sport’s commercial rights holder is broken down into three parts. ‘Column one’ is a fixed share of revenue paid to any team which has finished in the top 10 of the championship in two of the past three seasons. ‘Column two’ is paid on a sliding scale based on a team’s finishing position in the previous championship.

On top of that five teams receive further payments – a ‘constructors’ championship bonus’ is paid to four teams; three other teams receive bonus payments ranging from $10 million (Williams) to $35 million (Mercedes and Red Bull); and a special Long-Standing Team payment is made to Ferrari alone. Worth $73 million this year, the LST payment has ensured Ferrari has consistently received the most money of any team since the current prize money structure was introduced in 2013.

According to a schedule seen by RaceFans, Liberty Media will award a column one payment to Racing Point. This is despite the team being admitted to the championship last year as a new entrant, which prompted claims that it should not qualify for column one revenue as it has not fulfilled the requirement to finish in the top 10 twice in the previous three championships.

Projected 2019 payments to F1 teams

All values in $m

TeamColumn 1Column 2SubtotalLSTCCBOtherTotal2018 +/- (%)2018 position
Ferrari3556917341205+5.72
Mercedes35661014135177+4.11
Red Bull3546813635152+4.13
McLaren35326733100+23.56
Renault35387373+17.74
Haas35357070+32.15
Williams3515501060-21.110
Racing Point35245959-14.57
Sauber35215656+21.78
Toro Rosso35175252-7.19

NB. Racing Point classification from round 13 onwards, but total payments based on Racing Point being an existing team, not a new entry. Sauber has rebranded as Alfa Romeo for the 2019 season.

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See the 2018 prize money figures for reference here. Note these values were quotes in pounds sterling and, as with the figures above, are based on Liberty Media’ projected prize money values at the time:

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77 comments on “Formula 1 teams’ prize money payments for 2019 revealed”

  1. No wonder the mid field championship is tight.

    1. georgeboole (@)
      3rd March 2019, 12:50

      @fletch McLaren getting most of the midfield money and still finishing last. What a pity

      1. @georgeboole

        They are the Ferrari of F 1.5

        1. That’s probably the best way to insult both at the same time.

          Impressive

          1. georgeboole (@)
            3rd March 2019, 14:04

            @todfod @johnmilk still so true.
            At least Ferrari is fighting for the championship more often than McLaren

          2. @georgeboole

            And yet .. Mclaren won a championship more recently than Ferrari has :P

          3. @todfod When was the last time McLaren won a constructors’ championship?

          4. @rntm

            No one cares about the WCC.

          5. @todfod Oh really? What are we talking about here?

          6. @rntm

            If Ferrari has openly admitted that the WDC is what matters… Then what’s the point of your focus on the WCC?

      2. The dumbest comment possible. Since when is sixth last?

        1. georgeboole (@)
          4th March 2019, 12:40

          @proteus you can always post your opinion. Noone will call you names here. I believe we are civilised enough to be able to have a conversation or an argument so please show appropriate respect to everyone reading.

          @todfod did McLaren give Alonso his share of the prize money? Or they bought new freddos?

  2. leaveyourego
    3rd March 2019, 13:00

    Ferrari gets a payment called Long Standing Team, but isn’t it really regarding the prestige and marketing value of having Ferrari in the championship? Couldn’t Mercedes make a similar claim? Have they? Ferrari is great, but in the car world Mercedes is a bigger name.

    1. So in effect Ferrari is sponsoring F1 to the value of $73M ;)

      1. Well why not? F1 give you $205M at yrs end, It helped Ferrari with the what, $450M budget (haha) for the season.

    2. Daimler engines were OP in 1894, and they still are 125 years later.

    3. I’m not sure about the $73mil cut, but Ferrari deserves the LST title. Mercedes can’t make a similar claim as they have only been a manufacturer team for not more than 10 years I think.

    4. I’m not sure what you mean by in the car world?

      Certainly, if asked people around the world if they’d rather have present of a maintenance-free, cost-to-run-free Mercedes or Ferrari, practically everyone would chose the latter.

      1. What I mean is, that from a glamour perspective, surely Ferrari is much more important to F1 than Mercedes?

        1. leaveyourego
          4th March 2019, 3:37

          I meant what Lestyn pointed out. Mercedes is a more significant car firm than Ferrari. Ferrari is certainly known as the more sporting of the two, but Mercedes is still a bigger name. This payment seems to have been set up to avoid losing Ferrari in the championship, because of fear about whether F1 would survive the loss. Mercedes’ participation eliminates the need for that and highlights the favoritism behind the payment.

          1. Mercedes are more significant because they’re a bigger car manufacturer, what’s that got to do with F1 and the importance of the manufacturer to the sport? By that logic, Renault should get a bigger cut than all of them, since it’s far bigger than Mercedes parent company Daimler. Toyota should have been given half the earnings of the sport when it was in, given it’s more than 4 times the size of Daimler, and Honda, despite only being a power plant supplier, should also be given more money, since they twice the size of Daimler.

            That’s a ridiculous metric to base your opinion on. Mercedes will leave the sport the moment it’s no longer a fruitful marketing platform for them. Ferrari remain the only manufacturer or even team that has contested every year of the world championship. F1 without Ferrari would be F1 without it’s biggest connection to it’s history. It’s the same reason you won’t see Monaco dropped from the calendar.

    5. No, it’s not the value of Ferrari, it’s the price they extracted from Bernie for breaking FOTA, or as a labor union might call them “scabs”, in the USA they could be team Benedict Arnold.

  3. I don’t understand why only one team receives the LST bonus. Surely the pot should be 73 million and that’s divided by how long you’ve been in the championship?

    1. You’re making a common mistake – trying to apply common sense, fairness and decency to a payment structure created by Bernie. Don’t feel bad, that’s a testament to your good character.

      1. I used to be on the dark side but after digging up my math books saw the light.
        The LST bonus is split based on the natural exponential function with ‘years in F1’ as exponent rounded downwards to the closest million.
        Very logical and very ‘natural’ so it must be fair.
        @phylyp

        1. georgeboole (@)
          3rd March 2019, 14:54

          @coldfly as a mathematician I will agree with you. It’s all very natural

      2. Actually it was imposed by CVC in their desperation to IPO.

        1. Ah, ok. Thanks, Dieter!

    2. And keep thinking like that. People like me and @phylyp we are too far gone. There’s no hope. SAVE YOURSELF

      1. @johnmilk – oh, come now, let’s bring him over to the dark side. We have cookies here.

        1. I’ve reached a stage in my life where I’m laying down in a ship’s pontoon and I’m here thinking “was it worth it?” Was it worth it destroying all those younglings? What did the force gave me besides hatred and fear? The Jedi were right, let me go into the light @phylyp

        2. Intriguing offer…

    3. Farcical to say the least

  4. So, technically Red Bull get the second largest pot, when combined with Torro Rosso = $202m.

    Which, let’s face it, is unquestionably Red Bull B team – assuming that isn’t obvious to absolutely anyone.

    1. And they also have to spend the money it takes to run two teams and 4 cars. Now that Haas and Sauber are both Ferrari’s from the driver back, Ferrari gets the R&D data from that without spending money on a secondary team.

  5. Bar chart unreadable on mobile as labels are dropped. How about vertical text, or inline with the bar?

    1. @falken I’ve checked various displays and the labels appear on all of them for me. Note that if you tap on the column it shows the data as well.

  6. So, Ferrari get a helping hand. All that extra money for simply gracing us with their presence:

    Marc Priestly says it best:

    I get the historical importance of Ferrari, but we have been giving them an advantage by throwing more money at them then any other team. For me, that is like giving a fooyball team a 12th nab on the pitch. If you spend it right, your budget directly correlates to success and performance, so we’ve been handing them an unfair advantage.

    1. I get that. The rub to me is that the LST has been no guarantee of anything for Ferrari.

      1. Yeah, but that extra cash goes into their overall purse. Who knows, without that extra money, it could mean even less being spent/earmarked for development, meaning they would be fighting with the likes of Williams, instead of fighting at the sharp end. Overall, it gives Ferrari a helping hand no other team receive.

        1. @amam, as you note, Ferrari do explicitly make reference to the revenue they receive from FOM in their annual accounts and the way that they use it to offset the cost of competing – it’s certainly not exactly going to hurt to be given a bonus in prize money that is equal to or greater than the prize money that half the grid gets for their WCC efforts.

          There is also the question of whether there is a financial conflict of interest between Liberty Media and Ferrari given that Ferrari have been allocated a stake in Liberty Media, which they took up in 2017. It could be argued that, in some senses, Ferrari is effectively getting paid twice from competing in F1 thanks to the dividends that they are paid by Liberty Media, part of which will be raised from the profits of the sport.

    2. I wholeheartedly agree with Marc Priestly. Totally unfair – always has been. Organisers being pressured by Ferrari.

    3. Priestley never heard about real Madrid or Barcelona then?

      1. Juventus has a 12th man in the role of the referee

  7. Ferrari is worth every penny and more to Formula 1. They’re the only team that matters.

    1. petebaldwin (@)
      3rd March 2019, 16:36

      Would you therefore be happy for all the other teams to leave the sport so you could just watch 2 Ferrari’s drive around?

      1. I couldn’t have put it any better!

      2. Yes, I wouldn’t mind it. I’m sure Ferrari could be persuaded to add a few more to their team anyway. Their participation is worth more than all of the other teams combined, so for Liberty, they’re still a bargain.

        1. BlackJackFan
          4th March 2019, 3:38

          Remember that fateful Indy GP…!

    2. You left out “to you”

    3. Ferrari comes from the land of the Maffia, Berlusconi and ridiculous political parties,, the Pope, Ceasar, boringly ridiculously long movies with no story etc etc. Oh, and cars that are painted bright to appear fast. I could very well do without Ferrari thank you.

      1. @TZ you forgot mandolino and baffi

  8. The fact that Ferrari gets 73M just for showing up only to provide us abject failure year after year only emphasizes their uselessness for F1. If they didn’t receive this handout, they would be fighting Williams for last place.

    Give that money to teams that want to fight for wins rather than sell hats and t-shirts.

    1. So, if Ferrari wins the WDC & WCC, is it tainted by them having an unfair advantage over everyone else?

    2. Well…not just for showing up. They are a big part of the show too, providing competition even if they aren’t winning the two big trophies. Abject failure? So the extra money certainly is no guarantee of anything is it? And no, without the extra 73 they wouldn’t be fighting Williams. If they needed it they would find the 73 another way.

      Hey I get the unfairness of the payment, but for some reason I cannot seem to get bent out of shape over it. What I did get bent out of shape over was the Max Mosley and BE orchestrating of MS to Ferrari and the skewing that all of F1 had to go through so that MS could finally end the Ferrari WDC drought. That was worth far more to Ferrari and Max and Bernie than 73 mill a year.

    3. I don’t really have an issue with them getting a LST bonus, it’s the size of it that baffles me. They get more money simply for showing up to the season, than Mercedes do for winning the constructor’s championship. It’s no wonder why Ferrari focus on the WDC, there’s no benefit to them in winning the WCC.

      1. @hugh11 – I’ve always wondered why Ferrari emphasized the WDC over the WCC, and I was always told that’s because the tifosi adore a human champion than the team being a champion. Seeing your comment, it does seem this might be a major factor in that as well.

  9. LST is unfair and all, but Merc & RB get about half that money as ‘other’ and is that fair then?

  10. Interesting that Racing Point will get a Column 1 payment and that hasn’t been jumped on around here, like it seemed to have been last year when the takeover happened. The anti-Stroll rhetoric was strong.

    Personally I’m fine with it because Racing Point may have made a technical name change, which I realize legally requires all contracts be re-written as them being a new entity, but practically speaking they seamlessly saved F1 the embarrassment of losing a team mid-season. The casual observer wouldn’t know there’s been a change of ownership, and Liberty probably so appreciates that.

    1. @robbie – that is a very fair question, and probably begs an update on the challenge Haas made about RPFI’s entry last year – has that been resolved, settled, or is it still an open issue?

  11. The way I see LST is they’re paying for the marquee value of the Ferrari name. Just like if you were filming a movie you’d pay a big name like Brad Pitt far more than the other actors even if he was to do less and get far less camera time.
    When you attend a race, the majority of people wearing Ferrari colours are fans of the team and not the individual drivers which is unlike most teams. Thus, if Ferrari are at the front of the field or mid field, their fan base isn’t going to diminish and that has value which can be used to bring in sponsors and race promoters.

    1. Spot on Sir ! It’s the same as you running your business. Ferrari bring tons of money to F1 on/off track as well just because they showing itself. They have the biggest fan base from any team, the grandstand are 1/2 Ferrari supporters. Simple, they are worlds NO.1 brand, they deserve every single peny.

      1. BlackJackFan
        4th March 2019, 3:42

        Not biased by any chance, are you…?

      2. @nikola-sf, the world’s number one brand brand is either Amazon, Google or Apple, depending on how you measure it. Ferrari doesn’t even make the top ten.

  12. I’ve always felt very embarrassed for Ferrari recieving this extra help, and not just financially. It’s a lose lose situation. If they win it’s because of the extra help. If they lose, then well they really shouldn’t be losing with all that extra cash and favouritism.

    No championship in 10 years is karma I’m very satisfied with. I wish they would leave F1.

  13. You can see by the decisions made by the “officials” that F1 is Fiat/Ferrari.

  14. Like it or not, this and other payments like them, were “negotiated” ( for want of a better word) by Ferrari & co with the old Bernie/CVC regime and we’re contractually cast in stone until the expiry of the Concorde agreement in 2021.

    Liberty can’t actually do anything about that. What they need to ensure is a more equitable solution to be put in place post 2021, something I suspect is proving to be their biggest challenge and will continue to be their biggest challenge over the next 4 months.

    The only payment that they truly have any control over from 2018 is that one going to Racing Point and that one is still subject to challenge ( or was unless the challenge by Haas has been resolved)

    It’s information that is nice to know, but the real information that most of us are waiting for is what the distribution process will be post 2021, will Liberty try to lower the total amount being distributed to become more profitable, and will the marque teams accept it.

    1. There is NO Concorde Agreement in place. There are bilateral agreements between FOM and each team individually, and these expire at end-2020.

      1. Thanks Dieter, my mistake/ignorance. I guess the question remains as to whether the same teams will attempt to get similar agreements out of FOM once these expire.

        1. Of course they’ll TRY – the question upon which F1’s future hinges upon is: Is Liberty strong enough to resist?

          1. Well put @dieterrencken, and let’s hope so!

  15. McLaren and Williams are the teams everyone should be complaining about. They get a huge payout, but if they were gone tomorrow, how many people would really miss them?

    1. BlackJackFan
      4th March 2019, 3:47

      I know you’re very biased in your opinion so… I’ll be the same… I will not shed a tear if Ferrari pull out at the end of next year… Especially if it ensures more than one other team can afford to remain… and perhaps encourages others to join. So there… ;-)

  16. excluding the column 1 and 2 payments, the remainder is $304m. there must be a fairer, more sustainable way to split this than the current ‘constructor championship bonus’ and ‘long-standing team’ madness. I can understand some push back against this being split evenly (i.e. just adding $30m to column 1) but it’s blindingly obvious that the current model is dooming the sport to fail.

    who would want to join as a new constructor under the current prize system? no one with pretensions of winning, which means we’ll just get more de facto ‘b’ teams like haas who are just in it to market some wares. the sport is dead if it cannot attract genuine competitive privateers.

  17. F1oSaurus (@)
    30th March 2019, 15:34

    The CCB bonus is $100 million divided amongst 3 teams with the most victories over 3 seasons. Not 4. McLaren gets 0.

  18. I suppose when you get fined €50,000 trying to win a race , but in this case it failed , the overall cost for cheating every time would only be €1,050,000 a season , not bad when you consider they get prize money of $205 million.
    I still do not understand why they still get $73 million due to their time in the sport – especially when all the teams have similar costs.

Comments are closed.