Really? Your calming a poverty stricken childhood?

 

Pretty much all sports are pay to play except for the top 5% or less. I see many "pro" skiers that are just sons and daughters of rich parents who foot the bill. Also when the Olympics were in town I realized that most, if not all winter-sports athletes were the children of former Olympians or rich parents.

 

Pretty much, unless you are Hani's kid, no chance of becoming a professional driver

 

I wonder what's the season budget the lower ranked teams like Lotus or Hispania?

 

It was back when I was in Formula A and we wanted to step up a notch. I remember when he was considering going to F1 and we met at a track and they talked about his speed records, and how he managed to get a higher top speed than schumi on the straight and asked him to race for the team.

I wish I could've continued racing because I was able to go to a higher class (formula 3000) but I lost my sponsor(gf's dad) and then got confronted with the costs...

 

I remember that, and if I recall it correctly he was about 1.3 seconds faster than Vettel's fastest lap of the weekend. However, I do remember RBR saying the track was about 1.5 seconds faster. Still not a bad effort!

As for the issue on hand, money does play a big part but you have to remember that becoming an F1 driver takes years to progress up from karting. If I was rolling in cash and offered RBR $10000000 for a drive with no previous racing experience, they wouldn't even consider it. Alex summed it up real well as you need raw talent to keep a drive!

 

Damn, what the he'll have you been smoking. Do you genuinely think that only the top 3 drivers in F1 make money?! Schumi is not in the top three at the moment and he is getting a hefty pay package....

 

Excuse his English. He probably meant the top 3 teams, but that still is off.

 

Mark Webber tweeted this a while back, it was his plan as of 6/7/95 to get into f1, His parents didn't have the cash and only due to the backing of a family friend who put up a lot of the money and some other personal sponsorship here in Australia that he had the chance to head to Europe to try and make it, luckily for him he made it..

Casey Stoners parents sold up everything thay had to support their sons racing in Europe and took to living in a caravan travelling race to race all to give there son a chance of making it..

The history of motorsport is littered with talented drivers/riders who never had the cash "make it big" and this will continue to get worse as the price of of all these feeder categories for motorsport is only getting higher and you only have a couple of opportunities to show what you have before you get written off..

 

Sorry, I should have said it different:

They all make a lot of money in the end when they become famous, but not much with the racing itself, the millions of $ come from merchandise and sponsors/ contracts.

They all have to work there way up to F1, and before sponsors spot you you probably have paid 10's or more likely 100's of thousands to get there.