Formula 1 - The business of money

Formula 1 is back, and with it one of the most expensive business in the world!

F1 is the most spectacular sport, with the fastest cars ever seen and with a big competitiveness between teams like Ferrari, BMW, McLaren, Red Bull, Renault, etc. These cars catch a speed of 300 km/h easily and these races don’t go unnoticed, the average viewing figures for different grand prix is over 354 million worldwide, this is a lot of people, and also a lot of money in marketing, publicity, TV, news, etc. Formula 1 makes a lot of money, but also they have many costs. According to many web pages, the supporting cast will shell out over $3 billion this year in team resources. This is a huge and extraordinary amount of money! And the team that spends more money is Toyota spending more than $445 million of it alone. McLaren is a close second at $433 million, while Ferrari rounds out the top three with $414 million coming out of pocket. Also the drivers have a huge payroll, an example is Michael Schumacher, when he was 6 times World Champion, and he reported to be earning $49 million per year. These years Fernando Alonso in Ferrari’s team is earning about $25 million per year (it’s not bad).

Finally the cost of maintaining the team is extremely expensive. They cars are too expensive, they use around 900 tyres in a year’s racing that cost $2,405.40, in total $2,164,860.03, wheels $57,729.60 all the year, the engine is the most expensive it cost about $288,648.00 per race so it costs $49,070,160.77 all the year. There are more elements in a F1 car as we can see in the photo under this text, so calculate the total cost of every car...

But think that despite all of these costs, F1 earns money!

Bibliography:

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/09/22/f1-teams-to-spent-over-3-billion-toyota-the-most/
http://www.bized.co.uk/current/mind/2003_4/080304.htm

Technology advances in sport

Recently a lot of people, followers of any sport have many complaints about the solutions that referees had made in the game. For example when in football a player shoots the ball, and crash with the stick and bounces with the floor, but this happen too faster and we don’t know exactly if is it goal or no. An example was when Frank Lampard playing the World Cup with England vs Germany, had this bad luck and the referee didn’t accept the goal.  For this, for the legality of the game now we have introduced in many sports the high technology like for example the instant replay in tennis “hawkeye” and also in basketball to be sure if the player put the ball inside the basket out of time or not. The objective is to get the true result of the game avoiding troubles and errors of the referees. 

 

This research from new machines is done in many academics and one of them is the University of Surrey. Here the visual media research team works on video analysis, computer graphics and animation techniques to create the “iview” project which allows analysing matches from a huge array of angles to get the best view. They use several cameras situated around the field, or the stadium with which you can create and reconstruct what really happened in the game.

Finally as I said before the basic aim is to increase the level of efficiency in the sport and also in life.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/mar/14/goal-line-technology-academic-research

China's Development

How China became so rich? 

China nowadays is one of the potential countries in the world, but how they did this in a short period of time? China in the twentieth century was poorer than Cameroon; they suffer many crisis and revolutions against people in power. Mao the leader in China decided to invest in the heavy industry (coal, steel, etc) or to invest in agriculture. He thought that the bases of the other biggest countries like Great Britain, Germany or USA was the heavy industry, so he decided to decrease the level of production of rice to produce more coal and steel. This was the biggest error because a lot of people died because of hunger. Mao died, and Deng succeeded, he changed totally the idea of Mao and give incentives to people who cultivated and worked the land. This make that no more people died and China made profits exporting rise and cereals to other countries. Later China invested his money and tried to open his country to the world, to join the market and be a competitive player. 

Nowadays China still growing and wants to reach the top of the world over USA, will they reach that objective? What do you think?

Do you think that other countries like India, Brasil or African countries can be new future potential countries like the case of China?

TULIP MANIA

“The beginning of economic bubbles” 

As most of you know Tulip Mania happened in Netherlands around 1937. Tulip bulbs were a luxury product with an important value of power in the country, so everybody tries to have one or more in their houses. There were few tulip bulbs with different colours so they were really expensive and people compete and pay well for these bulbs. This makes that the price of tulip bulbs increase and people start to speculate with them, his price increase about 10 times and also people change houses for a tulip bulb! It was amazing! These facts lead to a big economic bubble and also a financial crisis. People start to buy bulbs like and investment, but at the end everybody had a lot of tulip bulbs imported for other countries and their price decrease a lot, then the tulip bulb has no value. It’s said that Tulip Mania was the first economic bubble.

And my question is why people are so stupid, and invest a lot of money in a plant? Tulips were flowers that everyone can cultivate in their houses. Anybody know that this was a big bubble which at the end will exploit? This example shows the fragility of the world economy.