Interesting read, surprised by how much Ferrari's budget was compared to their rivals, so is the spend how much they spent into this years cars? Because Ferrari I think also got a new wind tunnel, and maybe also the driver academy would't had a big impact, both are long term finical costs.
It does look quite bad for the performance of Ferrari's staff, there still is a big question mark over their relatively younger and almost certainly unproven staff that they now have in.
The data about how the return and expsore from sponsorship from the big teams was really interesting, though the critical knowledge is really how much value do the sponsors gain by having their image on f1, rather than simply comparing it to the cost of a conventional tv ad, is the f1 sponsorship more effective?
All together, the 141 brands with on-car logos in Formula One in 2010 gained exposure worth $1.2bn, an average of $62m per grand prix. This included not just sponsors and team owners, but the engine manufacturers, the team names themselves and charities, such as the FIA's Make Roads Safe campaign which appeared free-of-charge on all the teams' cars throughout the year. The campaign got coverage from this which would have cost it $1.3m if it had bought the time as standard TV advertising.
The closest challenger to Red Bull's supremacy was McLaren's title sponsor Vodafone, which drew exposure worth $122.5m throughout the year, giving the mobile phone provider a return of almost 190% on the $65m it spends annually. It was followed by Ferrari's major new partner Santander, which got exposure worth $99.3m, a 200% return on its $50m annual spending. With returns like this, it's easy to see why companies are so keen to get involved in F1.
It certainly looks rosy for the top of f1 teams (from a sponsors point of view) my concern is mid car pretty decent teams like Williams and Sauber seem to be struggling for sponsors.