HRT have confirmed that they are no longer a part of FOTA. Their reason for leaving is that they don’t feel that the small teams receive enough benefit from being a part of the organisation – this is despite the fact that there are still ongoing discussions about the Resource Restriction Agreement (RRA) to help keep costs down in the sport and help out the smaller F1 teams.
There are rumours that HRT were suspended from FOTA back in December for failing to pay the 100,000 Euro annual fee. However team principal Colin Kolles has said that they had already decided to leave as they couldn’t see the benefit in remaining. One particular aspect he honed in on was the TV revenue split citing the difference between finishing 10th in the championship (where the team receives $36 million) and 11th (where the team receives $10 million) as “excessive”. Instead, he believes that the extra points revenues should be split into equal parts.
