No joint launch for 2010: Is anyone actually surprised?

As was already published here at F1B Tuesday, the proposed joint car launch by the entire grid this January in Spain has been canceled.  This is not shocking.  In fact, this is exactly what was going to happen the moment it was discussed.  All of the factors required for the new season car launches would be minimized or removed at a joint launch by all the teams.  No one in the competitive world of F1 was going to give more than lip service to this idea.

To start off, one must consider why there are car launches in the first place.  It would be just as easy to simply show up to the first race, complete with new cars and drivers.  However, a car launch provides a team with a way to butter up the paddock journalists with a trip to an exotic or interesting location, food, drink, leaked bits of information, a chance to talk to the (new) drivers, and a story to fill the column inches during the off-season.

The idea of a joint launch is a good one for cost-cutting and journalists who do not like to travel all that often (this begs a question as to why they are F1 journalists, but that is an entirely different article).  It would also provide an excuse to shake down the new teams, many of which would not have had a car ready by the end of January.  However, it goes against the aforementioned reasons for individual car launches.  If all the teams launch at the same time, they are vying for a finite amount of press notice and public knowledge.  If the launches are spread out from now until the season begins, the teams have infinite amounts of press to use for marketing and catching sponsors at the last minute.  Despite some evidence to the contrary, the F1 public relations community as a whole seems to have learned the details of their jobs and realized that the joint launch was a bad idea.

Adding, of course, to the sensibleness of canceling is the fact that no one should believe that any of the few remaining larger-than-life (as well as the much quieter but equally focused) personalities in charge of the various teams in F1 could likely stand to have to wait in the same location while another team grabs all the attention for one or two days.  All in all, this join launch idea was unlikely to happen and likely would have gone pear-shaped in any number of ways.

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