Court documents from the McLaren and Alex Palou lawsuit have revealed the hefty price tag that a Formula 1 FP1 outing comes with.
The Woking-based squad’s bitter legal battle with Palou has given a rare insight into the behind-the-scenes ground realities of the paddock.
The four-time IndyCar Champion has been taken to court for allegedly breaching his contract with the team to race for its IndyCar operations dating back to 2023.
The Spaniard, on the other hand, contends that he is not liable to pay any damages to McLaren, owing to the various hollow promises allegedly made by CEO Zak Brown.
As it turns out, this legal battle has exposed an intriguing dynamic between F1 aspirants and teams that has remained unknown and unquantified in the past.
The Sporting Regulations mandate that each team must field a rookie at least four times during a season in the FP1 sessions.
Disclosures made in the Courtroom have now revealed how the teams have turned this FIA-mandated obligation into a revenue-generating operation.
Last season, Ryo Hirakawa made his FP1 debut for the Woking-based team at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
As per Motorsport Magazine, the Japanese racing driver coughed up a staggering $3.5 million to McLaren for this opportunity.
This also included a couple of appearances in older-spec McLaren F1 cars under the Testing of Previous Cars (TPC) rules.
Palou’s legal team has based the Spaniard’s defence around his own expenses incurred in availing an FP1 seat. The 28-year-old had a lone outing for McLaren during the 2022 United States Grand Prix weekend at the Circuit of the Americas as he stepped in for Daniel Ricciardo, finishing 17th after the first hour of running in Austin, Texas.
The Spaniard also contended that he was put under the impression, by Brown, that a seat in F1 in the coming seasons was a tangible possibility.
The American, however, has rubbished those claims as just an “optionality”.
Therefore, Palou now claims that he owes the Woking-based team nothing as the team “got precisely what it expected to: an F1 reserve driver from October 2022 to August 2023, and an opportunity to assess his potential in an F1 car.”
READ MORE – Why Zak Brown was ‘amused’ by ‘ludicrous’ Alex Palou suggestions about Oscar Piastri
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