Red Bull Racing and Ferrari have said that they are withdrawing from the Formula One Teams’ Association (FOTA). This will become a reality in February. If this is indeed the case, rather than a bit of brinksmanship, then the organisation will collapse as there is no longer any need for any collective bargaining and deals between the teams and the Formula One group will be done as best they can be.

According to my sources the Concorde Agreement has a clause which restricts the Commercial Rights Holder or any person acting on his behalf, to make any offer to any team prior to December 31 2011, unless it makes the same offer to all the teams. I believe also that the Commercial Rights Holder is contracted to not confer on any team “any material preferential right, benefit or privilege or discriminate against any other team” before December 31 2012.

Thus the only way that any deal can have been done at this point is if the parties were willing to face legal challenges.

The other possible reading of the situation is that this is a last-ditch attempt by the two teams to get the other teams to fall into line on the question of a Resources Restriction Agreement (RRA) and that the Formula One group is not yet involved in the politicking.

As it is hard to imagine that any deal would have been agreed without it all being written down and signed, one must assume that there have been no such negotiations unless the parties involved wanted to face legal action from the other signatories.

If there is no legal challenge then one can now expect the same pattern of events as we have seen before with Ferrari getting an even larger share of the F1 pot; Red Bull getting some extra cash for being compliant and the other teams scrambling to get what they can. In that scenario all collective bargaining is finished and all that we observers can do is stand in awe at the stupidity of the teams for allowing that to happen. One other way to read the situation would be to conclude that FOTA was invented by Ferrari simply as a means by which the team put pressure on Bernie to give it a better deal and that the plan was always to jettison the other teams when a deal was done. It is hard to know.

One way or another, however, if a team has legally committed to NOT doing a deal before a certain date, there will be the possibility of a legal challenge from the co-signatories if such a deal does in fact exist.