You probably don’t need me to tell you that in F1 2014-style there have been plenty of things to fuss over. And we have. To name a few (deep inhale) the new rules, noise, entertainment, tarmac run-off areas, team mate wars, crashes, trips down escape roads, conspiracies, FRIC, 17 year old debutants, radio transmissions, etc etc.
But in our shrieking at a few mice scuttling around the floor we had our attention taken seemingly from the elephant in the room. A far more weighty matter – and not a new one – rumbled in the background.
In the hour or so after the recent Italian race Adam Parr, with a certain amount of deceptive sang froid, via Twitter rather dropped a bombshell: ‘This is the last year of F1 as we know it. In 2015 eight teams will contest the championship, with several teams entering three cars’ he said.
Of course, it is but one source, but Parr is one normally who can be trusted and is not known for mischief. As a recently-ex Williams CEO and chairman he presumably also remains well-connected. It’s also not clear what ulterior motive he’d have for stirring the matter up.
Plus his prophecy has the benefit of appearing to fit precisely into what we know already. As Martin Brundle noted shortly after Parr’s tweet landed: ‘We’re heading that way, it’s something we’ve discussed this year and a number of years’. The concept is nothing new, neither are the issues that apparently are driving it. Cost control and various teams’ survival remains the sport’s great unresolved issue.
Its manifestations remain clear too. Caterham, sadly, is now giving all of the outward sign of a team in its dying days. Even going to the point of appointing Colin Kolles who is to F1 teams what Ted McGinley is to sitcoms. Marussia and its revolving door for its driver slot at Spa didn’t bode well. The usually fastidious Sauber teams reportedly got way behind on its payments of its driver Nico Hulkenberg last season as well as to suppliers. It’s not at all clear the extent that the situation has improved since (though it may be rescued by Lawrence Stroll). And it’s afflicted Lotus too – a team that within the last 12 months had a highly competitive car and was in the fight for runners’ up spot in both tables – in a variety of ways that we know about.
The modern day drivers’ market is as much a bidding war as a talent war. Martin Whitmarsh at the start of 2013 spoke of seven of the 11 teams existing in ‘survival mode’. The theoretical 13th F1 team slot has for years laid unclaimed, as has the 12th slot vacated by HRT. Even going back further Max Mosley in his then role as FIA president conspicuously wrestled with the cost control issue in the mid-to-late noughties.
And recent events haven’t got us any closer to an answer. We remain in the midst of a global economic slump with its knock-on impact on advertising and the like. But there is plenty that F1 has done all by itself. Most notably the collapse of previous cost control via FOTA and the Resource Restriction Agreement; Ferrari and Red Bull cutting and running out of self-interest. And starting a new and costly arms race which Mercedes eventually resolved it had little choice but to join if it wanted to win.
That the majority of the sport’s revenues goes off to CVC never to be seen again doesn’t help, neither does the curious lack of sponsorship on many of the cars, even allowing the consideration outlined above. That even a team as prestigious as McLaren hasn’t been able to attract a title sponsor to replace Vodafone is likely highly indicative.
Then there’s the fact that the wealth that is there is hideously skewed to the few at the top. To illustrate, Ferrari based on 2013 got $171m in result money; Red Bull $162m. Lotus – despite being about as competitive as Ferrari – got a princely $65m. Indeed it’s not all that much more than Caterham gets, at $40m (if it qualifies by finishing in the constructors’ top ten two years out of three).
So little to do with merit, and is in large part because the Enstone squad doesn’t benefit from a bonus independent of its constructors’ placing, that the ‘big five’ of the Bulls, Ferrari, Mercedes, McLaren and Williams get. The wedge given to Ferrari and the Bulls just for being them is particularly wide. Board seats for the two have also been mooted. And they just happened to be the ones who as mentioned cut and run from the previous settlement. Almost like it’s all a coincidence. And now with the Strategy Group the rules are in large part framed by this select band of teams too.
This move outlined by Parr for 2015 almost has a logical conclusion about it of a sport that allows the few at the top to carve things up for its own benefit, and to pull the ladder up as it does so. It’s hardly a surprise therefore that a few at ground level are under risk of withering away.
And the ‘solution’ (a term I use advisedly) that Bernie Ecclestone and a few others seem to find alluring, and have done for months and years, is simply to allow the teams at the bottom to fall off the back, or else for them to change utterly. For a long time it was expressed in the form of requiring those at the back to buy chassis rather than build them, perhaps as effective B teams. But another bad idea that has lingered in spite of itself is that of the bigger teams running three cars each, and the rest go hang. Now apparently it’s back with a vengeance.
It seems to me an extreme misdiagnosis, simply adapting to the symptoms of illness rather than seeking a cure. And most probably adapting in a way that will only exacerbate the said illness in the long run.
Some are sanguine about the prospect of three-car teams, indeed Tony Dodgins for one reckoned that more cars from the top squads would make the sport more competitive. And taking F1’s full expanse of history three-car teams are hardly unheard of. To take an extreme example BRM fielded no fewer than five in 1972. I’ve heard others claim it’ll help deserving drivers get into F1 as well as into competitive rides.
Possibly so (though as Johnny Herbert pointed out three-car teams this season likely would have given us Mercedes podium lock-outs most times). But F1 needs to be careful what it wishes for.
As is often the case in such matters ideally a balance would be struck. F1’s supposed to be the elite after all. It should be difficult, and only the fighting fit should be in there. We can hark back to 1989 when there was 39 cars trying to get on the grid, but as Martin Brundle noted a lot of them were rubbish. Embarrassing rubbish. And in some cases dangerous rubbish (just ask Perry McCarthy about some of his adventures in the Andrea Moda three years later). Similar goes in my view for the 1970s when anyone with £20,000 in the bank and fancying a jape could go Grand Prix racing like it was F3 or something.
But it seems we now have already gone way too far in the opposite direction of making the sport a closed shop. The dangers of this are manifold.
One risk of course is that it could freeze the sport’s competitive order. The prospect of a Frank Williams or Eddie Jordan being able without a manufacturer basis or else another seam of gold to build from nothing all the way to the top step of the podium has long been a virtual impossibility.
There also seems to be a potential thin end of the wedge about this, in that it vastly increases the grid numbers’ volatility and the associated risk to the sport. ‘Eight teams of three cars’ noted Brundle in Monza, ‘does that become six teams of four cars after two years? Because somebody’s going to lose, somebody’s going to run out of interest and money. It’s a slippery pole, at that point you’re going down.’
Then, Brundle went on, there is the peculiar case of Red Bull company which owns two of the teams: ‘If you end up with say six teams of four cars, and somebody like Red Bull with Toro Rosso decides their marketing spend should be somewhere else now, you’d lose eight cars off the grid. Ideally you’d want 12 or 13 teams with two cars that are healthy.
‘And even in a front-running team somebody’s going to be last. We’ve seen Toyota, Honda pull out, BMW disappeared. We need to be really careful.’
Brundle is correct that excluding the sport’s enthusiastic entrepreneurs and independent entrants to the benefit of manufacturers and sponsor-owned teams is a highly risky game. As the former band is the sport’s lifeblood, the ones that will continue for as long as they are able. Whereas without seeking to be contentious for companies such as Red Bull, Mercedes, Honda and others – as we have seen before frequently – the decision to quit would be a brutal and instant one. As Jackie Stewart noted on such things a few years ago: ‘the decision won’t come from their trackside personnel, but from the Board of Directors. There’s no racing passion there. It will be a straightforward and cold-blooded decision.’
Jordan, one who is not prone ordinarily to disagreeing with Bernie, summed it up: ‘This is a typical Bernie situation, I’m sorry I really am at odds with him over this’ he said in Singapore. ‘These three teams at the back…to single them out I think is disrespectful and it doesn’t show them the support that they should be getting from Bernie at this moment. The manufacturers, they’re the people who have left continually in Formula One days, and I think the private wholly-owned teams by supporters and people like I was myself, now is the time that people should come together and support those people.’
And most of all it’s hard to imagine that even were you to cut the top teams’ budgets substantially, perhaps even by half, that many of those watching on would notice. Indeed I vaguely recall at the time that Mosley was seeking his apparently swingeing £40m budget cap a few years back that it wasn’t too far off the budget at which Williams won championships in the mid-1990s. It’s hard to argue that to the naked eye the F1 product was noticeably weaker at those spending levels.
Far better than adapting to the symptoms would be to treat the illness. The sport’s shortcomings in raising revenue, in distributing it evenly as well as in splurging it every direction would be a good place to start.
When the F1 skewed wealth distribution (outlined already) is compared with those of sports that enjoy healthy growth such as the major American ones as well as Premiership football, the difference is striking. In the latter last season the team of the 20 at the bottom of the money list (Cardiff) got about two-thirds of the TV and prize pot that the team at the top of the pile (Liverpool) did, even though were it purely a matter of TV audiences the ratio in Liverpool’s favour would be pushing 6 to 1. In short, such healthy sports appear to have realised that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and allowing those at the bottom to fall over the edge is viral.
So what can be done? Getting the teams to agree on a different settlement would be near-impossible. It would fall foul of getting turkeys (in this case Ferrari, Red Bull – and Toro Rosso, natch – and perhaps Mercedes) to vote for an early Christmas. And even without this F1 is so dysfunctional and the teams so focussed on self-interest that they can rarely agree on what day of the week it is, let alone on anything important.
Bernie of course isn’t likely to dismantle a deal that he spent a good while constructing, and as mentioned his attitude to it all appears rather Darwinian (possibly because his contract with the FIA reportedly requires a minimum of 20 cars, and three-cars teams and/or customer cars is a simple way of ensuring it). So that leaves the sport’s third power base of the FIA.
But under Jean Todt’s command that avenue hasn’t always looked promising either, as Todt presidency had been, in Jonathan Noble’s words, ‘typified by the following of procedure and a shying away from confrontation.’ Indeed Todt’s predecessor Mosley a few months ago criticised the Frenchman for not taking a stronger stance on matters of controlling cost.
‘Sometimes you’ve got to be a bit confrontational’ Mosley said. ‘Back in 2003, when the teams would not agree about costs, I just said “we’re just going to stop the qualifying engines and qualifying cars and we’re going to have a parc ferme at six o’clock”. The teams went berserk, but it was the right thing to do and now people agree about not having qualifying cars and engines.
‘At the moment, maybe he’s (Todt’s) a little bit too reluctant to confront. He seeks consensus, (and) it’s good to have consensus, but sometimes you’ve got to get them to just do something.’
So, are we in an impasse? Locked on to the course of our fate? I had been worrying as much, but we’ve had in recent days evidence that, finally, after a few years in the job Todt might just be learning from his predecessor.
This was in his recent moves clamping down on driver coaching via the radio. Todt – this time with Bernie’s support – rather out of character simply faced the teams down. And his imposing of an extreme solution thus forcing the teams to either lump it or negotiate a more sensible settlement but with the fundamentals of what Todt wanted in tact (and in the end they went for the latter) was classic Mosley.
Might Todt be building himself up for the biggest battle? We can but hope.
