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Former F1 driver Gerhard Berger stands down from FIA role

Gerhard Berger will stand down from his role as president of the FIA Single Seater Commission at the end of this year

The Austrian, who initially planned to take the helm of the Commission for one year when he was appointed in late 2011, told teams in the Formula 3 European Championship paddock at Hockenheim on Saturday night that he is standing down.

Berger was instrumental in the FIA's Euro F3 championship, which in 2012 piggybacked rounds of the F3 Euro Series and British F3 before becoming a championship in its own right in 2013.

He has also played a leading role in the push for FIA Formula 4, which began this year in Italy and spreads to several more nations and regions in 2015.

Berger always said he would stand down when a logical successor to continue his work in the same direction became available, although AUTOSPORT understands that no one is yet being named as a logical replacement.

AUTOSPORT says
Marcus Simmons, F3 correspondent (@marcussimmons54)

You can imagine that there were a few cynical eyebrows moving in an upward direction in the wake of Gerhard Berger's statement to the European F3 teams on Saturday night that he was standing down.

This was, after all, only a few hours after AUTOSPORT broke news that British F3 has hit the end of the road.

You can almost hear the muttering: "Now he's achieved what he wanted to, he's decided to stand down."

But that would be unfair. Berger was given the role by Jean Todt of sorting out the utter mess in which single-seater racing found itself, and he's certainly streamlined it.

After all, we now have a super-strong FIA F3 European Championship, while his Formula 4 concept has blown a gale-force wind of fresh air around the lowest rung of the ladder.

It's Berger's uncompromising style that has ruffled the feathers. He always stated publicly that he wanted national-level F3 to thrive, and indeed gave very strong messages of support at a recent summit meeting with leading lights from the organisation of British and German F3.

But what caused upset among those trying to run a cut-price national version of F3 was that he wanted them to run to the same technical regulations as European F3.

Even Berger admitted that he wasn't sure the national markets could sustain this - he's right, because British F3 couldn't even gain traction with its low-cost blueprint.

Berger didn't cause the death of British F3; in hindsight, it's arguably the teams who signed their series' death warrant when they reneged in 2008 on their deal to join the BTCC package.

We must never tear up history and tradition, but British F3 arguably did this when it started culling UK events for trips across the Channel in 2005.

Besides, if you agree with Trevor Carlin's comments about a possible British F3 revival in the future, then that would be down to Berger's FIA F4 concept in the guise of MSA Formula.

It won't be until we're a few years down the line that we know whether the changes put in place during the Berger 'Era of the Commission' have made a positive difference to the single-seater ladder, but many of the signs look good.

Read an in-depth feature on how the post-Berger era of single-seater racing in Europe is shaping up in this week's AUTOSPORT magazine, available on Thursday.

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