FOTA hopeful of greater revenue share

FOTA has already made big progress in working with the FIA to reduce costs in the sport, but its next target is to improve the amount of revenue that is distributed among the teams.

Di Montezemolo is making plans to meet with Ecclestone to discuss the matter and, speaking to selected media including autosport.com over lunch at Maranello, he said he felt upbeat about securing a deal.

"I'm quite optimistic," he said. "If we continue to work like this, we can achieve important results. In every company we have to cut costs. But also to increase the revenue.

"We need to work at that and we seek in the future to work it out with Bernie Ecclestone and (F1 owners CVC's Donald) MacKenzie. We have a contract with them until 2012 and we have to work and talk together. As soon as we have finished our plans with cutting the costs for the next three years, we start another book."

Di Montezemolo said that one of the priorities from the talks with Ecclestone will be in getting more transparency in how the sport's commercial income is distributed.

"In terms of revenue, we want to know more about them," he said. "Theoretically, like in other professional sports, like basketball in the USA, we can have a league made by us and appoint a good league manager to run our own business. Because it is our own business.

"We want to know the revenues better so we can decrease the cost of the tickets. Then we have the matter of traditional tracks rather than exotic tracks just because they have a nice skyline. We have to discuss the show. How to promote. I'm not prepared any more to have all this dictated to us by outside without any control."

He added: "I think in one way or another the players have to be more involved in the sport. Do you think it's normal that we don't have even one race in North America? Do you think it's normal that we find out Canada has been dropped by reading the newspaper?

"Do you think it's normal that we see important sponsors that we pay an unbelievable amount of money for hospitality to promote ourselves. Do you think it's normal we can't discuss when our races are held?

"This is not polemic. It is not a game. F1 is my life. We start from the (current financial) crisis, which if it doesn't last long, thank God for the crisis. Because finally it's made us take a step back. It's the only way to go back, to get our feet back on the ground."

FIA president Max Mosley wrote to teams earlier this year saying the governing body would push for teams to get an equal distribution of more of the revenue from the sport - which could end the long-standing arrangement of Ferrari getting a greater percentage of the income owing to their historical importance.