The one change F1 needs to make

Make no bones about it: Formula 1 stands on the brink of perhaps its greatest upheaval for a while. The calls for a big change in the sport are now deafening, and from all quarters of the paddock there is talk about a need to react better to the challenges that F1 is facing before it's too late.

Whatever the outcome of Bernie Ecclestone's trial in Munich, there are more and more suggestions that his era of control over the sport is coming to an end - and perhaps even with his blessing.

That prospect means the thoughts of many people in the paddock are already focused on what will be done differently when there is a new man, or a new committee - or even a certain energy-drinks company - pulling the strings in F1. Such steps could be just a few months away. But while the timeframe of this happening is anyone's guess, what is agreed is that things can't stay the way they are.

On the one side, F1 seems unable to save itself from unsustainable costs. After months of discussions by the top teams, and suggestions from FIA president Jean Todt that a bag of proposals on offer from teams were a "joke", the best brains in the sport announced a raft of measures that saved pretty much nothing for next year.

Is Ecclestone's era coming to an end? © LAT

Reductions in testing, windtunnel time, CFD use and parc ferme will at best save a couple of million pounds per season. And will those savings be returned to the teams' shareholders to shore up competitors' financial health? Probably not; they'll be spent on car development, therefore achieving a cost benefit of approximately zero.

But having failed to agree on change where it's so desperately needed, teams have managed to shake things up in areas where there hasn't really been a problem in the first place. Just months after the furore caused by double points, and teams refusing to listen to criticism about it, F1 is now heading towards standing starts after safety-car periods, and sparking cars.

The committed fans don't like what is coming and, while the casual observer who tunes in occasionally may delight at the prospect of more chances of crashes after safety-car restarts, such change is not the magic bullet that's going to turn around declining audience figures.

As one senior F1 figure suggested last week, such tweaks are the equivalent of using a plaster for a broken leg. The change that F1 needs is huge - and goes beyond any gimmicky rule rewrite. F1 needs to be run in a different way if it's going to have any hope of improving.

When you sit back and analyse why F1 has found itself stuck in a rut, it's not the rules that are the problem: it's how they get framed. Having a structure where the commercial-rights holder is entirely separate from the body that frames the rules is not ideal. Add to the mix the fact that the teams get a say, and it becomes impossible to ever plot a radically different path.

No other sport allows its participants such a say in the way that rules are laid down. Could you imagine FIFA trying to get approval from Uruguay, Italy, England and Brazil about tweaking some football rules amid the heat of competition of the World Cup?

F1's system of team approval worked in the past because either the FIA or FOM was more willing to be confrontational in pushing for something they thought was for the good of everyone. They knew how to save the teams from themselves.

There was a time too when the teams were more united - which left them more open to accepting the greater good. Now though, with a spending war at the front of the grid, it's every man for himself: and those squads that have a say care only about themselves.

So here is a solution that would sort out a lot of F1's problems: teams sacrifice their right to have any voice in the rules in exchange for a bigger and more evenly shared slice of the F1 commercial-income pot.

The teams will be happier on the financial front, and the FIA, in consultation with the commercial chiefs, can put in place a better way forward for F1.

An improved F1 is a win for everyone.