Formula 1's definition of insanity

Formula 1 appears to have had a bit of an Einstein moment. Sadly, it's not something truly genius that's going to help the sport suddenly find a solution to turn around what many believe is a popularity crisis. Instead, I'm talking about one of (allegedly) Einstein's most famous quotes: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

That is in effect what F1 has done in creating a new working group with some teams, Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore to look at ways to make the sport more popular. You don't have to be too clever to realise that asking the very same team bosses who backed a hugely detested idea like double points to solve F1's current ills 
is unlikely to generate anything of much note.

If the teams are the right people to come up with the answers, then why haven't they done so already through 
F1's Strategy Group?

Why is Ecclestone the man to come up with the solution? He has openly poured scorn on social media, which is perhaps the biggest single route to opening up fresh ways 
to engage with a younger and wider audience.

And then we have, more controversially, Briatore's involvement. While there is benefit in having input from someone without a vested team interest, should F1 be embracing a man who was banished from the sport for his involvement in fixing the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix?

So if it's not the teams, Ecclestone or Briatore who have the answer to F1's falling audience figures, then who should it be? Well, they are sitting right in front of every single person on the pitwall: it's the fans.

F1's on-track product has been exciting during 2014 © LAT

One of the key elements for any successful business in the world is to understand its customers - if you know what they want, it's much easier to give it to them. F1 is astonishingly guilty of not only failing to give fans what they want but not even knowing what they are after. It's remarkable that F1 has entirely failed to do a widescale market research campaign of its followers - both in the grandstands and those that watch on TV - to try to understand what it should be doing.

I caught up recently with former FIA president Max Mosley, and he stated that it was incredibly frustrating that F1 didn't know what its fans really wanted. "What irritates me about the commercial side of F1 is that they all blow off about the noise, Bernie [Ecclestone], Luca [di Montezemolo] etc, but nobody does any market research," he said.

"It must be the only major world activity where nobody understands about market research. For example, the first thing you do if you are worried that the punters are going to be upset about the noise is to ask them. It doesn't cost very much; if 98 per cent of the people who went to Silverstone said it was a disaster because it was so quiet, well, then you need to think.

"Then you can go off and increase the noise. But nobody knows for definite, because nobody has ever asked them. Just because Bernie and Luca think it should be noisy, and 
a few of the old hands do, doesn't mean it should.

"You're trying to get the 18-to-20-year-olds interested, not the 80-to-90-year-olds."

F1 has spent too much time in recent months trying to find answers for problems that don't exist - resulting in double points and standing restarts - and doing nothing in areas where things have to change: like a coherent social media policy to bring F1 to a new generation of fans.

And ultimately the problems are more of where F1's culture has taken it - because what happens between 
the lights going out and the chequered flag is far from 
a problem. How can anyone not be excited by what happened on track in Hungary last Sunday?

F1's failures relate more to a lack of a coherent marketing strategy to promote the sport. It needs to improve fan interaction, make drivers true stars again, ramp up the characters and controversy that fuels the passion - and makes every young boy and girl want to be a part of the sport and follow it religiously.

But until F1 wakes up to the fact that it needs to go out there and ask those who watch it - and even those who don't - for their opinion on what they really want, it can't hope to come up with the solutions that are needed.

To think otherwise is insanity.