Drivers should be steering F1's future, not teams

OK. Enough loot has been spent already. Enough people have had their say. We have commissions and sub-commissions and strategy groups and advisory groups and all the usual Formula 1 fracas. It's fun to read about; it's fun to retweet. And it could be, by now, that Liberty Media actually does know exactly what it's bought - or why it bought it.

I doubt it, however.

Only Bernie Ecclestone knows the exact location of every brick in every F1 wall - and the constituents of the cement laid many years ago to glue them all together. And he's not telling anyone.

F1's a private club. Always has been, always will be. You can dress it up with Grid Kids and Formula E-derived circuits in Miami, swish open-plan offices in London and New York, and you can even spend vast amounts on shoring up some new races or sustaining the classic ones.

Ultimately, though, F1 will always be about the teams. That's what makes it different from any other sporting category on the planet. At the World Cup, the Olympics or Wimbledon it's the events that do the running. In F1, it's the competitors - the teams - that provide the flux. They have the cars, the drivers and the money. They have the power.

That's why it's so political in F1; that's why it's almost impossible to reach "democratic" decisions at any given F1 meeting. That's why F1 is so expensive and difficult to implement.

Depressed? Don't be. There's a solution. It isn't expensive (by F1 standards) and it isn't impractical (even in the afterburn of the Era of Ecclestone). And it doesn't require an autocrat to enact it.

So here it is: drivers.

Drivers are what F1 is ultimately all about, even though the power base currently lies with the teams. It's names like Senna, Prost, Mansell, Schumacher and Hamilton that bring - and have brought - the crowds through the gate and to the TV screens. Yes, Ferrari holds a special place in F1 folklore - but Ferrari is just one team among many big driver names. And you know the way it's going to end if Liberty goes the usual, predictable, F1 team brokerage route - if it tries to acquiesce to Ferrari's demands while simultaneously appeasing Mercedes, Red Bull and McLaren.

Correct. It'll be a mess - or, at best, a very, very expensive mish-mash of semi-compromise. So here's the thing: throughout his reign, Bernie's basic philosophy was to dumb down the drivers. At best, they added colour to the show and were expendable in usually spectacular ways; at worst, they cost money and complicated the TV schedules (at a time when they used to refuse to run owing to the absence of a safety helicopter or complain about the fog, etc).

That's why F1 has for the past 40 years forgotten its driver heritage - or shown any respect for its drivers in general. That's why the Grand Prix Drivers' Association has no say in circuit design or car development and paying drivers have become a part of the F1 norm.

Time for a clean sheet of paper. B Ecclestone in theory will no longer be casting his spell over F1. And Liberty have a new F1 logo! A new race day timetable! Flamenco dancers in the paddock! Cheerleaders in Austin!

In reality it is business as normal: let's play again with the cars and engines, chip away at "solutions" that will inevitably result in more money being spent in order to reduce budgets.

What Liberty should be doing is focusing completely on the drivers. We no longer need the constraints of an Ecclestone-era F1 team owners' club; the days of bankrupt team principals having to sign away their lives in order to exist disappeared with the sale of F1 in 2000. F1 is now bigger than that, even if its natural financial heritage did disappear with that aforementioned sale.

Now we need drivers. National heroes. New stars from the countries in which F1 races - and from the countries in which it thinks it might want to race in the future. Ecclestone's philosophy of driver development was that all drivers were replaceable - and that the next ones should come armed with a bag of gold. It was a bit like his approach to Formula 2 and GP3: the teams don't need a sponsorship platform because there will always be 50 or so indulgent fathers ready to pay the bills.

As a result, driver development for F1 has been left for the teams to manage. Some, like Renault, Mercedes, Red Bull and McLaren, do a half-reasonable job - and from such programmes, you could say, have emerged the Schumachers, Seb Vettel, Lewis Hamilton, Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen.

It's an incomplete system, however; too many talented drivers are left behind or signed to programmes because they "bring some money" or "fit the market in that region". And the teams can only run two drivers anyway. The system doesn't work on a global platform. There are no Chinese drivers in F1 - nor are there any from the USA, the rest of Asia, the UAE, India, Korea, South Africa or Spanish South America.

It stands to reason. If you want to unlock the door to the money in China - to the benefit of F1 as a whole - you'll have to have a couple of Chinese drivers in F1, in there with a chance of winning, driving for decent teams. We've had a great circuit in Shanghai for over a decade now but the evidence is clear: turning up for four days of complicated motor racing is never going to induce a cultural shift towards F1 in China.

The same goes for the US. We've raced regularly there for 60 years, yet F1's audience is tiny in relation to NASCAR. A race in Miami will help - but it won't help F1's profile there anything like as much as an American in a Mercedes, fighting for the title, would. The last frontrunning American was Mario Andretti - and he won his championship in 1978.

It's a no-brainer. Liberty Media wants lots of money to materialise from the world's biggest economies - and its expertise is creating stars on screen: Liberty should therefore own the new seam of drivers (not the teams). It should set up karting academies in all major markets and run a tailored system for driver progression through to F1, fully funded and legally binding. It will be expensive - but nothing like as expensive as building circuits and staging races in new markets, or trying to sell commodities no one wants because F1 has no profile in the countries in question.

And guess what? An international driver programme is in itself a great story to tell on TV - a dramatic new way to light the F1 fire in key but immature regions. As such, it will probably be self-funding. Best of all, a global F1 driver talent pool would provide Liberty with a whole new currency with which to deal with the teams, therefore changing forever the dynamics of the Ecclestone era and the F1 power base as we know it today.

The teams would own the cars. Liberty would own the stars.