Why Liberty is ready to fight for its 2021 vision

Just as turkeys don't vote for Christmas, so too Formula 1 teams are never enthused about getting behind rule changes that will wipe away any advantage they may have.

It is little wonder, then, that Liberty Media's push for an overhaul of F1 from 2021 that is intended to level the playing field has met with its fair share of resistance so far.

Some of the boldest of visions to shake things up have indeed been erased in the name of compromise. A major change to the turbo-hybrid engine rules has fallen away, and the budget cap level of $175million, once the exceptions have been weaved in, effectively means that only the top three teams are affected.

But as the first proper glimpse of the ideas that form the basis of a 2021 car emerged earlier on Wednesday, it is clear from F1's chiefs that there is one thing they will not be compromising on: placating the teams in areas where it means the racing will be hurt.

Both Liberty and the FIA knew heading into discussions with teams about the rules overhaul that it was always going to get to a point where the desires of the teams were in conflict with the desire for changes to make the show better.

After all, it is the job of a team to create the perfect car, easily lock out the front row of the grid, roar on to a comfortable one-two and have the championship wrapped up nice and early so work on the following year's car doesn't get delayed.

But motor racing thrives on being unpredictable. One of the key messages that has driven Liberty's vision for 2021 is of having a grid where a midfield team, on a day it gets everything right, has a shot of upsetting the form book and winning a race.

And it is Liberty's awareness that F1 needs to become better, closer, more thrilling and bigger that is driving its bosses with ever-greater conviction that the revolution must not be compromised.

It is F1's recent history of bad decisions, short-term thinking, teams' vested interests and the chase for money over everything else that has left F1 in a difficult place right now. There has been no grand master plan to get F1 to where it is today, but it has ended up with a pretty dire spectacle at times.

This is why 2021 offers such a golden opportunity. F1 can start with a clean canvas and come up with rules for a reason.

Self interest is rampant, whether it's the big outfits trying to maintain their edge, or smaller teams eager to not lose out in areas where they think they can excel

As F1's managing director of motorsports Ross Brawn said: "The cars we have now and the way we race now has not had, in my view, a lot of structure behind it. The decisions and the direction that have evolved were mainly due to political pressures.

"I have heard some comments from the teams about the things we are doing but I have to say, why is it [that] where we are today is a holy position and should not be changed? My view is it is the wrong position for lots of the reasons, and this is the first step to putting it to a much better place in F1."

One thing Brawn is clear on is that there is no room for rose-tinted-glasses talk about F1 winding the clock back and trying to recapture the glories of the past. It's why suggestions of reverting to V8 engines get short shrift.

"The confrontation and revolution that would have to take place to go back that far would be too damaging to F1," he said. "So we have to work around some constraints we have now. That is the commercial reality, but we can do an awful lot better job than we are doing now.

"We are tackling it on every front: financial, revenue, race format, the type of cars we have and in the main the teams recognise what needs to be done. We are bound to get little outposts of objections, because they will get frustrated that things they have been able to do in the past they won't be able to do in the future. But I think we will come out of this in a much better place.

"We have to be selective in our judgement. When we see the teams' comments are genuine and not because they want to preserve an advantage, we are open enough to admit we made a mistake and go back on it" Nikolas Tombazis

"It needs the whole team side of things to be much more viable, we need closer grids - which we believe will entertain fans a lot more - we need cars that can race each other and circuits [that are conducive to overtaking]."

Of course, an unpredictable F1 that is immensely close and risks big outfits being relegated to the back if they make the slightest mistake is not something that will delight everyone in the pitlane.

And this is the key battleground now between Liberty and the FIA on one side and the teams on the other. Self interest from teams is rampant, whether it is the big outfits trying to maintain their advantage, or smaller teams eager to not lose out in areas where they think they can have an edge.

F1's head of single-seater technical matters Nikolas Tombazis said: "There are plenty of aspects that the teams are pushing back on, especially depending on where on the starting grid they lie and that influences their positions.

"Also within teams not everybody sees it the same way; sometimes you have the team principals who have an overall view of the situation and understand what we are doing, and then sometimes the engineers see that some of the freedom or playground will be reduced and therefore object.

"But we have taken a lot of comments into account and have been discussing this with teams over a long period, and sometimes we have realised that certain things we were planning to do were wrong, and we have changed and taken them into account.

"We have to be selective in our judgement and when we see the teams' comments are genuine and not because they want to preserve a certain advantage but are highlighting a weakness of what we are doing, we are open enough to admit we made a mistake and go back on it."

But some of the team's arguments have been quickly batted away. Brawn revealed how an office quiz at FOM headquarters in London has put a lie to claims that F1 will lose its magic if teams are not allowed enough innovation to do their own thing and create different looking cars.

"There are complaints that all the cars are going to look the same and the other nonsense we have heard," he explained. "So as an exercise, Pat [Symonds] took all the existing cars and took the livery off them and put them up [on a wall].

"You cannot tell the difference between the cars we have now once the colours are taken off them. You need to be an extreme geek to pick them out, and even within our office we managed to pick three out! So when you see the existing cars with the colours taken off, you wouldn't know.

"We know with these very proscriptive regulations, the fertile minds of F1 will come up with different solutions. [The rules] will be proscriptive because we have to make sure we achieve these objectives, but there is enough latitude there.

"Undoubtedly from the relative freedom that the teams have had so far, it is going to be frustrating but if they can take the approach that, 'These regulations are the same for everyone and if we will do a better job than anyone else, we just won't be two seconds faster we will be two tenths faster', then that is what we want in F1."

There is no doubt F1 is going to be very different from 2021, and some teams are not going to like it. But, if the spectacle is better and the championship becomes more popular as a result, then everyone will be a winner.