Martin Brundle

I'm not sure there is an agenda from Bernie. You mean the London thing? He wasn't there. I didn't see him or any of his personnel involved. It was more driven by Harvey Goldsmith and the Regent Street retail group. They were the ones at the press conference and that's the way Harvey painted it.

I'm still, a few days later, thinking it through and working out the implications. Because if you can trundle eight Formula 1 cars down Regent St and get several hundred thousand people coming from all over the place, half of which never even saw a car...


No. I spoke to a lot of people. We were in among the crowd and there were people there from 10am. They were fans, they had team shirts on and they weren't people who happened to be wandering down Regent St that day. I spoke to about 300 of them and half of them didn't see a car and still thought it was brilliant. It was just incredible.

You've got to stop and think that, wow, that's the kind of interest level in Formula 1. Six million people watched our ITV show from Indianapolis and let's say, conservatively, 300,000 came to Regent St. There's 104,000 here at Silverstone on race day. There's a fantastic interest in F1. It is amazing and it makes you think that we've got to give them a better show and more access. Then how many would there be? They deserve more than they are getting.


Well it's not. I've always said that and nobody's ever really believed me. There'll probably be a 2005 Grand Prix but there might not be. That's how I see it anyway. I'm no longer in the controlling seat because I've stepped down now, so it's not in my power now to make anything happen.

But I'm massively frustrated that on Monday morning there's not bulldozers coming in to take this lot down [we are sat in the media centre opened by Ecclestone and Mrs Kay Brown in 1988]. Looking at the press office and seeing the zoo that's up here is embarrassing. It should have been going Monday morning. So I'm annoyed and frustrated about a lot of it. I think the London thing just underpinned the popularity of F1 and well done Bernie on that.


Realistically, the roads were virtually undriveable. I don't know what route they'd choose but they'd have to be resurfaced, and the place would be controlled for a full week unless it was in a park. Sometimes, with all the Silverstone stuff, you get frustrated and think, for goodness sake, just take it away. It'll stop all this misery and crap. You get fed up with it every year. It's just so predictable. And such nonsense. And there'll be a load of government people on the grid here pretending that they are interested in doing something about it.

But in the three years I've been involved in it, they've done nothing. Not at a high level. EMDA [the East Midland Development Agency] and the local council have been fantastic but there's a lot of bullshit goes on. At the end of the day maybe it needs to go for a little while so that people appreciate it a bit more and stop bitching about it.


Yeah. Why should we put up with this nonsense year in, year out? If they don't want it, take it away. If they do want it, then proactively help sort something out. If it's all about bundles of tens of millions more dollars in the bank, then I'm sure it'll have to come from somewhere else - another country. That's the tragedy of it. The revenue that comes in here and the pay-off that the BRDC are getting because Interpublic have run off from their Grand Prix contract and now their lease, well, a third of that goes straight to the tax man.


Yes. So around £9 million of that will go straight into the taxman's pocket, which leaves £18 million. We wasted £17.1 million that wasn't spent this year, which could have been.


Because it didn't get signed off back in January. And now it's fallen over. The final part of the masterplan has fallen over. It was actually going to look really good. I think it looked fantastic and was a bargain to a certain extent.


Well, now that Interpublic has gone, the masterplan that did the roads, the car parks and the general landscaping, toilets and tidying up has gone too. The final part was pits, paddock and media centre. So this lot should have been gone by the end of the week.


It's a story all by itself. But the masterplan, which we signed on December 19th, 2000, which has funded a lot of the changes, that's gone, along with the Interpublic deal. With it not being signed off, it let Interpublic off the hook from building it. End of story.


No, no. The whole mechanism is gone. It's over.


No. Absolutely, unquestionably, no.


For next year, no. Because you've got to order the steel in March and get the planning and all those kinds of things. To pull this lot down so that it would be back up again next May, gives you about six weeks leeway to find unexpected problems. You'd think there wouldn't be any because it's been rebuilt a couple of times over the years, but you've got to factor in things like finding a bit of soft ground, suffering extreme weather conditions, etcetera.

It's pretty tricky to get it all back up in time, plus all the logistical problems it gives the circuit. Because the circuit can't function. You've got to build temporary pits because you can't have a place like this not working for a year, because you've got races, testing, and it plays a pivotal role in British motorsport. You can't have Silverstone just die for a year. You can't just switch it on and off. It's a big job. And the other thing, of course, is that you would need to be sure of a race date. If we suddenly got an April date again and the place was razed to the ground... So, also needed, is the commitment to a later date.


I don't know. I honestly don't. You'd have to ask Ray Bellm [the new BRDC Chairman] or Jackie Stewart about that.


I don't know. I think there's a lot of water under the bridge over the years between the key players, so I think it's more likely to be historical stuff. There's no point going there. It's just not worth it.


I've got the same stance I've always had although the danger has been brought forward now by Interpublic's early exit. I always thought it would be reasonably secure until 2007. I now think it's probable that there will be a British Grand Prix next year, using the facility we've got now, but possibly not. There's a reasonable possibility that there won't be a British Grand Prix next year. We found a white knight in Interpublic, which came barrelling in and inherited a Grand Prix contract. Is there going to be another one of those out there? Unless you can get the numbers right it's virtually impossible. The cost base is too high for the potential revenue.


I hate these fag packet calculations. You can't do it like that. The revenue is relatively easy to guestimate but the costs are staggering. About a third of a million quid for the police. And the rates are staggering. The insurance. The security. The maintenance. And all of a sudden if you need two gravel traps turning into tarmac run-offs, it's a million and a half quid.

And maybe a security fence might need to go up by a metre at some stage. The downside financial risks are massive, because it's a big facility, and it pays all its dues. The stupid thing is that if it stops, all the money spent around here and the VAT on the ticket sales, has all gone. That's the really silly thing. The revenue for the region and the tax revenue if there's no British Grand Prix next year - gone. It's a no-brainer to me that they should be doing something more.


Yeah. But Regent St happened, didn't it? To be honest I was amazed. When I cruised up to the theoretical start line in an F1 car at the end of Pall Mall, I was simply amazed. It was surreal. Didn't seem possible. With that amount of people you cannot do anything other than take it seriously. I was taking to a lady and her daughter, who had a good spot, and they'd been waiting 9hrs and 20 minutes! To see a Formula 1 car depart, arrive back again and do a few doughnuts... And they were ecstatic. They loved it. And it had hardly any publicity.

I spoke to another guy, he'd been to Magny-Cours, gone home to Glasgow, and then come back down again. And he was going back home again to Glasgow that night! And then we were at a DC supporter's thing where 320 people turned up just to see David for 20 minutes. Of them, more than half had been to Regent St. That's the fanatical support for the sport.


There was no point. It's sold out... We've got to look after that kind of support.