Save us from ourselves, Formula 1 teams tell Liberty's Chase Carey

Carey says teams are spending so much purely to match their rivals, and the only way to tackle this is to tune the rules to reduce costs and stop unnecessary expenditure.

"What some of the teams spend on the sport today is an incredible amount, and they'll acknowledge it's an incredible amount," said Carey.

"To some degree they're saying, 'we need to be protected from ourselves.'

"There are a handful of teams that spend an extraordinary amount that aren't really spending to create something that enhances the consumer experience.

"What they're doing is spending because two other guys are spending it, so they've got to do it to compete with the other guys.

"And we want this to be healthier for all the teams, we'd like to be a healthy business for them."

Carey and F1 sporting chief Ross Brawn see the post-2020 engine regulations as the key to cutting expense.

In a recent meeting with the FIA and the four current F1 manufacturers - with Alfa Romeo and Volkswagen/Audi also represented - the basic format for what Carey called "simpler, cheaper, louder" engines was agreed.

Carey is adamant that technology plays too big a role at the moment, although he understands its significance to F1.

"On the track we'll do everything we can to make sure we're enhancing [F1], making the competition great, making the action great, improving passing and other things," he said.

"Let's not get too complicated, so fans can follow it.

"One of the things we keep saying to them is at the end of the day we're doing it for the fans, we're not doing it for the teams.

"We want first and foremost a simpler sport, sports entertainment, so you've got to make the entertainment great, and then enable fans to connect to it.

"The R&D part is an important part, we don't want to lose the engineering aspects of it, but it shouldn't dominate it.

"Niki Lauda keeps saying to me we've got to let the drivers drive."

The real significance of controlling costs to Carey and his colleagues is the bigger picture of revised distribution of income among the teams once the current Concorde Agreement expires in 2020.

He has made it clear that reducing what teams have to spend will help to justify a cut in what they are paid.

"Costs and revenues are all inter-related," said Carey.

"You have to deal with it in pieces, but you want to start with a focus on the whole.

So it's costs, revenue, rules, engines.

"We want to make the business of owning a team a much better business proposition for everybody.

"We think it's good for everybody, including us, to make the economics of owning a team much healthier. We're addressing that more holistically at this point."