Team Bosses to Discuss Silverstone with Ecclestone

Team bosses will try to persuade Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone to keep the British Grand Prix on the calendar at a meeting on Friday, however BAR boss David Richards warned today that their powers of persuasion would be limited.

"There's a meeting tomorrow of the team principals and Bernie and I'm sure it will be an issue for discussion," Richards told Reuters at Interlagos. "The teams do not have the influence of where we race that one might assume we do. The commercial rights are completely with Bernie Ecclestone and his companies and he determines where the races take place.

"Yes, we can obviously talk to him and try and persuade him but the reality is ...it's his decision alone."

Ecclestone said on Tuesday the race, listed provisionally on the 2005 race calendar, would be axed after an apparent breakdown in negotiations with the circuit's owners, the British Racing Drivers' Club.

"I've bent over backwards to keep the race going and can only conclude that the BRDC don't really want to promote it," he told reporters. "It looks certain that there will not be a British Grand Prix in 2005."

Lawyers today said that Ecclestone was also suing BRDC president and former world champion Jackie Stewart for libel for comments he had made in a BBC radio interview.

"I'm obviously very disappointed that the whole situation seems to have degenerated into a personal war of words," said Richards. "The British Grand Prix is important not just to the teams but to the British motorsport public.

"We owe it to them to have a British Grand Prix somehow and I sincerely hope this whole situation can be resolved. I think we have got to find a way...of breaking the deadlock."