Dodgy Business

The Formula One manufacturers have gone very quiet. What was it they said they wanted post-2007? A more equitable distribution of F1's revenues and greater transparency; perhaps some input into the technical direction; and a bit more rule stability.

Well you can't win 'em all, but FIA president Max Mosley was clearly prepared to give a little. Zilch money chaps, I'm afraid, but stability by the bucket load. How about homologated engines you can't change for three years! Now go try spending to the bottom of those pits you call pockets.

Good slap-stick, this. You could picture Messrs Thiessen and Haug in the stocks, gloop dripping from their chins as Mosley rammed home the sixth custard tart. All we needed was a guffawing Stuart Hall and the Belgians playing their joker. Which is not going to happen now, considering that after Eddie Merckx it was always Spa-Francorchamps...

I've got to admit, I expected much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But nothing. Silence from the GPMA camp. I put in a call to see if anything was going on. They are not about to respond to everything that Max comes out with, apparently. He seems to like the barrage of headlines, they said, but they don't.

The hope is that they can agree a workable commercial deal with Bernie Ecclestone before recruiting his help to prevail upon Max in negotiating something everyone is happy with without the need for a huge fight. But the FIA feels no need to negotiate. It's their train set. The manufacturers can play with it if they like. Or they can do one.

Who knows whether Mosley is being inflammatory for the sake of it, having a bit of a laugh before moderating his position? It wouldn't be the first time. But much of what he says makes sense.

When the major manufacturers are spending a billion dollars a year between them on engine development, clearly things are getting a little out of hand. But then they will point out that F1 generates roughly the same in revenue and that a wholly disproportionate amount flows in the direction of one man, Mr BC Bolt.

Max is right when he differentiates between an independent team and the manufacturers. For the former, racing is its core business and for the latter F1 is a marketing tool. Manufacturers will use F1 for as long as it suits them but then disappear. Which should be no problem. But today, such is the scale of their involvement that a withdrawal inevitably does cause trouble.

The waters are muddied, too, by the kind of amalgamation of specialist teams and manufacturers, such as McLaren and Mercedes and, latterly, Sauber and BMW. It is not inconceivable that a team could continue to exist beyond a manufacturer withdrawal, as they always used to, but today the picture is much more complex and complicated further by the sheer numbers involved.

It's a point that David Richards made when I rang him to talk about Prodrive's F1 plans.

David Richards at the Autosport Show © LAT

Richards is renowned as one of the shrewdest operators in the business. He agrees that F1 has to be slimmed down if it is to be sustainable.

"The figures have to add up," he says. "As an example, when I was at BAR (2002-2004) the staffing level was around 360 and didn't move, but today I gather it's 560."

And there lies the problem. Mosley has recently talked about the need to make F1 accessible to new blood, even mentioning the idea of some kind of promotion/relegation system using GP2 as a feeder series.

But only last year in Monza, Mosley told me, while discussing the need for a decent post-'07 F1 blueprint: "You know, I worked out that on average GP2 costs 0.87% of a Formula One budget and the question is, is F1 a hundred times better?"

That, in a nutshell, sums up the sport's predicament. Formula One is so far removed from any other branch of the sport as to make any form of interaction, promotion/relegation, entirely unworkable. What are you going to do with 500 people if you find yourself in GP2?

It's a similar problem that UK Premiership football managers face when they are relegated. Suddenly there's no Sky TV money, they can't afford their players' wage bills, they all move on and it's a downward spiral. Which is why they all say they'd rather not win promotion to the Premiership until they feel ready. In order to compete, you have to spend, and then if you don't succeed, you go belly-up. In motor racing it's the same conundrum but 100 times worse.

Some might say tough, it's the law of business and it's the risk you take if you want to play with the big boys. Nobody is forcing anyone to go F1. Which is a view, certainly, but not one I agree with.

Formula One should be a sport and not a marketing exercise. It's about people; drivers. We want to know who is the best. Sure, it's nice to have freedom in as many different areas - engines, tyres, etc., but that means expense and it's not entirely necessary. So long as the things are quick, noisy and spectacular, the fastest form of racing there is, and entertaining, TV and media exposure will do the rest.

I love the little nuances thrown up by a tyre war but given the money frittered on tyre testing, it's probably an indulgence out of all proportion. Grudgingly I have to admit that a control tyre is probably a sensible move. But you need to save money in all areas, not just one. So Mosley's engine restrictions also make sense.

But, restrict tyres, restrict engines, limit chassis innovation and what do you do? You place greater emphasis on the man in the cockpit. That's good, surely. But then what happens? Your Schumachers, Alonsos and Raikkonens will command $100 million in a free market.

So how do you get around that?

Well, a few years ago Mosley was laughed at when he suggested that drivers should rotate teams during the season. If you're talking about a clean sheet of paper from 2008, then at the risk of holding myself up to ridicule, I can't for the life of me see what's wrong with that.

The problem at the moment is that everyone assumes Schumacher, Alonso and Raikkonen are the best drivers. But they don't know. If my life depended on answering correctly who was the better racing driver, Kimi Raikkonen or Jenson Button, I wouldn't feel comfortable. Ditto Webber, Trulli, Heidfeld. Success in F1 has always been car-driven and that's wrong. So why not address it?

Michael Schumacher (Ferrari), Fernando Alonso (Renault), Kimi Raikkonen (McLaren-Mercedes) racing in the 2005 Japanese Grand Prix © LAT

How?

Drivers, instead of being employed by a team, are employed by 'Formula One.' They qualify for a place by, say, finishing in the top two in GP2, or winning a European F3, Formula Nippon, CART or IRL title. If those drivers don't want to play for whatever reason, fair enough, their place goes to the next guy down.

They all receive a reasonable and equal F1 'salary' having qualified into the series, but the race and championship prize money is substantial. So you get a beaming Michael Schumacher receiving his cheque for a million bucks from Ron Walker and the head honcho of Fosters as he wins in Melbourne.

And then at the end of the season, amid great fanfare, the champion waltzes off with his cheque for $10 million. And the bottom five or six is relegated. They can then go back to GP2 to try and re-qualify or earn a decent living driving for a manufacturer in a touring car programme.

The system should ensure that the best driver and the best team win the championship. Okay, a team might have a puncture or something at the race they've got Michael but, over a season, things should even out.

Whenever this has been vaguely mentioned in the past, it's always been scornfully dismissed as unworkable, not 'Formula One.' Nobody seems interested, which is odd, because it's the opposing reaction that you get from fans, even some of those working in the F1 business. They feel a little embarrassed at being naive enough to waste breath on such a thing but they don't really know why they're being naive.

It's not an attractive idea to the top teams because they have the financial muscle to buy the best drivers, so it takes away one of their advantages. The top drivers don't like it because they are already paid squillions without the need to necessarily win anything, on the back of having perhaps done so in the past by dint of a superior car. And the commercial people don't want it because they like to build marketing programmes around 'name' drivers or nationality associations.

But they still could. If a manufacturer employed none of the drivers, the manufacturers would be free to do personal deals with whichever driver they so chose to advertise their wares in whichever country. The biggest spenders could then generate the best advertising/marketing campaigns but they wouldn't be able to buy success on the track. Which is how it should be and would bring motor racing more into line with other personal achievement sports such as tennis and golf.

You'd have your transparency because you could publish major money earner lists, like tennis and golf, and you could operate a similar prize money scheme for the teams. It could work so that the successful ones would make a healthy profit (in conjunction with a sensible distribution of the F1 revenue) while the duffers struggle. Sponsors would naturally gravitate towards the more successful teams, as always.

In terms of news and media value to the sport, a bit of innovative thinking could work wonders. For example, without a major change in the regulations it's safe to assume that the championship-winning team will be there or thereabouts the following year. So, this year, Michael Schumacher would drive the Renault in Germany, Fernando Alonso would drive it in Spain, Jenson Button would drive it at Silverstone, Takuma Sato would drive it in Japan, Mark Webber would drive it in Melbourne, and so on.

That would mean a much greater chance of the local hero winning his home race and, correspondingly, you'd have more people flocking through the gates and so, more revenue. It would also mean huge, and deserved, exposure benefits for the constructors' champions.

Consider it antipasti for racing drivers © LAT

You could even have an FA Cup-style draw after each race to decide the remainder of the line-up for the next event. That would keep the sport in the headlines in the fallow weeks between races and generate more ticket sales and TV interest. Kind of: Our pundits tell you why Kimi will beat Michael at McLaren next week!

There would obviously be a bit of scope for mischief too. Say, Webber and Alonso are spitting razor blades because they've taken each other off, they could miraculously be drawn as teammates for the next race. That sort of thing. The marketing men would obviously whinge because they'd want to know well in advance who was driving what, where, but then you just have to sit down and work out what's more important. Is it sport or is it marketing?

As for the promotion/relegation system for teams, you could do one of two things. Either you accept that F1 is effectively a closed-shop franchise for the people who are in at the start (the rotation system would work well with 10 teams and 20 races, for example, because each driver would drive twice for each team during the season). Then, as now, if a team wanted out or was struggling, a manufacturer or a Dietrich Mateschitz-type entrepreneur could buy it.

Or, if costs could be cut sufficiently, probably in stages to prevent mass redundancies, to the point where, say, F1 was ten or fifteen times more expensive than GP2 instead of a hundred times more, you could look at a system where the bottom team was relegated to GP2. Perhaps to start with, you'd say the bottom team on aggregate over a three-year period, while costs were brought down.

You would then offer promotion to the top GP2 team over the same period and, as part of the promotion package, they would receive a substantial proportion of a first year operating budget and be allowed to buy a customer car for a set period of time if they were not in a position to manufacture one. What would tend to happen is that the staff now surplus to the relegated team would gravitate towards the promoted one.

Okay, in practice it's not ideal, especially if the relegated and promoted teams are from different countries. Motor racing people, like everyone else, have children in schools, family ties and so forth, but the reality is that much of the racing industry is grouped together in pockets in the same places and the writing would be on the wall for long enough. The problems need not add up to anything greater than the general up and downscaling in any industry.

The purists, of course, bang on about the sport and its tradition. They talk about artificiality and about how racing used to be. But I'd argue that a 'sport' that doesn't always reward the best is far more artificial. And racing has never been more competitive than it is today. Was it better when you had a field of Cosworth V8s taking on a handful of twelves?

But just because F1 is competitive doesn't mean that it can't be improved. The very concept of paying drivers in F1 is nonsense and would disappear with the rotation system. And to hell with tradition. Just because something has been wrong for the past 50 years doesn't mean it has to be wrong for the next 50.

Just as you don't want one man taking all the dough, you don't want the World Spending Championship either. But you do want equal opportunity for drivers.

You can appreciate that Mosley upsets the manufacturers when he appears to fly in the face of time scales laid down in the rules by finding clever ways around them. It can be both infuriating and embarrassing at corporate level if you're a man responsible for wholesale spending on something outlawed by the stroke of a pen.

If that's what the manufacturers want to eliminate by better transparency and some technical input, then it's fair enough. But they shouldn't be writing the rules.

And Mosley's right, the sport should not be frightened to innovate. A clean sheet of paper is an exciting opportunity.