Joe senses that F1 is finally learning about fair play.
Suddenly, we’re several races into the season and (at the time of writing) Mercedes has yet to win a race. The score is Ferrari at two and Red Bull at one, while all three races have been really interesting – with an unlikely Ferrari win in Australia, and two very entertaining races in Bahrain and China. There will always be people who will say that it’s not exciting enough, but I reckon that we’ve had a great start and the signs are that we’ll have some more great races as the season develops.
Ferrari seems to be the most competitive car (as it was last year) and yet Mercedes leads the Constructors’ Championship by a point from Ferrari – proving, once again, that Ferrari needs a better second driver. And while all this is going on, we also have the makings of a revolution in the works – quietly – with the proposals put forward by Liberty Media for the commercial and technical future of F1. The key to this package is a budget cap at $150 million in 2021. The big teams will complain, of course, but it makes a huge amount of sense to limit spending, as this will show that the winners are the most cost-effective manufacturers and that has to be a selling point – just as crash-testing has become. There was a time when the manufacturers opposed crash-testing as well, but once it was forced upon them they began to see the advantages of it.
The Liberty proposals are very carefully thought out and make a lot of sense. I won’t go into a lot of detail (because it is a private and confidential document, and there is no ‘public interest’ justification in publishing the actual numbers), but the overall picture is very simple. All the bonus funds that existed previously, which were conceived to pay the big teams more money, will be axed. The money (nearly $250 million, if things go ahead as planned) will be spread amongst the teams – with the emphasis being on performance. This means that every team will get around $20-25 million in additional revenues. Obviously, one or two of them will lose money, but the proposal is clever in that it increases the revenues of the smaller teams and pushes the big teams into cost-cutting, which means that staff who will need to be cut by the big teams can switch to the smaller team – thus improving performance across the board and making the sport more interesting.
The real genius of the idea is that it offers the possibility for the big teams to get two teams for the price of one, which will mean that Ferrari and Alfa Romeo (sister companies) can work together and both brands will get exposure at about the same cost as what Ferrari spends right now. Mercedes will take a big hit in terms of bonuses, but it also has the option to follow the same trend and take over a team to become a Junior Team operation. At the moment, the company funds its young drivers by paying for their drives (or reducing the engine fees charged). If there were a ‘Junior Team’ (similar to Red Bull’s Toro Rosso), the team would have access to two flows of prize money, and would have twice the number of cars. There are possibilities relating to branding, as Mercedes has both the AMG brand and the new EQ electric car brand.
The problem that Mercedes has is that the proposals are broadly in line with what it wants from the sport, and so it’s struggling to argue from the point of view of self-interest. Ferrari is another matter. The team has always done what is best for Ferrari, rather than what’s best for the sport. It’s this endless pursuit of self-interest that has resulted in the team getting the bonuses – financial and political – that it enjoys. Is that right? Does Ferrari deserve to always have an unfair advantage over its rivals? In a purely sporting sense, the answer is no. Ferrari should compete on a level playing field, and if it doesn’t want to do that it should leave F1. There’s no philosophical reason why Ferrari should get extra money because of how long the team has been in the sport. That is not a sufficient justification for extra cash. If that was to be the case, then McLaren, Williams and Sauber should all be paid extra for being around for a long time. It’s a rubbish argument.
If Ferrari had confidence in its own abilities, it would play the game fairly. It has plenty of advantages from having been around a long time, notably in terms of licensing and merchandising – this is reward enough.
Ferrari chairman Sergio Marchionne is an odd fellow and he continues to bang on-and-on about how Ferrari must get more, or the company will leave F1. No-one in F1 wants to see it happen, but if that’s the price for having a fair sport, then it’s worth paying. Who wants to support a sport that’s skewed towards one player?
In the end, it makes no sense at all for Ferrari to quit F1. There’s no alternative that gets even vaguely close to what F1 offers Ferrari. If the company wants to disappear off to do something else, it will be sad, but the sport will survive as it’s survived the disappearance of any number of great marques over the years. Ferrari is special, but it isn’t THAT special. It’s far better to have a whole of bunch of new brands coming into the sport because it’s more cost-effective and fair.
Joe Saward has been covering Formula 1 full-time for 30 years. He has not missed a race since 1988.
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