Formula one’s biggest teams should not be allowed to bully the sport’s new owners into financial arrangements that hurt the smaller squads, according to the former driver Johnny Herbert.
The 52-year-old Englishman, who drove for seven F1 teams, said the crucial issue facing Liberty Media was the distribution of payments across the teams. His comments came after Manor went into administration, becoming the third team to drop out of F1 since 2012.
Herbert said Liberty must stand up to any threats by the bigger teams to leave in order to ensure the smaller squads’ survival and ability to compete.
“The smaller teams in many regards are more important then the bigger teams,” Herbert said. “They are the heart and soul of the sport. Force India and Williams do a brilliant job. For the buck that they spend on a season they do a better job than Mercedes but they don’t win.
“To get that you need distribution of payments across the board. If the bigger teams don’t like it, and threaten to leave, Liberty would be right to put pressure on them. They would be doing it for the good of F1.”
The distribution of payments is weighted heavily in favour of teams such as Ferrari, who received an extra $105m above their performance fee in 2015. They finished second that year but topped the earnings table with $192m, more than double that of Williams, who finished third, and almost three times that of Force India, who were fifth.
The president of Liberty, Greg Maffei, has already suggested Ferrari’s bonus payments could be addressed for redistribution but the agreement with the teams is set to run until 2020. The Ferrari president, Sergio Marchionne, has warned that even bringing up a discussion of changes would be “unwise” and has already requested clarification of the plans for the sport beyond 2020.
Herbert, who drove for Sauber between 1996 and 1998, one of the threatened smaller squads who have lodged a complaint with the EU that the system is unfair competition, believes Liberty have the chance to ensure a stronger future for F1 by forcing a new financial model on teams such as Ferrari, Mercedes, Red Bull and McLaren.
“There has to be an element of facing them down,” he said. “For the investment Liberty have put in and for the growth they want the sport to give them they will have to confront those teams and put under them that pressure.
“Liberty have to oppose the teams and say we need to make this bigger and better. Getting the threats is something they will have to deal with because it is the only way to improve the whole pit lane.
“At the moment the smaller teams know they have no chance of winning and even with what Williams and Force India have done over the last few years they still know they are not realistically going to be able to win. This is a great opportunity to make a huge competitive battle for everybody on the grid.”
Maffei’s sentiments that Ferrari are already in a privileged position due to the amount of sponsorship the team attracts, were also echoed by the former president of the FIA Max Mosley. He told Sky Sports that, were it up to him, he would cut Ferrari’s bonus payment “immediately” because it gave the Scuderia an unfair advantage.
“The thing is Ferrari are always going to get more sponsorship than the other teams, so to give them the same money from the money you have control of, which is the Formula One Management money, it’s completely fair and then they get extra money because they are famous and because they have sponsorship,” he said. “But the fundamental problem is if you’ve got three times as much money as me you may as well have a bigger engine, you’ve got a huge advantage. That plays out in inequality between the cars and the drivers.”
Mosley was in favour of budget caps while in charge of the FIA and was insistent that without a change in the distribution of F1’s payments the smaller teams would always struggle. “You’re never going to make it work where you’ve got two or three teams with far more money than the rest. Apart from anything else, it’s very unfair,” he said.
