Bernie Ecclestone will be 86 in October and there was an opinion voiced during the second grand prix of the season in Bahrain that – to amend Paul Simon – he might be crazy after all these years.
Formula One’s chief executive repeated his pre-season onslaught on the sport he is supposed to promote. “I got slaughtered because I said I wouldn’t buy a ticket for a Formula One race,” he said at the Sakhir circuit. “Which is true because I know full well before I go to the race who is going to be first, who is going to be second. What am I going to sit in the bloody grandstand for?”
In another interview he added: “We are not putting on a very good show. Imagine if people turned up to watch the Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger couldn’t sing and the others couldn’t play their instruments.”
He even took a swipe at the drivers, who are showing understandable concern about the lack of leadership in the sport and the chaos over qualifying; Friday has traditionally been a dead duck of a day for F1 fans and in the first two races, in Australia and Bahrain, Saturday was a waste of time, too. That leaves everyone hoping that Sunday will produce a good race – and it’s often a vain hope.
What Ecclestone has been saying is mostly true but why is he, of all people, slagging off his sport instead of attempting to defend it? The theory that he is running down the value in the hope that he can buy it back doesn’t make sense. Even Ecclestone’s billions don’t add up to enough to purchase F1 from CVC and the other shareholders.
Is he showing frustration because he no longer governs the sport he built up from obscurity to become a major global enterprise? This may be partly the case – the most powerful voices in F1 now come from Mercedes and Ferrari, who supply engines to eight of the 11 teams on the grid.
There is something else at play here, however. Ecclestone has individual contracts with the various teams and nothing can change much until 2020, when the deals run out. But something can change – the EU can tell Ecclestone and F1 to tear up these contracts and start again.
Ecclestone would love that. He said in Bahrain that the EU was “starting to get more and more interested in the anti-competitive way that we’ve got”, adding: “If the EU got really excited about it, they could look at it and say we have to tear up the contracts.”
Last September Force India and Sauber, both upset about the unfair way money is distributed among the teams, asked the EU competition authorities to take a close look at the sport’s governance. There is a whiff of a cartel in the air. That is dismissed by most people but there is still a very real concern that the leading teams, including Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull and McLaren, receive special treatment and extra payments because of their historic standing within the sport.
The big teams not only cream off most of the money but also have the biggest say when it comes to deciding how the sport is run – they sit alongside Ecclestone and the FIA on the strategy group.
Force India say they are waiting until the rules for 2017 are sorted out, which will happen in the next few weeks, before they return to the EU. “We’re not looking at moving that forward until the end of the month, until we’ve seen all the changes that come in and we know exactly where things are,” the deputy team principal, Bob Fernley, told Reuters this week.
“We submitted our complaint. The complaint has then gone to CVC [the biggest shareholders]. CVC have responded back [to the EU], which we have a copy of, and then we have to reply again to that final part of it,” Fernley added. “Then they’ll look at it. It’s going through the process.”
One thing is certain. Things cannot remain as they are for the next four years. Watch this space.
