Fernandes of 5 team future

[vintly]

When he is gone, it will come apart. 

Agreed. You can see it now. 'Hail a new dawn for F1 now the evil ringmaster is no more!" Then five years later a complete disaster with no one strong enough to keep the ship afloat, or worse still, a committee-run sham that's so busy nodding to pressure it forgets to race. Ugh.

I hope I'm proven wrong.

[Ian]

Don't we all Vintly.

[Irisado]

It will only come apart if they don't plan ahead and have a succession plan.  That does need to be worked on now.  The lack of progress on that issue is not an encouraging sign.

I refuse to respect Ecclestone though.  I can have no respect for someone who cares so much about his own bank balance, and so little about everyone and everything else.  What he has done for Formula 1 is also contested, since as much credit as can be given to him for giving the sport more exposure, and getting better television coverage over the years, the amount of money that he has pocketed personally from all of this at the expense of others is not justified in my opinion.  He could have sorted out the issue of the teams not receiving enough money years ago, and chose not to.  I find that very difficult to understand.

[cosworth151]

I've got the perfect person to replace him. He has an office at near the corner of 16th Street & Georgetown Road in Speedway, Indiana.

[Jericoke]

It will only come apart if they don't plan ahead and have a succession plan.  That does need to be worked on now.  The lack of progress on that issue is not an encouraging sign.

I refuse to respect Ecclestone though.  I can have no respect for someone who cares so much about his own bank balance, and so little about everyone and everything else.  What he has done for Formula 1 is also contested, since as much credit as can be given to him for giving the sport more exposure, and getting better television coverage over the years, the amount of money that he has pocketed personally from all of this at the expense of others is not justified in my opinion.  He could have sorted out the issue of the teams not receiving enough money years ago, and chose not to.  I find that very difficult to understand.

I think he's happy with the money, knowing full well it buys contempt.

As for the lack of progress replacing him, the issue is that he IS FOM.  Either you deal with him, or you don't deal with F1.  The only way to create succession is to allow other people to take up the slack.  OF course this is a sensible approach, but there is one extra wrinkle in this thing:  Bernie isn't running F1 for the sake of the sport.  He's not even running it for the sake of the money.  He's running it to prove he's the best F1 runner of all time (he does this by keeping score with the money he pockets).  He literally has nothing else in life as important as F1 (Bernie, if you're reading this, I know you love your family dearly, but I know deep down running F1 is more fun).  He doesn't want to stop, and he'll never want to stop.  He tried once, and it didn't suit him, so he picked the game back up, and will literally run it until it's taken away from him.

It's impossible to plan succession to that. 

I hope at some point that Bernie learns that the state he leaves F1 in is MORE important than the state he brought it to.  Once Mr. Eccelstone is fully invested in his legacy, rather than his score, you'll find the succession plans coming together quickly.  Perhaps we can get the idea out there, that F1 fans are getting ready to judge Bernie's success not by dollar signs, but by the success of F1 ten years hence.  If enough people put that idea into the public sphere... who knows?

[Alianora La Canta]

By this point, saving F1 isn't in Bernie's or his successor's hands. If anyone decides to bring up F1's Article 1 violation in Bahrain 2012 in court, it's toast. If anyone decides to try ending it any other way (or neglecting its way into failure), the only person who can save it is the president of the FIA by withdrawing the world championship status from F1. Once that happens, the whole house of cards falls over and the teams can do nothing but follow whatever (hopefully more enlightened path) the FIA selects (unless they're Ferrari or similarly manufacturer-ish, in which case they can go to LMP1 while awaiting stability if they choose).

As the structure stands, there isn't enough money to service everyone. CVC takes gallons of money out of the sport, but that's because the debts it incurred buying it take gallons to pay off. It was supposed to have paid off the debt by now but has failed, with the result that it had to get a new debt (albeit at a better interest rate than before due to its smaller size and proven "regular payer" status) to cover it. So the unexpected expenses mean CVC is having to draw more money from the sport. Bernie is a CVC employee, so to speak of Bernie's money is to speak of CVC's (unless you refer to Bernie's previous savings).

The teams' troubles are well-documented, not assisted by sponsors preferring to fund drivers (who pay nothing into F1's profit pot - their contributions go directly to the FIA). They alone have cut back their expenditure - but when Red Bull spends 50% more than the next most profligate team, it has to be understood that competitiveness is severely damaged. And Red Bull are not going to reduce their expenditure because they find it such a successful platform for promoting their canned liquids.

The FIA has had funding issues over the last few years due to expansions in its projects. So it needs more money too.

Meanwhile, profits have reduced bigstyle over the last few years, partly due to F1 losing over 20% of its viewers over the last 5 years. So there is more money needed and less money arriving to share between them.

I suspect that someone will need to be brave and invoke the FIA's right - which it has never surrendered - to withdraw world championship status from any series no longer meeting its needs. It could always award that title to GP2, Renault World Series or any other single-seater series under its aegis (including a newly-invented series). A canny president would then invite the teams into that series with terms that were friendly but firm. Ones that indicated that the FIA was in charge with team assistance, rather than the current situation of money people being in charge with paranoia assistance.

[cosworth151]

If there is anything worse that FOM in the racing world, it's the FIA. If anything, I'd like to see CVC (or whomever) tell the FIA, "We're having an F1 World Championship. If you'd like to take part, fine. If not, even better. We don't believe that you hold a copyright on the words World Championship."

Just look at what the FIA has done in the brief time they've moved back into endurance racing. They've cut out the second most prestigious endurance race in the world, Sebring, and replaced it with a garbage race on a garbage track. That fact alone makes the "WEC" irrelevant. a World Endurance Championship without Sebring is as meaningless as an Indy Car championship without Indy. Or, should I say, as meaningless as the Mulsanne with chicanes all through it.

The FIA bring nothing, absolutely nothing of value to racing. All they bring is a heavy layer of bureaucracy full of idiotic apparatchiks who know nothing about racing. And for this "benefit," they haul away huge amounts of cash.

Somebody needs to be brave enough to tell the FIA to stick it. I still have hope that the ACO will come to its senses and do just that. Maybe it will take a group of business types like CVC to get the job done.

[Irisado]

While I'm no lover of the FIA, the free market business system is, more or less, what got Formula 1 into the mess it is in.  It was the manufacturers who priced most of the independents out of the sport in the game of who can spend the most in the first decade of this century, as they were egged on by Ecclestone from the sidelines.  CVC, the FIA, and Ecclestone are all guilty of mismanaging Formula 1, just in different ways.

[John S]

If there is anything worse that FOM in the racing world, it's the FIA. If anything, I'd like to see CVC (or whomever) tell the FIA, "We're having an F1 World Championship. If you'd like to take part, fine. If not, even better. We don't believe that you hold a copyright on the words World Championship."

Of course they don't hold a copyright on the words 'World Championship' it's the Formula 1 bit alongside it that belongs to them, and by contract with FOM/CVC. It's this very contract between the FIA and FOM that has established over many years the FIA's rights to the F1 world championship name.
Bernie (and possibly the FIA as well) has also reserved, or at least thinks he has, the other popular likely names for open wheel world championships.

Yes CVC should loosen the purse strings and give all teams a respectable base amount each year just for being an entrant to F1 say $40mill, getting a slot on the grid has traditionally never been easy but this should ensure there is always someone on the waiting list to get onto the grid. They can add some caveats to make sure all the recipients turn up and race properly - as best they can in some cases obviously.  
Ferrari & Merc should welcome such a plan, it means smaller teams should be able to pay their engine bills - maybe even on time.
After that divide the rest of the team money cake up as always, if that's the preferred method, of the series owners, to keep competition on the grid at it's fiercest.

Another thought is that Engine suppliers get paid by FOM/CVC a standard amount for each team they supply. This would be a base customer engine price and teams would be free to pay or invest more in enhancements or development. This ensures all teams have engines to race with and the engine suppliers get at least the base income stream guaranteed from a reliable source. Never know might attract new engine builders.