British business magnate Bernie Ecclestone, the former chief executive of the Formula One Group, which manages Formula One and controls the commercial rights to the sport, doesn’t believe that Liberty Media has what it takes to deliver a second United States Grand Prix on the Streets of Miami.
Plans for the Miami race have fallen through for now, but the leaders of the sport insists it has not given up: “It will never happen,” former Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone told Speed Week. The 88-year-old said street circuits are notoriously hard to organize, and the plans for Miami were too ambitious: “I think the Americans always want a guarantee not to lose money,” Ecclestone opined.
Bernie Ecclestone added that Liberty Media is in too much a hurry to finalize new events: “When they came in, they said ‘We’ll have 25 races, six of them in America’. But they don’t know how to do it,” he insisted.
Liberty has delivered a new race in Vietnam, but Ecclestone said he decided against that race because of the competing hosts in Singapore and Japan: “So I let it go,” the Briton said. “If you tell people about Formula 1 there, they don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Whether it’s right or wrong, I don’t know. Everywhere is the right place, as long as people come to the track or turn on the TV.”
He also scoffed at the latest reports about Liberty eyeing a race in London: “We looked at it years ago,” he said. “It’s too complicated, too many restrictions. We had so many meetings and in the end the difference was three million pounds. I said ‘That’s the cost of the bottled water at the meetings we still need to have. So let’s just forget the whole thing’.” – Bernie Ecclestone concluded.
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