Irish-American executive Chase Carey, who after long stints with the News Corporation and DirecTV, was named chief executive of the Formula One Group, recently visited a motorsport event known as Great Race in Budapest, Hungary where he spoke about the future plans of the sport’s new commercial rights holder, Liberty Media.
The new Formula 1 boss Chase Carey received bachlor’s degree from Colgate University, then a master degree of business administration from Harvard, working for News Corp, DIRECTV and 21st Century Fox. He then became the Vice Chair of 21st Century Fox. On 23 January 2017, he was installed as CEO and Executive chairman of Formula One Group after Liberty Media completed their $4.4 Billion acquisition of Formula One Group. Chase Carey first visited Budapest last year during the Formula One Hungarian Grand Prix and immediately fell in love with the Hungarian capital.
“I love Budapest. This is a special city with a beautiful history. The people are welcoming.” Asked to define the nature of Formula One, the 64-year-old declared it as a sport: “It is a sport first of all. Its foundation is a sport. It uses technology, but at the end of the day it’s a sport, a competition with great teams, great history.” Liberty Media recognized the force of digital media which can engage new audiences all around the world. This is in stark contrast to Bernie Ecclestone’s vision who focused on tv production and did not want to share the broadcast with other platforms. Carey revealed that Liberty Media believes that the sport can only benefit if its joins forces with different companies like the leading media channels.
“You have to use all the platform available to you. I think the sport needs to have a vision where you want to go. There should be a competition on the track. We need to have a shared vision, a partnership. It was rather a short-term thinking before.” – he added. The Irish-American does not reveal any exact plans how the new commercial rights holder want to shake up the current calendar, but hinted that there are a list of cities that are in contention for a possible Grand Prix:
“Fortunately we actually have some great cities around the world, great countries around the world which are interested in hosting a race. We wanna be in destination cities like Budapest which capture the world’s imagination, but there aren’t that many that are attractive to us. We have a pretty close schedule. There aren’t many slots between the weekends. But we will continue to investigate and try to bring the sport to new places or former destinations. We are engaged to great cities.” – the chief executive of the Formula One Group concluded.
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