When the American mass media company Liberty Media took over Formula One in January 2017, the most immediate impact was the ousting of Bernie Ecclestone, who had run the sport for so many years. Irish-American executive Chase Carey, an executive whose résumé includes long stints with the News Corporation and DirecTV, was named chief executive of the Formula One Group and thus became a regular presence in the sport’s paddock, as his style of leadership has been to act first and talk later. It has made for a striking change for a sport that had long conducted negotiations via public salvos.
“If I go back, I feel pretty good about what we’ve achieved and where we’ve gotten to in 12 months. Because we don’t go out and talk about where we are in various discussions doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of stuff going on, but it has complexities to it that we’re wrestling to the ground.” – the new chairman of Formula 1 recently said, as reported by nytimes.com. The next season will be important because the Bernie Ecclestone-era commercial agreements binding teams, determining the system of governance and the distribution of the prize fund will expire in 2020. The deals have historically taken several years of negotiating, and discussions on the shape of Formula One are underway.
While we wait for the official debut of F1 TV, Formula One’s new multilingual streaming service (which however has been postponed for the moment), Chase Carey is committed to solving two of the sports’ main problems: its business model and team competitiveness: “Our goal is to have a healthy sport for fans and a healthy sport for teams. It should be balanced. There should be rewards for success and failure and the like, but the business model we’ve got really isn’t as healthy as it should be for teams. The economics are too difficult for too many teams to play, and I think we need to make that better.” – he explains.
The economics are not the only issue. Critical to the process will be the engines used starting with the 2021 Formula One season. Scuderia Ferrari and Mercedes would be more than happy to continue along the expensive path of the current complex hybrids, while other teams favor a simpler, and cheaper, solution given their financial resources. Not for the first time in the sport’s history, Ferrari have threatened to pull out if they do not get their way.
With competitiveness, Chase Carey wants to reduce the gap between teams. In the last teb seasons, only four different drivers have won the championship, and eight of the constructors’ titles were won by Red Bull or Mercedes. Predictability and a lack of competitiveness have become a pressing issue: “Go back to the sport on the track. I don’t think it is as competitive, and the action is as good — it’s gotten too perfect. Something that makes competition interesting is mistakes or errors. If nothing ever goes wrong, you can admire the fact that nothing goes wrong, but it doesn’t create the most exciting and dramatic outcome. At the core for fans, we want to create a product that delivers everything they grew up with, if not more. I don’t think you will get a transformation that all of a sudden you’ve got 10 equal teams competing. I hope it is competitive as it can be, but at least within that I hope you get some things that create more drama and excitement. We had some of that particularly between two teams last year, but we need to have it on a broader level.”
The goal, he said, is to put a “great sport on the track. We need to make sure that we put on events that are truly spectacles; we want every one of our races to be really a weeklong celebration that captures the world’s imagination. And then we wanted to make sure we connect, because obviously only a small slice of our fans are there live.” – the chief executive officer and executive chairman of the Formula One Group concluded.
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