Despite innovative projects like the GT Academy, only a lucky few ever get to try their hand at Formula One. Could structural change within the sport itself bring motor racing to the masses, asks NEIL BRISCOE
IT IS often argued that Formula One is not actually a sport. Can it count as a sport when an internal combustion engine is providing the motive power and the “sportsman” in question spends his Sunday afternoons sitting down? For what it’s worth, I think yes; it is a sport and you only have to see the fitness levels required of modern racing drivers, and learn a little about the intense physical and mental pressures of the F1 life, to understand that. Put simply, if golf, horse racing, and darts can be considered sports, then F1 and its ilk can also certainly be.
But above and beyond being a sport in a sporting sense, to most people these days, F1 and motor sport at large, is a business and a forum for political intrigue.
How could it be otherwise when Bernie Ecclestone stands tall above the motor racing empire he has created, pulling both the puppet and purse strings? Bernie has become a billionaire many times over because of his canny business knowledge and the fact that he spotted, when nobody else did, that F1 could make a fortune from TV revenues and that the commensurate TV coverage would create sponsorship revenues the likes of which had never been dreamed of.
But there’s no doubt that, in the purists’ eye, money has damaged the sport. It has paid for the high levels of safety, the amazing 750bhp engines and aerospace technology chassis, but it’s also created a brick wall to getting into the sport in the first place.
For well beyond a decade now, it has been impossible to get an F1 drive unless you pay for it. True, raw talent does sometimes bubble to the surface, but even then, a new driver will have to be closely allied to a major sponsor to get anywhere.
Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton are brilliant racers, but if their fortunes were not so closely entwined with major corporate structures, then you’d be just as likely to see them racing go-karts on a Sunday afternoon in Limerick. Even Bernie himself has touched on the point, once suggesting that the best F1 driver of all time could be a goat-herder in Ulan Bator, but because he’s broke, we’ll never get to see him race.
There are ways around the wall though, if you know where to look for them. Nissan runs an annual competition, in association with PlayStation, called the GT Academy. It’s designed to find – amongst the hordes of gamers – one with the talent to actually step into a real racing car. It sounds like a silly gimmick (couch potato to racing driver in one easy step) but it actually works; the first GT Academy winner, Spanish driver Lucas Ordonez, has just competed at the Le Mans 24hrs, and acquitted himself well against his experienced team mates.
But the fact remains that even Lucas would struggle to keep up with the front-running teams at Le Mans; Audi and Peugeot were over seven seconds a lap quicker than the best of the rest, and that’s a gap that’s only bridgeable with sizeable amounts of cash.
Even the World Rally Championship, which has been notably strapped for such cash and investment in recent years, has a massive chasm between the front-running works teams and the quickest “amateurs”. And that’s a gap that’s likely only going to get wider when big-spending Volkswagen enters rallying in 2013.
So, what’s to be done? Well, there is a chink of light on the horizon and that is that F1 in a couple of years time may not be the F1 we know it today. Bernie, for all his acumen, is ageing and there is agitation in the pitlane about who may succeed him. And the chances are it won’t be one man (or woman) but the F1 teams themselves. Thanks to the torturous governing of F1’s finances, the rights to the sport are currently held and managed by Bernie on behalf of an investment bank: CVC Capital.
With its multi-billion dollar turnover every year, CVC seems happy enough to retain that investment, taking 50 per cent of the sports money in revenue with the other 50 per cent divided up between the teams.
But the teams are increasingly keen on taking 100 per cent and it is they that hold the ultimate trump card. If, when the current Concorde Agreement (the contract by which F1 is governed) expires at the end of this year, none of the current teams have re-signed, then CVC and Bernie will be left holding the rights to three fifths of naff-all. We’ve been here before – two years ago – when the Formula One Teams Association was within hours of quitting F1 and establishing a breakaway championship. While all has been peaceful in F1 since then, the recent announcements that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was interested in buying the F1 rights, if they were for sale, has re-sparked interest in the money that feeds the sport. And if the teams get their way, then all that lucrative rights money would go directly to them.
And this is where the aspiring amateur can find some, small, kernel of hope. If Fota does go ahead with its breakaway and the F1 teams do become the full beneficiaries of F1’s income, then increasingly there will be more money in the sport to support up-and-comers; talented amateurs and the like. Without a commercial rights holder hoovering up half the sports revenues, the slices of cake available further down the F1 ladder will become that much richer. That at least, should be the hope of any 10 year old, currently watching Sebastian Vettel march towards his second title, and dreaming of doing the same.
