F1 preview, with added Brawn
As a competitor, Ross Brawn made an indelible impression on Formula 1. Now, as the gaffer, he must save it from greed, tedium and obscurity
The new boss’s vision for Grands Prix post-Bernie
WHEN I WAS LAST at Formula 1 HQ, I was ushered into the ‘penthouse’ meeting room. It wasn’t situated on the top floor, with panoramic views over central London; its walls were merely adorned with every Penthouse front cover from the last 50 years. It was Bernie Ecclestone’s little joke. Something to talk to heads of state about when they visited him in London. As was the pile of $100 bills (amounting to $1 million) in the meeting room opposite.
Thirteen months on and I’m back at F1 HQ, but that’s where the similarities end. The meeting room in which I sit, with coffee, tea, biscuits and water all at hand, is on the top floor – the penthouse, you could say – and its walls are white. No magazines anywhere. There’s a giant TV at one end to help with presentations and there’s a solitary photograph, albeit a large one, on the wall from the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix.
The impression is one of business, not pleasure, as you might expect from Liberty Media, a Nasdaq-listed company. The new owners of F1 cast a more corporate shadow over the sport than Bernie ever did, yet the atmosphere is informal. ‘It’s all a bit Google,’ as one of the company’s 120 employees put it. Laughter can be heard coming from the reception area, where once there would have been silence. Bernie didn’t like noise.
This is F1’s brave new world. Liberty moved into these shiny new offices in Piccadilly in July, since when they’ve been on an aggressive recruitment drive. They haven’t been chasing your usual racing types, but experts in digital media and music. Areas in which they hope to attract scores of new, young fans.
Steering the ship is the triumvirate of Chase Carey, Sean Bratches and Ross Brawn. Carey and Bratches are new to F1; after successful business careers they came out of retirement to head-up F1. Brawn, on the other hand, is a racer and a petrolhead. In an F1 career spanning four decades, he netted 10 drivers’ and 12 constructors’ titles (see panel, below). He also laid the foundations for Mercedes’ recent dominance of the hybrid era, prior to leaving the team just before the first hybrid season, 2014.
Brawn’s official job title is ‘motorsport director’. In reality, though, he’s Liberty’s point of contact for the big fish in the F1 paddock. He has their respect, and they his, and he knows what’s feasible for a racing team. He doesn’t make unnecessary requests. When he asks for change, the teams listen.
‘The rules are set in stone for the next few years,’ Brawn tells me. ‘But we are going to make changes for 2021. Those changes will have two main objectives: to create more entertaining racing and to create a more economically sustainable environment for the teams.
‘The drivers need to be able to drive the cars at 100 per cent, 100 per cent of the time. No more looking after the brakes or the tyres. They also need to be able to race closer to each other than is4
currently the case. We also need to create a financial environment that is sustainable in the long term. We have evidence that the top teams are spending twice as much as they were just six or seven years and that needs to be brought under control.’
As the new season gets underway, the budgetary gulf between the top three teams and the remainder of the field is an explosive topic. Mercedes and Ferrari spend close to $400m annually to go racing, which places them on a pedestal and out of reach – and the situation is getting worse, not better.
In 2011 the fourth-placed team (Mercedes) spent 30 per cent less than champions Red Bull Racing; in 2017 the fourth-placed team (Force India) spent 60 percent less than champions Mercedes.
‘That isn’t good for the sport,’ says Brawn. ‘We want to even things up and part of that discussion involves convincing Mercedes that their dominance isn’t good for the sport. People don’t like dominance. The sport needs competition to be worth watching. We can’t mandate that people run their teams properly, but we can create an environment where the numbers add up if they do a sensible job. That’s our goal.’
The future spend of the teams will be greatly influenced by the regulations being drawn up for 2021 by Brawn and a special working group within Liberty. The Holy Grail is what’s called ‘benign downforce’, which would allow the cars to run closer together.
‘Aerodynamic downforce isn’t all bad,’ says Brawn, ‘because aerodynamics are what make the cars as fast and as spectacular as they are today. We want to maintain as much of that as we can, while making the cars easier to race [as opposed to easier to drive – an important distinction]. Better racing is more important than ultimate lap time because great racing doesn’t depend on lap time. We’ve had some great races in the wet, when the lap times are 10-15 seconds slower than they would have been in the dry.’
Other technical modifications on the drawing board include some standardised parts, a change of wheel size (currently 13 inches), a reduction in weight (currently 734kg) and tweaks to the power unit, perhaps removing the complex MGU-H.
The power units are expensive and heavy, meaning the cars are only 16kg lighter than the enclosed prototype Jaguar sports car that Brawn designed in 1991. With the rise of the all-electric Formula E championship, the issues around the current power units beg the question as to whether F1 needs to be road-relevant at all.
‘Part of F1’s magic is having the manufacturers involved,’ says Brawn. ‘For some of them, road-relevance is important and we need to respect the investment they’ve made in F1. But we shouldn’t let that objective compromise the sport.’
You sense that Brawn would like to see the MGU-H gone. ‘It’s a debatable technology for the future,’ he says, leaving you to ponder whether he would have exercised Ferrari’s power of technical veto on this subject were he still at the team.
The Ferrari question is an interesting one. As well as its power of veto (it can single-handedly torpedo any ideas it doesn’t like the look of), it receives significantly more money from F1 than any other team. Yet Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne is still threatening to pull the plug.
‘I’ve had many conversations with Sergio,’ says Brawn. ‘He’s told me that he wants to see everything on the table for 2021 onwards before making a decision. But let’s be clear: we don’t want Ferrari to leave F1. We want to create a set of circumstances that enables the team to stay, for Ferrari – and everyone else – to be able to make that decision, they need to know what the rules are going to be.
‘That should be done by the summer, after which we hope to make real progress.’
How those regulations are received, including the financial ramifications for the teams, is the point at which we can begin to judge Liberty Media’s stewardship of F1. There have been changes to date, such as a new logo and the banning of grid girls, but that’s all window-dressing. It won’t determine the growth of F1. That will come down to the on-track action.
‘Don’t judge us on what we’ve done so far,’ says Brawn. ‘We’ve come a long way in a year, and now that we have the foundations in place, we have to start showing people what we can do. But there won’t be a binary point in time at which you’ll be able to say “they’ve succeeded” or “they haven’t succeeded”. It’s not like we’re an F1 team; there isn’t going to be a point at which we can say we’ve won the world championship. We have a strategic plan for the next three to five years and we have a set of objectives we’d like to achieve.’ Will the identity of the world champion affect business? ‘I don’t care who wins the title,’ he says, ‘so long as it’s done at the last race.’
Just for a moment, Ross, you sounded a bit like Bernie.4