New owners see drivers as the stars

BERNIE ECCLESTONE has his critics but you can’t take anything away from what he has achieved at the helm of the sport.

Okay, you can have a dig at him about the money distribution within the sport and the way that he dealt with certain things, but he’s the man that made Formula 1 the behemoth that Liberty Media were willing to pay $8billion for.

Clearly, they see there’s a product and one Bernie’s not quite generated to its full worth. They think there’s growth in the sport, otherwise they wouldn’t have got involved.

Quite how that change manifests itself, I’m not sure but I like the early noises for change I’m hearing from Chase Carey and Ross Brawn.

I think they see more than ever that the drivers are the main event, the main attraction for the millions of supporters around the world. You hope their approach is to let them be gladiators on the track and stop meddling.

How much they can change is a bit limited because of the current Concorde Agreement, which runs until 2020. But it seems that the American owners, much like with the NFL, want to see a structure that shares out the revenue more evenly among all the teams.

The teams, from Mercedes at the top to Sauber, need to know they can have economic stability, the latter coming to a point not so long ago where they nearly went out of business after 25 years in F1. Doing that keeps the teams on the grid — and we want that — but it also offers a carrot to future teams to get involved going forward.