Chase Carey

The new face of F1.

It is hard to imagine two more different businessmen than F1’s old boss and its new one. Bernie Ecclestone was the son of a trawlerman; a car dealer who cut his teeth in East London and who, no matter how rich he became, has never seemed very far away from the mean streets on which he built his initial wealth.

Chase Carey is a graduate of Colgate University, a private liberal arts college in New York, and Harvard Business School; a man who has lived a life of east-coast respectability and privilege. Anyone who has met Carey or seen his interviews since he took over as F1’s chairman and chief executive officer could not fail to have reached the conclusion that he is a highly impressive and accomplished man, with a far-reaching vision for the future of the sport he has been put in charge of, and the wherewithal and nous to make it happen.

Carey has made it clear that he wants to preside over a very different F1 to the one run by Ecclestone. He wants a collegiate approach to decision-making, not an adversarial one. He seeks planning and organisation, not on-the-hoof decisionmaking. He wants a strategy in place before considering tactics to implement it.

After years of dealing with Ecclestone’s divide-and-conquer method, his malice, vindictiveness and threats, many of the big beasts of F1 almost certainly welcome his replacement. But if any of them think Carey is likely to be a pushover, they had better think again. As one insider put it: “You don’t spend 20 years as one of Rupert Murdoch’s key lieutenants without being a hard m *********** .”

Carey is expertly qualified for his new role. As chief executive of Fox he nailed the $1.6bn NFL rights deal that made the cable network a major player in American sports broadcasting. At Newscorp subsidiary Directv, he added a million new subscribers a year, which brought him to the attention of Liberty Media, who bought Directv in 2006. Since then, he has been president of Murdoch’s Newscorp, then COO and then president of 21st Century Fox.

If anyone can unite the ferocious members of the ‘Piranha Club’ to build F1 a brighter future, it is surely Carey.