Lucas di Grassi
Current trends point to a bleak future for top-level motorsport, but there could be an unintended positive by-product
Automotive apathy could have an unforeseen boost for motorsport
“The ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ model that was very strong in the past is decreasing”
The 1000th world championship race in China raised a lot of questions about the future of Formula 1, and of motorsport as a whole. And for many people, that future does not look very encouraging.
A lot of that can be put down to the fast-changing automotive segment, which is posing a major challenge for motorsport to stay relevant.
Volvo recently announced that it will not produce cars that go over the public speed limit, and even Germany is now talking about putting a 200km/h (124mph) speed limit on the autobahns. If you think about it, there is a straightforward logic to it – if you can’t go over 25km/h on an e-bike because it’s dangerous for pedestrians, then why should you sell a car that goes 300km/h in a country where you can’t go more than 120km/h on a public road?
As government regulations become tighter on safety, I am sure that in 10 years you will not be able to buy a new car without some kind of autonomous system to make it safer, like crash avoidance or speed control by location. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but as it becomes more and more restrictive it will have serious implications for motorsport. In circumstances where power and speed are constantly monitored, why would a
manufacturer invest in a racing programme to develop technology that would make their latest supercar go two seconds quicker on a track than the previous model?
Performance brands will see that they don’t need to invest in motorsport to be successful. Bugatti for example doesn’t do any motorsport, Koenigsegg and Pagani the same, but all are very successful despite 99.9% of their customers not knowing how to extract its true performance. Even if they do, they will never use it in the lifetime of the car because they are mostly bought to be a status symbol.
Tesla is not in Formula E but it is the most sold electric car. People don’t have a perception that Jaguar has a better drivetrain because they won in Rome, so they’re going to buy an I-pace instead of a Model 3. It is a business success story and is dominating a segment without investing a single dollar on motorsport – which shows that the ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ model that was very strong in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s is decreasing.
Of course, there is still relevance – Ferrari and Porsche built the prestige around their brands through motorsport, and Audi has transformed its image with success at Le Mans – but it will have a much lesser effect over time, as we’re already seeing with
Tesla, when the cars on the roads are increasingly autonomous.
As the relevance curve between motorsport and the industry decreases, motorsport has to adapt to reduce this curve, and one of the things that I’m doing is to integrate autonomous systems into motorsport with Roborace. But the future for motorsport can still be bright, depending on how fast it adapts to these new realities. And in my view, there could be a positive impact in an unexpected way.
As regulation on the road gets tighter, I expect that people who really like to drive their cars quickly will participate in more trackdays and more amateur racing. So while the amount of money the manufacturers will spend on motorsport will decrease on average because there will be less market and less potential for those technologies in professional motorsport, amateur motorsport could actually rise as more people have access to nicer cars, for example in India and China where GDP is rising every year. Motorsport as we know it is not going to diminish as a sport. There are still going to be a lot of people driving their cars and wanting to have this adrenaline rush, but it’s just going to be different.
How F1 responds to this is the big question. It has to be proactive to keep manufacturers interested and continue generating the professional engineers, drivers and media people that will keep the flame alive for the next 1000 grands prix.
9 MAY 2019 07