It is hard to argue the points raised by Dieter Rencken...
Autosport.com wrote:
F1 reached a new low in Melbourne
It wasn't the first dull season-opener with a small field, but the nature of the dramas around the 2015 Australian GP showed the toxic mess Formula 1 is now in, says DIETER RENCKEN
For graphic proof of just how much Formula 1 has deteriorated in exactly 12 months, just consider the contrasts between the 2014 Australian Grand Prix and the latest edition of the traditional season opener, held at the same circuit a year on.
Where the sport last year managed to field 22 cars despite considerable obstacles created by F1's then-brand-new hybrid power units and totally revised technical regulations - and deliver an enthralling race with 13 classified finishers - this year it was nip and tuck whether 13 cars would even take the start.
As one cynical local journalist tweeted, if Sydney was indeed serious about hijacking Melbourne's race after the current contract expires (in 2020), Sunday's show must surely have created introspection in the offices of incumbent New South Wales Premier Baird, whose pre-election manifesto includes an AU$180million concept that has cars racing across the Pacific city's iconic bridge.
So Melbourne can breathe easy (if expensively), as can Hockenheim after the German circuit, requested to stand in after the Nurburgring reneged on its original contractual obligation to host races in odd years, failed to agree commercial terms with rights holder Formula One Management CEO Bernie Ecclestone - who recently attempted to heap blame for the fiasco on German fans by calling audiences in the nation "lousy". One reaps...
Melbourne's race weekend hardly got off to the best of starts, what with an Australian judge passing rather harsh comments about a case best compared to a dispute over conjugal rights by Dutch/Swiss parties over who may (not) sleep on which side of an already-crowded marital bed - despite the bedroom being situated thousands of miles from either's legal domicile...
It all smacked of desperation - on the one hand by Giedo van der Garde, whose unspectacular (19-race) F1 career reduced him to a pay-driver supported by a billionaire father-in-law; on the other by a cash-strapped team (Sauber) on its proverbial uppers.
Easy to overlook is that the root cause is a shortage of money brought about by F1's inequitable revenue structure, which originally manifested itself last year due to the first (2013) season's earnings under the new structure being paid a year in arrears: Sauber was last year forced to take on two other drivers despite having said plaintiff under contract simply to make ends meet.
Only an eleventh-hour settlement, said to have been reached after Ecclestone banged heads together, enabled Sauber to participate without the Dutch driver - or the grid would have been minus (another - see below) two cars. In fact, the team's participation had been in doubt even before the litigious van der Garde camp brought its action.
Together with Force India and Lotus, Sauber had approached FOM for financial support, making the point that unless was granted around $10million (£7million) they would be unable to make the trip Down Under - they were not striking, they stressed, but simply did not have the wherewithal.
An advance on 2014 revenues earned but not yet disbursed eased their respective ways, but it smacks of a sticking plaster applied to cancerous wounds.
All this caused Pirelli Motorsport director Paul Hembery to express his fears during the tyre company's Thursday evening pre-season function in Melbourne that financial issues would hit the grid (hard) during the mid-season. Seldom has the extremely well-connected 48-year-old proven incorrect.
Still, Sauber (and Force India) made it to the grid and (both) into the points, which is more than could be said of Manor, which deserved kudos only for media spin and not conduct, which left folk within and out the paddock with piles of unpaid invoices after the collapsed team entered into Company Voluntary Administration, a British form of Chapter 11. A team insider confirmed that unsecured creditors would receive "less than 10 pence in the pound" - so much for Manor being a 'good news story'.
Manor didn't run at all in Australia, saying its software was wiped in the run-up to a pending auction after going into administration and that it ran out of time to get into operating shape, though it did not eat into its curfew allowance.
All in, it was not surprising that Ecclestone was scathing about the operation - despite the stewards finding Manor not being in breach of regulation - with the octogenarian telling Reuters he expected Manor to pay its own logistics costs.
Given that the team (allegedly) had 30 tonnes of airfreight in Australia and over 40 team members, the 'fine' could push the outfit to the edge. Of course, the fact that Manor's now-chairman, former Sainsbury's boss Justin King, was once punted as successor to Ecclestone does little to help its cause despite the self-proclaimed petrolhead and father of 2013 British Formula 3 champion Jordan low-keying any F1 ambitions...
Thus, with Caterham's demise and Manor's shenanigans, the grid was a quartet of cars down on last year, with the Swiss entries having made it by the thickness of a carbon fibre shard. Then, after Saturday's white-knuckle hour, came news that Valtteri Bottas had injured his back and would likely not be fit enough to take the start - news confirmed shortly before the race. 17 cars and counting...
Come 4pm Sunday and the field was reduced by two more after McLaren's Kevin Magnussen blew his Honda engine during his line-up lap ("least of our worries" according to team boss Ron Dennis) and Daniil Kvyat's Red Bull stopped while headed for the dummy grid with a transmission problem Christian Horner suspected had its roots in engine vibrations.
This left 15 starters, whose number was down by one after Pastor Maldonado crashed his Lotus into a wall on the opening lap; 13 runners when team-mate Romain Grosjean stopped with power unit issues during the subsequent safety car phase.
By lap 40 Toro Rosso youngster Max Verstappen's premature halt (engine) and Kimi Raikkonen's demise (wonky wheelnut) dropped the numbers of runners to 11, half the number to have taken the start 12 months before. Indeed, so decimated was the field that Jenson Button's chronically downtuned McLaren-Honda was in danger of scoring points - had Sauber's assets been seized, JB would have been ninth.
True, there have been season openers with fewer starters and less finishers - both numerically and as a percentage - but never before have so many separate dramas impacted on a race. It could not be made up, and, as one wag pointed out after McLaren remained obtuse about Fernando Alonso's condition: "Rather than celebrating drivers who are racing, we're obsessing about those who aren't."
Post-race blues illustrated the depth of confusion surrounding this once-noble sport: Where Ecclestone told the (non-accredited) media before the race he was unperturbed [about the show], saying - "If they [Mercedes drivers Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg] race like they did last year it is good, and I'm happy". Yet, afterwards he added his call for engine equalisation regulations after both Silver Arrows romped the race.
Red Bull's Christian Horner and Ecclestone have since made various wishful references to a mechanism that simply does not exist: appendix 4 of the sporting regulations is clear in its intentions that it can only be used to ensure fair and equitable (a word seldom applied in F1) power units, not in the event that Renault (and, for that matter, Honda) duff it:
"A power unit delivered to the FIA after 28 February 2014, or modified and re-delivered to the FIA after that date, which the FIA is satisfied, in its absolute discretion and after full consultation with all other suppliers of power units for the championship, could fairly and equitably be allowed to compete with other homologated power units."
What is "unfair or inequitable" about Mercedes having done a way better job than the rest; put differently, why should the Three Pointed Star be penalised after the rest made pigs ears of their power units - at second time of trying?
F1's current governance structure does not, as Horner and Ecclestone know all too well from their tenures on the Strategy Group, allow technical willy-nilly chops and changes to spice F1's 'show'. Ecclestone may lament the manner in which pal Max Mosley introduced knee-jerk changes (invariably on "safety" grounds), but the fact of the matter is that technically F1 has what it has until 2017 at earliest.
As part of his politicking, Horner, whose only finisher was local hero Daniel Ricciardo in a lapped sixth place, made the point that "double diffusers were banned, exhausts were moved, flexible bodywork was prohibited, engine mapping mid-season was changed," by the FIA.
However, even he cannot deny that these changes, where made in-season, were introduced by the governing body via rule clarifications - whereas he forwarded not a single example of where engine regulations require clarification.
If anything, he destroyed his case by admitting in virtually the same breath that "obviously [Renault] are in a bit of a mess at the moment" - does he really the FIA will introduce engine equalisation measures because a competitor is in a bit of a mess? Mercedes would have an even better day in court than did van der Garde...
Red Bull's disgruntled motorsport adviser Helmut Marko was not slow in coming forward after the race, either: "We will evaluate the situation again [in the summer] as every year, and look into costs and revenues," the Austrian told a group of reporters, including this columnist. "If we are totally dissatisfied we could contemplate an F1 exit. Yes, the danger is that [Red Bull boss] Mr Mateschitz loses his passion for F1."
Marko, a former F1 driver and 1971 Le Mans winner, also criticised the comparative cost of engines, in the process conveniently overlooking that the price structure of the previous V8 2400cc units was artificially low due to: a) being heavily subsidised by manufacturers as part of a pact with the FIA, and b) having been amortised over 15 years.
In fact, it was pointed out to him that, where engines once comprised up to 60 per cent of team budgets, they now made up less than 10 per cent of Red Bull's spend even before subsidies from Renault's alliance partner (and team title sponsor) Infiniti are factored into the equation. Arguably these are the cheapest units Red Bull ever had, even if their (lack of) performance makes them among the dearest...
Whatever, Marko (and Horner) would do well to (re)study the contracts their head office entered into with FOM before threatening Red Bull's withdrawal from the sport, or blaming the FIA for the price or lack of competitiveness of their power units.
In 2013, during the Italian GP Friday press conference, the team principals were asked to comment to on the price of the (then) to-be-introduced hybrid engines, with the only respondent to pick up the ball being Horner, who said:
"When you're talking about the increase in costs and in fairness to Jean [Todt], the engine discussion was in place before his presidency. Where collectively we all made a mistake was not to say 'no'. Some of us did, but at the end of the day there's a process that these regulations have to go through and the teams, through the old Concorde Agreement, had the opportunity, through the Formula One Commission etc etc to stop it, and we didn't, so we can only, in many respects, blame ourselves."
As for Red Bull exiting F1, in Abu Dhabi last November this was how Horner justified the controversial Strategy Group and Red Bull Racing's participation in the (arguably illegal) forum in reply to a question posed by this writer:
"I think what you have to remember about the Strategy Group is that the members of that group are the teams that have given a guarantee that they will be in the sport until 2020."
So much for Red Bull's guarantees, if, only one race on, it is talking about withdrawal...
Ultimately, if CVC Capital Partners - FOM's majority controller - creams most of F1's revenues, then, it too, must carry the can for the shocking mess the investment fund, which in real terms has no place in the sporting world, has made of a sport loved by tens of millions of fans across the world.
Yes, Mr Donald Mackenzie, for as long as F1's bucks flow through your office, the buck stops on your desk: After the superb event staged by Melbourne, Australia for one deserved better.
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