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HSHman you are amazing! Thank you!
Yep, Tobias, the 94-95 datas are just that. But how about the decrease from 2005 to 2011? It is a decreasing line. What do you think guys could be the reason behind that?

Maybe the many changes of regulations and team names after almost 15 years of stability?

You should also try to compare it with general motorsport popularity if you can find anything on that. With the current context (environmental concerns, economic crisis...) motorsports may have less positive reception from the general public, in which case F1 would be just following that trend.

As for your question, yes you should try to contact them. It's worth nothing to try. I doubt any of that is confidential either, since that's what attracts sponsors, promoters, and TV channels. They may even have some brochures or presentations ready to send to the press.

Also around the last part of the decade, the F1 that people started watching after Senna died, em, died. Those heroes that we took up in the years after Senna's death were themselves dying out. Schumacher, Coulthard, Fisichella, Ralf etc, were all again. For me, these guys were the stars of my childhood, amongst others who had already retired before 2005. Nowadays the grid is made up of my contemporaries.

Just to add, in the last 10 years the viewing figures in Brazil have dropped 55%.

Some countries have gone with pay-TV channels, that surely decreases TV figures.

coldtyre: "Maybe the many changes of regulations and team names after almost 15 years of stability?"
That's a good idea! The reg changes definately took part in that. Not just costs a lot of money, people don't following F1 so closely can be very mixed and frustrated. What is DRS? What is KERS? Why do F1 need them? And so on. They lag behind.

And I will try to contact them, maybe I will be surprised

EAS: thanks for the info! do you have any source of that? Unfortunately I need to have a link to every data in the thesis.

Guys, I tried to contact F1, but no success

A new question in my mind: can somebody please explain the "business of F1" for me? I mean something about CVC, FOM, FIA, FOTA and the whole system of F1. Why did F1 need to loan money, and from who did they do it? I spent hours with that, but that is so difficult to understand. Maybe a good article or something you know about it?

Thanks

FIA is the sporting governing body. Business wise, they have no power. It is all about the sporting side for them. They govern pretty much every motorsport series in Europe. They are a non profit organisation. They are responsible for safety, sporting and technical regulations. Whenever a change is made at a circuit, or on the cars, etc, this is the FIAs domain.

FOM own the commercial rights to Formula One. They sign the circuits and TV deals, and provide TV coverage at most circuits now days. Contrary to popular belief, Bernie does not have complete power here. FOM is owned largely by CVC (around 70%). Eccelstones Family owns most of the rest of it, with random shares held by others and Bernie himself. Back in the 80s and 90s, Bernie himself used to have a lot of power. As Martin Brundle once said, if it was too wet and drivers were having a bit of a moan, Bernie would turn up on the grid, tell them to get in the cars and drive (see Interlagos 1996). Now days, Bernie doesn't have anywhere near that sort of power and is more of a figure head at the circuits. Whilst Bernie gets a LOT of flak from fans, he is responsible for keeping circuits like Spa on the calender by taking over the commercial rights to that event when it was struggling. Despite all of the flaws and issues with the commercial side of things, Bernie and FOM are responsible for getting F1 into the TV and internet deals it has now days.

FOTA is the teams association. They literally have no power at all. They like to think they do, but they don't, at all. They can all get together and throw their weight around, but at the end of the day they do not decide anything, and are at the mercy of the FIA and FOM. Membership of FOTA is around €100,000 per team, but membership is not mandatory. As it stands, only Force India, Caterham, McLaren, Mercedes, Lotus, Marussia and Williams are members. Every few years FOTA has a hissy fit and threaten a breakaway series, which they never follow through with.

Firstly, thanks for the effort and for making everything so clear, eventhough I personally knew big part of it already

I just wish that the teams would really get together, sort their differences out and create a new independent of FIA/FOM series.

From what I've heard, FOM(CVC) get's at least 50% of all income which is a travesty, if true, imho. They are completely unecessary imo and take way too much money from the teams.

I would like to see a series ran just like English football Premier League, ie, independent of any 3rd part organization and therefore, they(the teams) can negotiate and get all the money split for themselves rather than giving a huge part to a useless company.

I also like the way the money is split among Premier league teams. I heard 40% of the income is evenly splitted among all teams. Then, the 60% remaining is splitted according to position in the championship, which is fair.

In F1, they already get only 50% of the total income and that is splitted only based on WCC which hurt the poorer teams(Williams, Sauber, FI, STR......) a lot. Plus, I heard there are clauses in the contract to give even more money to the likes of Ferrari and etc with BS like : "extra money for team with more than X years in F1" and so on.

PS: Ferrarigirl, sorry for my off-topic little rant in your thread

Disagreed. That would be the worst thing to EVER happen in motorsports. The ring leaders in previous breakaway discussions were teams like Toyota, Honda and BMW. And how many of them stuck around? None. They don't give a fuck about the sport, and they only wanted a breakaway series so they could have control. When the going gets tough they throw in the towel and run away. So by creating a breakaway series all they'd do is weaken both sides, and eventually kill off one or the other. It'd be worthless.

Formula One does not need the teams to be in charge, it needs a dictator. That is how sports should work, otherwise everyone just wants what is best for themselves. Look at IndyCar in the last few years, and especially the last few weeks, to see exactly what happens when teams get too much of a say.



That may be so, but without FOM F1 wouldn't be in the position it's in. It wouldn't be on TVs. It wouldn't be a household sport. It wouldn't be in the situation where teams can ask for insane amounts of money just to put a logo on the side of a car. FOM is one of the major power houses in building F1 into what it has become, and currently it's fucking awesome.

Thank you ellis!!!! Artur Craft I was also pleased to read your comments!

So, If I get it right, 50% of the income goes outside of F1. The remaining 50% is being splitted between teams, based on the championsip results?
About IndyCar: what happened there? Unfortunately I do not follow it

And how about that loan? Did F1 get it from CVC? Or how did that 50% walk out of the hands of FIA/FOM/..F1? And what was the reason behind this?

Sorry for the questions, but for me this is really a very difficult system to understand!

Quick summary of IndyCars history.

In the early 90s there was IndyCar. IndyCar and CART were the same thing. In 1996, Tony George (who owned Indianapolis) decided he wasn't seeing enough of the money of IndyCar and created his own series - IRL (Indy Racing League). IndyCar then lost the rights to the name IndyCar (which went with Tony George) and called itself CART. So now you have 2 open wheel series in America competing against each other. For the rest of the 90s and the early 00s, CART was the better series. It had better drivers, better tracks and better teams. The only thing IRL had going for it was they had the Indy 500.

As CART became too popular the costs rose, and teams like Penske and Team Green, the big players of the series, left and joined IRL. CART ran into money troubles and 3 team owners of CART teams clubbed together and bought CART, and called it CCWS (Champ Car World Series). Although things then looked good again, all was not well with CCWS, and the 3 team owners continually worked against each other and things kept going down hill. Teams kept leaving, costs stayed high, and the series died again at the end of 2007.

In 2008 the series were reunited when Tony George and IRL bought the now dead CCWS and it was all merged back into one and became IndyCar again. In recent years it went through a management reshuffle, as people were unhappy with Tony George and the power he had. A man called Randy Bernard was brought in. He had no motorsport experience, but was extremely popular with fans due to his thinking outside of the box, and he almost single handedly brought IndyCar back from a poor boring series, to a series that was exciting and growing in popularity.

Unfortunately Randy ruffled some feathers. Some of things he did did not sit well with the teams. A couple of weeks ago the teams got him shuffled out and Randy was sacked. The backlash from fans and press was unexpectedly large, and the teams immediately went into damage recovery mode, saying how badly Randy was treated and they started blaming people (Ganassi blamed Speed Journalist Robin Miller) to try and shift the blame. But the damage was done.

IndyCar is a perfect example of what happens when you let teams, or even circuit owners, have a say in things. They create issues and things go badly. It's happened FOUR TIMES in just 2 decades in American Open Wheel racing.

That's what the rumours are. The official stuff is confidential and I don't think you'll find it published anywhere, unfortunatelly



@

ellis, I was a little unfair to FOM in my previous post, yes. We can't take some merits away from FOM. If you look at all other motorsports(even traditional Lola....) everybody is struggling, MotoGP/Dorna apart. So yes, FOM did a great job to keep F1 valuable, but couldn't the teams do it themselves? I know all of them have personal interests and etc, but the same can be said about the football teams.
Toyota, BMW, Honda, they come and go but some teams like Ferrari, Mclaren, Williams and even Sauber will always be there, if they have the money to compete, and sharing a 100% income, more evenly(as like with the 40% being equally split or something), they would always have the money to be there, once they managed to do FOM's job and keep promoting "their series" as well as F1 have been doing.
I wouldn't mind if they kept with FOM, but I would like to see some more money to the teams(+80%) and part of it being equally split and make the sport more "doable" for poorer teams.
With all that said, I understand the problems with my desire as teams like Ferrari, for instance, wouldn't want to give more money to lower teams and would do anything they could to extract the max for themselfs only

Teams like Williams and Sauber were not at the centre of the breakaway talks. Ferrari have made these threats multiple times and have never followed through because it would be suicidal for them. They know they have it good in F1.

Breakaway series require teams like Toyota and Honda to stir up and shit and get greedy. They also require them to work together. Historically that has never worked.



Without knowing the finances involved in a very intimate way you cannot suggest a number like 80% with any sort of real backing.



No. There is no evidence to suggest that they can do so. Even FOTA is split with half the teams not being in it. If they can't even get along enough to form a proper working group, how the hell are they actually meant to run a series? It cannot be done, and trying it is a HUGE gamble because you potentially kill both series in doing so. It will not happen, because the amount of time for it to be created is longer than the attention span of these big names that want a breakaway. If you simply ignore the bitching of Toyota and BMW then they'll leave before they even get a little way into making a new series.

Thank you ellis for the history of IndyCar! Really interesting!

Look what I've found in the meantime:

That's a good flowchart. And as you can see, FIA is not included at all. They're relatively disconnected from that side of the sport.

Okay, some question regarding that chart:
- Who are the members of Formula One Group? I read the wikipedia article and that is so mixed up. Who is SLEC for example? - or just take the F1 Group as a unit, and don't care who are the members? They are all companies?
- Why F1 Gruop pays to CVC? Are they paying divident for them?

Thanks!

That's getting above my knowledge range unfortunately.

No problem, I'm very grateful for you, thank you very much for your help!

I just googled "F1 pays dividend to CVC" and yes, it is just looking like that

- CVC Capital Partners owns F1 - http://www.cvc.com/Our-Portfolio.htmx?o ... 1003124601
- SLEC (short for Slavica Ecclestone...) Holdings Limited owns television and commercial rights of the Formula One races. Additionally it engages in management and administration of F1 races through its subsidiaries. SLEC Holdings Limited was founded in 1996 and is based in the St. Helier, Channel Islands.

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