IGNITION
Is it crisis time for Liberty and Formula 1?
Strange times these for Formula 1, which clings desperately to the hope of resuming racing before everything falls apart. As races continue to fall by the wayside (ten and counting at the time of writing), decimating F1’s income as teams beg for handouts from Liberty Media simply to stay afloat, FIA president Jean Todt is right when he suggests this is an existential crisis for grand prix racing, and indeed all of motorsport.
Even in these extraordinary times of crisis, F1’s game of high stakes poker rages on off track. Franz Tost says each lost race is costing his team €2million; Claire Williams suggests her team won’t survive if racing doesn’t happen at all in 2020; Mclaren now calls for F1 to go further and faster with drastic changes to monetary policy: ‘slash spending and save our sport’.
Ferrari bristles, but will probably blink first in the end. Or the FIA may force the issue using fresh regulatory powers. A budget cap lowered from $175million to $145million by consent may be lowered further to $100million in the coming years, or even lower still. For so long unthinkable, this could become F1’s new lower-cost reality. Regardless of politics, the future – if F1 has a future at all – must look very different to what we’ve known before. Strange times indeed.
While F1 remains on ice we thought we’d use this month’s magazine to examine in more detail one of
F1’s major emerging storylines: namely, the growing ascendency of Charles Leclerc inside Ferrari, the subsequent recalibration of Sebastian Vettel’s place within that team, and Ferrari’s chances of doing anything of note with either of them once racing resumes, given how decidedly iffy the Scuderia’s latest F1 design looked during pre-season testing.
Andrew Benson (see page 28) has the inside track on how Leclerc managed, through the force of his personality and driving ability, to become Ferrari’s de facto number one and convince the management to shell out for a lucrative new long-term contract.
Where all that leaves Vettel is anyone’s guess, though the man himself seems determined to dig in and continue the project he began in 2015. Vettel might not be Ferrari’s new darling any longer, but as he tells us from lockdown in Germany (page 36) he still wants to be part of the Scuderia’s future, whatever that looks like.
Like everyone else out of contract in F1 at the end of 2020, Vettel may have to fly blind before he commits pen to paper on any new deal. As Stuart Codling explains in detail (page 38), the SF1000 wasn’t looking particularly useful before the season was paused. New restrictions designed to make F1 more sustainable when it does finally resume may make it even more difficult for Ferrari to catch up.
It seems the Prancing Horse is under fire from all angles in these strange times.