Today the obvious follow-up for journalists is to analyse the winners and the losers in the FIA-FOTA battle. The really serves no purpose. The important thing that there is an agreement and the sport can go on. The FIA retains its position as the owner and organiser of the World Championship, the teams get the governance they wanted, Bernie Ecclestone gets the commitment he wanted until the end of 2012. I hear that he also gave assurances that the teams would get a bigger share of the revenues in the post 2012 Concorde Agreement, but these things are not talked about openly. Max Mosley will not seek re-election as FIA President. He will no doubt move into the FIA Senate, as ex-presidents do, and it remains to be seen whether or not we hear much more of him. The big question now is who takes over and already the name Jean Todt is being bandied about. The Frenchman is Mosley’s choice as his successor but it would be a very unpopular choice with the F1 teams. Todt made a lot of enemies in his time in F1. My feeling is that it will probably not end up being him for this reason. The FIA understands the importance of F1 in its activities (hence what happened yesterday). The FIA does not need to have a hugely active presence in the sport, beyond being the regulator and adjudicator. Todt is also no spring chicken. He is already 63, which is two years short of the normal retirement age. It would probably be wiser to try to find someone in the mid-fifties, as Mosley was when he was first elected back in the early 1990s.
Whatever the future holds, the F1 world should be celebrating today. Now it is the time for everyone to get together and sort out some of the other problems being faced by the sport. Not to mention getting to work on next year’s driver line-ups.
joeblogsf1 
Really enjoying your blog and sidepodcast conversations joe. If I had any money, I’d subscribe to grandprix + in an instant
Donnelly seems likely. Otherwise just a completely new unknown from another world (i.e., other than the current FIA/FOTA/F1 miscellany).
But it’s an important one. Time will tell.
Joe: The F1 world might be celebrating… the fans are not. This is a missed opportunity for real change which the fans wanted. The fans are actually hughly dissapointed since for them no and for which they supported the FOA. Nothing will change for them. Let me just take one example which all blogs seem to put aside; but in nearly every FOTA poll was mentioned as super important: the price of tickets… I live half an hour drive from the Ring. In three weeks time Hosanna! But not for me. If I want to be there with my wife and kids for the weekend it’ll cost me rough 2500 USD. It’s cheaper for us to have a holliday New York! Compare this to LeMans series on SPA (1 hour drive) for the race day with the family I spend 250 USD…. and could even talk(!) and shake hands with the drivers. The fans will face another three years of same boring races whilst every one keeps on doing it’s blabla and all insiders are happy with the millions being devided. So my basic question to you if you can answer… what has this deal really done for the fans?
You make some very valid points, but would you be happy paying slightly less for an inferior product, which is what you would have got if there had been a breakaway…
Thanks for you answer; but I have two points:
1] how could a breakaway be in any way have been inferior. It’s what a lot of commenters have said but I absolutely would not have believed that. Ok Williams I grant you that, would have been missed but the rest? The real new teams Like Lola, Prodrive and N-technologies would have jumped in is my guess. Sorry I don’t believe it would be inferior.
2] I do believe it is in the best for everyone to have F1 reamaining instead two series; but nothing was done FOR the fans in this deal and it should have been included! Since they are the viewers; consumers and actually they are the persons that pay… So yes I might be naive but in a years time there will be again less spectators and less viewers; and again the same ritual: we need more overtaking and we should listen to the fans etc etc.
3] If the technical ruling remains the same for next year (but without kers most likely) there will be less overtaking then this year and be honest although a great crowd at Silverstone how much real overtaking did we see… Turkey? Oempf..
I therefore really call this deal a missed opportunity for real change and feel a bit dissapointed for the fans are left out in the cold.
Oeps there were three points actually :)=
Thanks for taking your time to react on it.
Heartily endorse k2san’s comments – it’s depressingly all back to as it was, as far as the fans are concerned. What appeared to be on the cards was the cars minus Williams, all of the drivers, and a very promising set of tracks, with the possibility of a number of the existing ones making the jump once the dust settled a little. I don’t see that as an inferior product. Bernie was/is at least half the problem, and he’s still rigidly in situ. Max has not gone, and has not promised he’ll go – I’ve seen him quoted as saying, effectively, that he won’t stand again, providing things look ok to him in October. And the prospect of Todt or Donnely – either would be almost worse than the devil we know! As for Luca praising Mosley’s ‘contribution’, about five minutes after being about as critical as it’s possible to be in polite circles, and news that shortly before declaring that Flav was a loonie, Max had flown in to Silverstone in the same chopper with F and Bernie. My brief assessment of this whole saga: none of these guys would recognise straight any more if it got up and hit them, and they all deserve each other.
Hi Joe
It sounds like k2san is very happy with the value for money he gets at LeMans, where team and development budgets are smaller than F1.
The attraction of F1 is brilliant engineers building exciting cars for skilled and brave drivers, flavoured with decades of tradition and history. If FOTA had gone ahead they would have had all of those components (and despite being a breakaway series would have had more tradition than FOM and the FIA currently offer).
Whether under FOTA or FIA we would have continued to remember Fangio, Villeneuve and Senna, and we’d continue our love/hate relationship with the red cars from Maranello.
Thanks to Bernie I don’t even have the option of seeing a F1 race in North America, FOTA promised to change that.
Joe,
I agree with most of the commenters that the “resolution” has been a little anticlimatic. Primarily, it shows you cannot trust any public statements made by FOTA, FIA or the participants involved. And, as others have already mentioned, what will be the final disposition of Mosley and who will take his place. Why does FOTA expect any real change.
As far as the costs of attending a Gran Prix for a family. It is utter nonsense to tax the fans in this matter. But, the costs really are not associated with the manufacturers costs. The manufacturers do not recoup their costs as it is. Joe, you said, the fans would be paying “slightly” less for an inferior product. The breakaway would likely not have been an inferior product. And, has anyone yet mentioned what the fan’s costs would have been under the Mosley cost cap?? I don’t think so. As it is the tracks don’t make money (some don’t anyway), the teams recoup some costs through sponsors and whatever Ecclestone/CVC provide with points/travel. The only ones who really make money upfront are Ecclestone/CVC.
So, we’ll see. It will be nice if the hot air stops for a while and reporting is about the cars, teams, drivers and the races. Keep your fingers crossed.
Probably overstaying my welcome (more than one comment per post) but I think it’s too early to think of the political/money situation in F1 as stable.
For one thing Mosley isn’t gone yet. He’s just said he will go. Given his track record those are two very different things until they coincide in real time, as many including myself have already pointed out here. I doubt very much that FOTA has completely shut down the machinery of a split.
The other thing is Bernie a.k.a. CVC. His dear friend di Montezemolo has just floored his other dear friend Mosley, right in front of his eyes. No doubt Bernie added some weight to di Montezemolo’s ultimatum (whatever it constituted), but the latter now has the upper hand in dealing with Bernie as well.
Meanwhile, exotic venues have been filling up with empty seats — not good for CVC coffers. CVC needs Ferrari (and all the “also rans” currently showing up Ferrari on the track) more than ever. Negotiations are likely in progress over who gets how much of the gate. Not likely to change ticket prices at the gate, but it will shake things up and who know? I did see a video of Luca and Max holding hands in a presser — after the Wednesday FIA meeting, I assume — where the former spoke of the importance of “tak[ing] care of the public…this is very, very important.”
He was not talking about ticket prices, of course, but about getting all the “legal procedures, polemics” behind and out of the sport. But it is gratifying (however sincere it may or may not have been) that he even mentioned at all “the public”, its care and feeding.
As for U.S races? Over here F1 is a very particular taste. And it’s a big country, lots of traveling distance. But as Indianapolis showed (at least through 2005) it can draw a very big house. (Montreal, just over the river, as well.) And those people came from South America, from Japan, from Hungary, you name it. The race was “at Indy” after all.
But whether the U.S. alone could support more than one F1 race, I don’t know. The public, racing and otherwise, is notably xenophobic. Average Americans rarely leave the country (or even their own county, in some cases), and F1 is “foreign”.
American race watchers also prefer a bit of dicing, believe it or not. They won’t be getting much of that from F1, based on recent observation.
And to be honest, they also like a good old smash-up. If someone dies, then hey, it’s just another legend in the making. NASCAR and the 500 are extremely popular, and there’s a reason for that over and above the noise and raw speed — the possibility of carnage. I remember at the Indy GP in 2005 how outraged many of the new-to-F1 fans around me were. “There’re not racing because of safety?!?!?”
So if Bernie excepts that he has start to looking at a market where most of the cars in the world are sold (at least until recently), he and F1 and whoever governs the series will have to work on improving the show.
A destruction derby as a warm-up would be one possibility. Just joking.
I agree as well…Bernie is the one piece that needs to be changed. He needs to stop being so greedy and demanding of potential/current venues. I was really sad that the Indy GP was removed from the calandar…because BE wanted so much money. I was at the 06 GP and there was maybe 100k spectators…which is silly considering that place can pack 500k+ for a stock car race or even the Indy 500 where you just watch inferior cars go in circles.
There was lots of speculation about North American courses that FOTA could come to, which I got excited about. Bernie knows that the US is a huge market, but rather than trying to simply exploit that, I wish he would work on F1 exposure over here and stop asking for so much money so that tickets were reasonable (at all venues) and we could add more circuits back to the calandar.
Talking about the expense of F1, yesterday I looked at the possibility of booking a last minute trip to the Ring.
Using a well know Irish airline, flights from Birmingham to Dusseldorf (about 2 hours from the Ring) were £10 each way including taxes (out Saturday, back Monday).
A small rental car from the same website was £55 and a weekend ticket to the race was €88 (the only general admission tickets left).
If you kip in the car that’s a total of about £120 excluding petrol and food.
Sounds like a bargain to me.
Peace is over. War is back on. Max has decided that he may stay. Plus ça change
I should have posted the following link. http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/76529
Joe, you are probably sleeping, but Autosport just published an article indicating that Max is threatening to reneg on the “peace” deal. If true, this man is truly crazy. October is a long way in the future and maybe FOTA should continue planning their own series. I wish I could be more optimistic, but Max is too unpredictable.
I thought there would always going to be a deal. There have been many power/money struggles in past. This time the players felt they needed to play chicken for real and drive straight towards the other until they really saw the whites of each others eyes. It was all very high stakes brinkmanship driven by huge egos. There is so much money involved, so many contracts to fight in court over. Only madmen would have kept it up until a head on crash, the clash and 2 series would have been a commercial and sporting disaster for both sides in the medium term. Regardless of Ferraris bravado that they could go it alone with their own series and be successful. It seems it would have been popular with many fans initially, but the first time there was a disagreement over rules (ah la double diffuser) FOTAs veil of “togetherness” would have vanished faster than a brides nightie, and erupted in war that would have resulted in the “world series” being decided in court months after the end of the season. This would have been a commercial disaster too. Fans want to know who wins on race day, this can only happen with a totally independant umpire not appointed or influenced in any way by the powerful teams. More money would have been spent in legal fees than on the cars. The teams with the big money would have won everything and new teams would not have entered. The manufacterers would have dropped out over time. Ferrari would be the last man standing, fans will have drifted away as the sport became business- boring.
However , I agree with some of the comments above.
Bernie needs to consider reducing some fees to traditional circuits that add so much to the history and tradition of the sport that increases the overall “brand value” Some I think should get special treatment are :
Silverstone, Montreal, French GP- maybe at Le Mans would be very cool) , Indianapolis , a west coast US race ( Laguna Seca?) This should be seen as an investment in the US. The US is going through a fundermental economic and cultural change , now is the time to invest and seriously promote the sport there with all the money Bernie is making. There is a US team next year too. He needs to get some long term contracts with circuits that really matter like Monaco, spa, . Some planning for 2012 must start now.
I am also concerned with one team having so much power, this needs to be addressed or it could all happen again.
Thank god they came to there collective senses or in a year or two, the highest standard racing in the world would have been diluted just like open wheelers in the US, which have really not recovered 100%.