Racing people are fighters. They don’t shrug their shoulders and say “we did our best”. They say “we failed” and look at the reasons why and try to fix them. They might say that they have a disadvantage if they are fighting teams with three times their budget, but they will fight nonetheless in the knowledge (or at least the belief) that one day, they will be in a position to win. They will show the world they are the best. The big budget Johnny-come-lately teams – the Red Bulls and Mercedes – forget that part of the success in F1 is failure. It drives the hungry onwards, perhaps it creates dysfunction as well, but then part of the charm of the sport is that the people who run things and win are not normal people. They are extreme individuals. I’m not saying that F1 people are better than folk in the real world, they just have different priorities and different energy levels. F1 is a sieve that separates the wheat from the chaff and leaves the hot air behind. Never forget that Frank Williams spent nearly 10 years known as “Wanker” Williams before the team broke through; never forget that there is a reason that McLarens are called MP4 – because Ron Dennis had three projects that failed before Project 4 took over the McLaren team. Never forget also that Ferrari had times when things were dire and the racing team nearly died. They did not whinge nor pull out, they battened down the hatches, survived and worked hard and their opportunities eventually came along. Sauber has been doing that, Force India too, even Manor. Lotus seems a team that is a little lost at the moment, being not one thing or the other but the signs are that the engineers will put them back on the straight and narrow. These teams are the lifeblood of the sport, the people who are still there when the going is tough. There are many others that folded up along the way, the team bosses giving up because they realized that they had bitten off more than they could chew, or because they had got rich, or had bigger ambitions: the list includes the likes of Eddie Jordan, Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley and many many more. So to hear Red Bull whingeing about losing and threatening to pull out simply shows that they are still neophytes in this great game. Perhaps it has been too easy for them…
The view in the paddock is very clear, if they cannot dig deeper to win some more then they can go and no one will give a monkeys. Benetton did that, British American Tobacco did it and a raft of car companies as well. These are the users of F1, the people who come and go, not the hard core. Sadly Ecclestone gave the current generation of users more power than they should have, at the expense of the hard core, and the sport is now suffering as a result. The FIA failed the sport by selling its power to keep things sensible. That is unforgivable.
It will all change in the fullness of time, but racing people don’t want to wait, which is why they are fighting for change right now. One way or another the system will change and we can only hope that the next generation is wiser and builds a structure that looks after the sport, not just the people running it. In the meantime, may the best team win. It would be good if the playing field was a little more level but equality in all things is impossible.
In the meantime I note with interest that someone unknown has started a grassroots campaign to knock some sense into the sport. Grassroots campaigns usually have a face so the fact that this one doesn’t makes it more interesting, someone wants to give the fans a voice…http://www.saveourformula.com
joeblogsf1 
Ah Joseph, fine sentiments indeed but that website http://www.saveourformula.com is registered via a company called Identity Protect Ltd of Godalming. Besides this being not very transparent, a cursory Googling of said company reveals it is used as a front for spammers and scammers. Best avoided methinks…
No, I sense this is a professional job
Unfortunately, “scam” and “professional” are not mutually exclusive.
Could it be traced back to Princes Gate?!
No, I don’t think so. I think you may be getting things back to front.
Precisely, the gentleman is very good at that,
confusion grenades!
Professional as in FOM work, or someone (team/teamowner/…) longing for a new equivalent of FOTA or someone like that Joe?
Does look slick, although a little down on details. As F1 does need a bit of a wake up call I supported it.
But off course we will have to see what comes of it, as the last time we as fans were asked (the survey) it gave us tyres to degrade VERY fast (mixed on how good an idea it was) and DRS (meh) to improve overtaking instead of solving the way F1 is governed and how much money gets waylayed and badly distributed.
I think that Identity Protect do exactly what it says on the tin – register a domain through them and no one will know who is behind it. Interesting to note that they do not appear to advertise their services so they must use word of mouth recommendation.
So it could be anyone,even someone with a high profile in the sport – it could even be you Joe 😉
Sorry, forgot to say the main point which is a compliment for another First Class JS post. What is needed now is for someone to distil this analysis into a coherent action plan which the likes of the people/persons behind http://www.saveourformula.com/ can promote.
It’s not a spamming company, if you register a domain you can opt to not to make your details available and depending on who you register through it will come through as something like this. There is always a way to find out who owns a domain, if you have the time or inclination, which I don’t so I think I’ll just sign it 😉
At whose urging?
No, it is not registered via Identity Protect, what that compani does is protecting the privacy of the WHOIS record.
.com domains need to have proper contact details filled in, without proper contact details you can lose the domain. Identity Protect is a paid for service that allows you to own a domain without everyone being able to see who you are while fulfilling the requirement to have contact details.
Seems like they have thought carefully about how this is set up, as it is hosted with rackspace who are not cheap but do provide excellent hosting. Whoever has set this up (it may be a group of people of course) hasn’t done it on the spur of the moment, has decided to put a small amount of money into making it work. It will be interesting to see how much traction the site gets, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t widely publicised as the people behind this won’t just let it lie. Heck it’s reached a few (tens?) of thousand F1 fans already..
Thanks for a bit of tech background there Pie Man. Good to hear the setup shows whoever went for this step has thought things over and put some money in to make it work well.
It should mean that they are serious about it, that is good.
The domain is registered through 123-reg. They have a subsidiary called Identity Protect Limited.
One of the services they offer is to hide the postal, email and phone numbers of individuals who buy a domain. Every domain registry company has a similar privacy service. So if you use this, as thousands of individuals do, then the ‘who.is’ record will show Identity Protect Limited.
Of course spammers and scammers could hide behind this service (which is not the same as using the company as a front), but from a privacy standpoint for anyone registering a domain it makes absolute sense, especially if you are an individual rather than a company.
I have a couple of domains registered and I also hide my details. The who.is search on my domains shows almost exactly the same info as saveourformula (I also use 123-reg and have done for years).
Whether you want to sign up to this is your call, but to suggest it should be avoided because of a cursory google search is misleading and potentially damaging to what is likely a genuine effort.
It seems much more likely that this is an individual trying to do things the right way. The actual site appears to be on WordPress, but to give it a more professional look they have purchased a domain.
That just shows that the website’s owners don’t want their public details listed in a whois search. I do the same for my own personal site as I don’t want people knowing where I live (though I use a different company).
There’s nothing sinister about it at all.
Identity Protect Ltd exist entirely in order to hide the owner of a domain, whether the main user is a nefarious villain or a deliberately anonymous campaigner.
https://www.daily.co.uk/products/domain-names/domain-name-whoisprivacy.html
What baffles me is simply that there’s no substance to the “campaign”, there’s no clear indication of what changes, if any, need to be made.
Not at all – that just means that the real owner of the web site has taken the trouble to have their WHOIS data masked.
Almost by definition, all domain registrars get used heavily by spammers and scammers. Which one anyone registers their site with hardly makes any difference (I guess GoDaddy has at least been a racing sponsor, though!), so I wouldn’t read much of anything into that.
They’re also a company that sells the ability to hide your ownership of a domain
Others have done the digging around whatever the funny company is.
That’s irrelevant.
Is this about Formula One?
Who I know might get that site up in a hour.
What price a theme? Is the copy pointed enough to be a hardcore fan? Does it say what it intends to effect? Does it ask much to spread the message? Is that message coherent? Would someone bent on a change be extremely generic about their speech or pointed leading in with a contemporaneous open? Would multiple messages form the basis of a narrative campagn to get awareness? If there’s need to act has that been specified? Is the intention to trend a subject in advance to pull more punch? Did they list twitter hashtags sorry can’t recall. Or a Facebook account or vine or instagram Flickr and Pinterest accounts typical of pushing the channels to trend and get participation?
In short, assume it’s legit. Maybe lame but legit.
The domain is owned behind a veil. Well dodgy people flock to such veils.
But is this a effort that convinces you your time is well engaged and it has viable intent?
Would you be willing to pay for the site as it is if you had even a modest bit to spend on what you care for.
Would a flat broke fan do this?
would they be satisfied with the way it is?
Does it make sense to be a professional gig when less than four figures gets you at least the things I didn’t spot. Things that are normally very needed. Have the heard of IFTTT?
And last of all but first of all considerations when seeking viral or social media traction…does it pass the smell test for a high enough proportion of people? Nothing else much matters.
Identity Protect Ltd can be used by anyone who wishes to register a domain and remain anonymous, for a myriad of legitimate reasons. If they wanted to do this anonymously (as they obviously did), then they they would be forced to use a company like that to hide their WHOIS info.
That will just be a whois protection company that hides the identity of the real owner for their own privacy. Many companies use them these days. You will be able to make a request to that company if you have a legitimate reason to want to know the owners identity. Nothing peculiar there at all.
Interesting that a domain name search shows it listed to Identity Protect Limited
Identity Protect Ltd appears to be part of 123-reg Ltd (handling their domain privacy service) so perhaps one shouldn’t read too much into that.
Applying similar caveats, PR firm Sniffer Media (which has promoted this ‘grassroots’ campaign) lists Lotus F1 amongst its clients on its website.
The pertinent question must be: who’d stand to benefit if this campaign was truly successful?
Well hopefully the fans, judging by the mission statement of the website.
This is just a standard way of domains being registered if you don’t want your information on a WHOIS lookup on the internet. In this case this is the way that I think 123reg do it. I don’t doubt that some nefarious organisations will use this service, but the process and Identity Protect Limited is legit
“Identity Protect” and several companies like them exist only to register websites on behalf of third parties who wish to remain anonymous.
Maybe that wish is for good or bad reasons, but Joe seems to have an inkling that someone somewhere inside the sport is behind it. If that’s the case then good luck to them, because those at the top don’t seem to want to listen to the fans any other way.
Which just means it was registered by someone who didn’t want to show up in a whois listing (which isn’t uncommon or suspicious, in these post-doxxing days.)
That just means that whoever registered the domain is having the registrar put in a fake name in order to protect from getting spammed. It’s not an indicator that the person/entity are scam artists. The domain appears to be registered and hosted on RackSpace servers in the UK.
Anyone who registers a domain can hide their personal details for a small fee. It avoids junk mail and tele-sales calls. It doesn’t mean it’s suspect domain.
It’s costs nothing NDC… just use “whoisguard” at point of domain reg.
I don’t think Red Bull really have any intention of quitting F1. The comment came from Helmut Marko as opposed to Christian Horner, and we know that Marko is in the same mould as Bernie in that he says one thing to try and get another.
Yes, Red Bull are frustrated that things aren’t going their way and hence they are lobbying for change – perhaps more publicly, but certainly no more vociferously than the likes of Ferrari or McLaren in the past. This is the sign of a truly driven race team. they’ll fight for any advantage they can get, be that on the track, in the garage, at the factory, in the boardroom or some hotel meeting room near Heathrow!
As you are well aware, Red Bull have been in F1 in their own right for 11 years now, and prior to that as a majority shareholder in Sauber for 10 years. They are certainly no strangers to losing!
What are signs of Lotus being a little lost, if I may ask?
That website asks you to sign without telling you what it is going to do. It merely states that F1 is in crisis and that the spectators should wrest control from the bankers. Hardly professional. If it wants more support from me, it will have to give (a lot) more information.
That’s what I love about race fans. Give them the chance to have a voice and they see a conspiracy in it… Hopeless.
Sorry Joe, I guess the foul smell coming from the past political shenanigans of F1 (which some of us have, quite literally, grown up with) makes a lot of people wary of hidden agendas and lack of information.
Personally I think it’s a great idea but I can see why a very limited set of words and vague ideas on a website nobody has heard of garners some level of distrust.
I mean conspiracy wise – the F1 bubble has outpaced 24 as a hyper paranoid endeavour 😉
Sorry, Joe, I don’t see a conspiracy, just a front of a web site with little information
Did I say there was a conspiracy?
No, you implied I did – your reply to my original comment “That’s what I love about race fans. Give them the chance to have a voice and they see a conspiracy in it… Hopeless.” ……and as I said, I don’t see a conspiracy, just a website with no info.
That’s what I strongly dislike about the F1 ‘management’. It doesn’t give a monkeys about the fans and this (regardless of whether it is sinister, or not) is what the fans have to resort to, to even get a voice heard anywhere. Hopeless.
He said it doesn’t state how F1 should be improved or how this campaign will help advocate for change. I agree. It wouldn’t take most professional web developers more than a few hours to put up what they did. So, I agree it’s ridiculous for anyone to think “its slick appearance indicates an important backer.” Important, businessmen don’t spend time on little petitions
These days you can log into Companies House direct and see all the Directors for free. One of the directors of the aforementioned company shares a surname with a former world champion. Probably co-incidence though.
I’m a Software Developer by trade – people are correct to be deeply suspicious of any anonymous websites, but I’ve made a cursory check of this one over and first impressions it seems legit to me. I can find nothing obviously nasty in the public code of the site.
The Identity Protect contact details link to a chap called Matt Mansell (as far as I know, no relation!). He has a long and distinguished career in web services, so I would be surprised if he has any links to anything nasty. I’m reasonably confident in using the site, though I do think that if there really want this to take off, they are going to need to lose the anonymity and get a public face.
I am going to delve further when I get a minute, but I think it’s fine. If you’re worried about leaving your email details, downloading the PDF ‘showboard’ and posting a pic on twitter etc. is safe enough.
The ‘Red Bull can go’ view would be all very well in a world where teams with a genuine potential to run at the front were lining up to replace them. At least they provided a bench mark and wake-up call for those so-called ‘racing people’ for a few years.
As things stand, F1 is in danger of being ‘Manorised’ in the near future if it doesn’t get its act together. It would seem that those self-same ‘racing people’ are incapable of managing the sport to its overall advantage and require the input of some benign charity to do it.
As for the grass-roots campaign its ‘facelessness’ coupled with Ecclestone’s sense of humour suggest that FOM/CVC are behind it – subtle marketing research to gauge the strength of the ‘opposition’ – but I hope this isn’t the case.
@ Richie J – So you think that the Red Bull team are not the benefactors of benign charity ? (ok, you can question the benign bit). Similarly Ferrari with their unequal payments, Cars become fast because of good designers and these designers will always be hired by the teams with the most to pay. If we did not have the Manors of this world which can draw in new young blood there would be less of a pool of design talent for the bigger players to fish in.
Ferrari/Red Bull are the benefactors of F1 teams across the board looking after themselves rather than the sport as a whole. Lack of solidarity begs disintegration.
In its heyday F1 would benefit from underfunded start-ups. Sadly, the sport’s reached the top of its ‘s-curve’ development/popularity cycle and is danger of becoming a circus run by clowns.
Good piece Joe, thank you…..
This “campaign” smells very eggy.
It claims to be “grassroots” but, in my experience, no real grassroots campaign ever describes itself as such. Certainly, no *real* campaign goes to such lengths to hide its origins, or has such nebulous aims.
The domain is registered by a front company used to hide true ownership details.
Even the downloadable PDF sign has had all the authorship information removed.
At the very least, this is an exercise in building a marketable mailing list of F1 fans.
Identity Protect is just used when a personal domain name owner wants his / her address to remain private. So there’s nothing to read into that.
It’s not very clear what “save our formula” are actually proposing…
Identity Protect isn’t a sign its dodgy.. i use it on most of my domain names and those of my clients.. nothing untoward there.
Joe what were the three previous failed projects you refer to ? Motul Rondel racing wasn’t unsuccessful and didn’t Ron win also subsequently win F3 championships with the likes of Chico Serra and Stefan Johanssen..?
If they were successful why was Project 4 called Project 4?
Because it was a step up?
It’s hosted on wordpress, rather than an established ePetition site (like the many and varied ones used for the Jeremy Clarkson campaign!) and it uses the same ID protection as many other scam sites, so I fear it’s probably just a way of harvesting email addresses of F1 fans for onward sale to spammers.
Have signed anyway using their own identity protection company as the email address
“It’s hosted on wordpress”. That means WP owns their (published/indexed) content, and can pull it at any time they like.
Come to think of it Joe, I assume you know that? IMHO it’s far better to pay a few <$10 a month for WP through a webhost, ie cPanel; then it belongs to you, not WP. Just a thought.
I don’t know if your post was partly inspired, or if you’ve even seen, James Allison’s appearance on the BBC after the race this week, but he said much the same thing: “David and Eddie will know, most of this sport is failure”. You might say that of any sport, but it’s more true of F1 than anything else, even other motorsport categories. Sure, there are football teams who haven’t won a championship since the 19th Century, but they’ve won games. They’ve tasted victory, however minor. Most F1 drivers, and a great many teams, never win anything.
Red Bull seems to have forgotten that. Of course everyone wants to win, but most of the time they can’t.
Having said that, I’m reluctant to sign up to a campaign until I know what its plan is. Anyone can call for F1 to be “saved”. The question is how. I’m quite sure, for example, that the people in charge right now think that’s exactly what they’re doing. What do “fairer” and “more sustainable” mean? I have my own ideas, but are they the same as those of the people behind this website? So I’m not going to put my name to a slogan, only to find out later that the any measures they actually propose won’t do anything of the kind. It sounds interesting, but I’ll hold off for now.
I have not seen it
The James Allison quote is “This sport is mainly misery and then every now and again you get an incredible rush that makes all the misery worthwhile”.
I’m not signing up for the same reasons as you.
It’s ironic that the campaign has about as about as much transparency as the organisation it wishes to change.
Duncan. I am hoping that the act of supporting a call for change will result in a discussion about what that change should be and how it should be enacted. Having said that, I’m not sure that my position as a fan gives me the required knowledge or experience to fully push for how that change should be enacted or necessarily what is a realistic or feasible change. I have my own ideas, I think some of them have merit, I appreciate some of them probably don’t have merit if examined under the appropriate light.
I do not want to put my name to a set of changes that I disagree with and the fact that I don’t know what changes might be suggested could dissuade me. The absence of a list of suggested changes assures me that I am not signing a particular set of changes, nor recommending a particular set of changes. All I am doing is adding my name as a supporter of the general values espoused in the statements about fairer, sustainable, accessible and affordable. I don’t know any F1 fans who don’t support those principles, though I concede that there might be some. That these are just value statements is ok with me because I think the whole point is to gather enough signatures to prove a desire for change. There are many different ways of identifying, discussing and debating particular suggestions for what this change should be at a later stage of the movement.
Your ideas about what sustainable means might not be the same as the people behind the website. Maybe they are open minded enough to accept different opinions on this simply to get the numbers for a petition up and running. If we want to get bogged down in exactly what each of us envisages sustainable, affordable, accessible and fairer mean we might not get as far as any petition for change. To be fair there are dictionary definitions of these words which are acceptable to most of us for general usage. I’m happy to go with that. When the petition starts calling for particular suggestions to be enacted, then I will make a more informed decision as to whether I will continue to sign the petitions.
No-one has to sign. However, I think at this stage it is enough to want change and to want the powers to be to understand that enough of us want change. I’m not involved with the site, I kind of wish I was but I’m not, so I can’t guarantee anything to anyone. I’ve never met anyone that could though. Some people think it could be a scam, others suspect it’s motives. It’s the first op I’ve seen in a long time to add my voice to others calling for F1 to get its house in order and I don’t want to miss it hoping something that more specifically fits my desired change comes along. Truth is I am very happy with the value statements on the petition and relieved it doesn’t give a list of changes that could possibly alienate supporters for change. I look forward to that debate later.
I think he actually said “misery”. Made me laugh.
Identity theft website perhaps?
Yes, that’s why I recommended it…
Because Joe is behind it 😉
But hey, can we stop discussing the other website and focus on the article?
No, I’m not. I have opinions and put my name to them
You clearly know something about the people behind this website that you can’t say, Joe… most interesting… 🙂
Oh dear! Time will tell I suppose…..
Unsure of how good a recommendation this is Joe – there is no indication on the website of the number of people who have signed up for this – a basic function of an on-line petition – it just appears to take your details and do nothing.
I have yet to read exactly how the ownership of Formula One’s commercial rights is going to transfer from the collection of private equity funds led by CVC to a supposedly more beneficent master. Last time I looked these funds had a fiduciary duty to their investors to generate returns on the investments, not act is some unknown charitable way by tossing the keys back to the “stakeholders” (i.e the teams) and walk away.Anything less will have them defending themselves in court …
The book value of the commercial rights, in the estimation of the funds, is now too high for the teams to collectively borrow the money to buy out CVC et al and run the sport themselves. That ship has sailed. And there is only one person to attribute this current status to: Ecclestone. He didn’t have to sell the commercial rights to CVC, he chose to. At one time, when the rights were worth a fraction of their current value, he could have transferred them to a public trust that would have financed the sale/transfer with bank financing or bonds and he would have still gotten his big pot of gold. (This form of ownership involving sport assets is already known—witness the NFL’s Green Bay Packers)
Haven’t looked for any background myself, but what I would say is that nearly 1,000,000 signatures didn’t save Clarkson his job….many millions walked in London protests against banning Hunting with Dogs, and against the Iraq War….and no one in power listened at any of these protestations, so my Q is who in F1 from Bernie, CVC, the FIA, the Teams, the Manufacturers, the Sponsors etc, etc, who of them would listen if 5 million or 10 million did this Petition? I rather think Joe, that the F1 Bubble is too near sighted to even know we are at the Circuits!
What would be better would be for the Independent Teams, along with say some new teams from the USA like Penske ( I know they have been here before! But that was a generation ago ), and Ganassi, and some WEC private teams, to go to the Old European & North American Circuits, and do a deal to race a simpler car & engine package at say 12 Circuits for starters.
Then the hard pressed Circuits could just tell Bernie & Co to go forth and multiply, and we could all see how long he & CVC, Merc/Ferrari/McLaren/RBR would stay in the current F1 Circus……methinks Bernie’s Gang would be gone in a season at most.
It’s a novel idea, and probably the only way now to save Grand Prix Racing, as without F1, I expect quite a few old circuits will end up closing down and being built over, once that happens, there’s no Heritage left, which is truly a dire thought!
Well I guess that no number of signatures would save clarkson, sometimes the indefensible is simply indefensible and people need to take their bloody medicine and move on.
World history is full of examples of people petitioning, walking in the streets, broad sheeting and agitating successfully for change. If the cause is good enough or well supported enough it can be achieved, so,entires even if it is for a bad idea. Not always, maybe not always the first time, or the second time, but nearly any significant improvement in the lives of human beings have been wrought by active agitation. To quote a handful of examples that didn’t lead to instant change and say bugger it better to just give up is pretty poor old bean. That’s the behaviour of people who don’t want things to improve, they like them just the way they are thank you very much.
Damien, you go on about no-one listening, and then follow that up with a bunch of ideas as to how you think things need to change. Why bother talking about the independent teams, simpler car and engine packages if no-one is listening. If you aren’t prepared to sign onto a petition to try and force a mood for change why would you expect any of us to bother reading your suggestions. No-one is asking you to storm the FIA or take Ecclestone hostage till they cede to our demands.
Independent teams, circuit owners, potential future cosworth enterprises, Bernie, CVC, or the FIA don’t scour the comments on Joe’s blog in search of ways to improve F1. I’d like to think they do, and I like to think they should, but the only real way to get their attention is with a big block of signatures. They only understand numbers that can be translated into dollars and market share and dividends. The worst that could happen it’s that we are ignored, and in that case no great loss. Far worse would be to give up a potential chance to state a case for change.
You, of all people on these comments pages should be signing any saveF1 petitions you can get your hands on. You have strong opinions, your own ideas and plenty of energy to submit a lot of comments about how F1 needs to change or it loses you. Don’t use clarkson as an excuse for doing nothing. You can’t eat your cake and keep it too. Come on man, take a stand.
If it’s just people like me who sign the petition you risk an F1 with a greater reliance on green tech, and renewables, surely that also is motivator. If you can’t sign to join me, then at least sign to spite me.
“Identity Protect Limited” is the domain name “owner” that is listed when the real owner of a domain purchased from 123-Reg asks that their identity not be listed.
+1 Damain
Regarding Red Bull – after Sunday’s event, the silence from them was deafening. With the possible prospect of a return by Renault as an F1 team, do you think some of the problems between RB and Renault are perhaps caused by the fact that Renault have one eye on that return? So in that respect, they’re hardly about to develop a highly rated engine to be used by a potential competitor? Also, why should they throw money and time at developing said engine, when they can keep any technological breakthroughs for themselves should they return?
Perhaps they had been stunned by the general reaction to their threat to quit F1. Instead of “Please don’t go” it was “Go on then”.
Hi Joe,
Really happy you addressed this. I’m noticing that whenever the financial issues of the sport are discussed it is usually blown over the following week by a frivolous story.
Really enjoyed the race, but with the above sentiments towards Red Bull and the dire financial situation of many teams we could seen be faced with a very small grid and potentially 3 team cars.
How is this for an idea. Not absolute and do welcome your feedback, but perhaps something like this could work:
– Car is divided into 5 parts: Aero, Brakes/Suspension, Chassis, Engine, KERS/ERS
– Teams that produce these parts in house must make these available for other teams to purchase at a set price.
– No team can have more than 3 parts purchased from 1 team, unless they are that specific team.
The investment currently to get into F1 let alone to be competitive is staggering. My logic behind such an approach is it provides a pretty set cost to be somewhat competitive, not just present on the grid. Given the parts can be sold to other teams it also allows those teams with a greater infrastructure to do as they please. Let them spend. The plus side of this by making these parts available is the larger teams can recoup a large amount of their R&D costs by making these available to the smaller teams.
In the current environment where it is proving hard to win without being aligned to an engine manufacturer this allows far greater grid numbers, while not changing the grid order too much. Realistically those that have invested the most over time would still hold the competitive edge in the sport, while not running away with it.
Thoughts? Its either that or in-house auditors to implement a budget cap. That is the only way we will not lose more teams, perhaps even generate interest in the long term.
Wouldn’t mind being able to line up to buy tickets for the sport in 50 years time.
once cvc et al is done exploiting f1, who will buy it? the cost will probably be astronomical and the viewership, sponsorship figures will be way down. who would buy for a high cost and low value?
Remember the huge debt reduces its asset value to almost zero.
Given the recent history of how the sport’s dissenters have been treated by the incumbent powers, it doesn’t come as any surprise that whomever is behind this campaign should wish to hide their identity and protect themselves from similar treatment…
anyone can pay identity protect – just means they anonymize who WHOIS details for them. Identity Protect don’t actually own or manage the site
Giving these people your email address is madness considering the complaints lodged against this site. Even if it is a ‘safe’ site, (what is really safe on the net?) I refuse to be used as a pawn by an unknown group or an individual whom have an unknown agenda, perhaps an alternate commercial agenda that is equally fan unfriendly.
The fan’s ‘power’ is that if you are unhappy with F1 you have a choice, don’t go to the races and don’t watch on TV. Nothing F1 does is so important to me in my life that would get me all riled up and want to light the torch so to speak (internet wise) and sign a petition. As a practical matter, petition’s do not work. Kony is still out there…
There seem to be two types of groups that have a *major* issue with the current state of F1: 1. The small teams. 2. The rabid fans whom are easily manipulated.
Everyone else understand that F1 is a business masking itself as a sport. Most of us accept that anything we get from F1 that was in the interests of the fans was purely by accident. I’m OK with that until such time as I want to do something else on a Sunday afternoon.
Doug don’t use Kony as an example of the general success of petitioning. The whole Kony gig was scammed from the outset. It sucked a lot of people in and provided a lot of publicity for the people generating it. To try and compare the f1 petition with Kony is both disingenuous and wrong. The out the issues and fixes in the same boat is false. I don’t think the saveF1 petition is calling for an International manhunt or did I miss that somewhere.
Over the last couple of years I’ve been involved with a lot of petitioning, and we have achieved a lot of success. Organisations such as Get Up and change.org have managed to achieve substantial positive change with petitions. If you don’t want to light a torch and sign a petition that’s fine but don’t paint those of us that do as “rabid fans whom are easily manipulated”. It’s people like us that got you the vote and a whole heap of other luxuries you enjoy. Sitting on the sideline casting activists as radicals is pretty poor form.
If you are happy with F1 or happy enough to not get “all riled up” then good on you. Why you waste your time telling others not to bother escapes me.
Thanks Joe. I joined!
Identity Protect Limited is 123-reg’s privacy service, a legit way of hiding your details when registering a domain name.
Interesting that the WHOIS shows the website is registered to Identity Protect Ltd, as they’re a company you can hide behind if you don’t want your ownership to be known…
Bet you it is Bernie behind it 😉
Someone should give Marko and Horner the following list:
Maserati
Alfa Romeo
Vanwall
Cooper
British Racing Motors
Team Lotus
Brabham
Matra
Tyrrell
Benetton
Renault
Brawn
All Championship-winning constructors, all gone now though… Expand that to race-winning constructors and you can add in:
Ligier
Jordan
March
Wolf
Honda
Porsche
Eagle
Hesketh
Penske
Stewart
BMW
Yet despite this huge number of failed constructors, F1 survives and thrives. So Red Bull leaves, who cares? The high-pitched whine that has been coming from their pit garage for the last few years has been one of the most irritating things about F1 recently.
A small point but in the spirit of fighting back with the troops why doesn’t Ron Dennis wear his own teams uniform these days
He’s not officially part of the race team.
It’s called ego Dancelli
He’s too busy writing letters to the Telegraph blaming Ed Miliband for his failure 😉
Identity Protect is not a front used by spammers its usually used by people registering a website who don’t want to be spammed by others..
It merely mean that the quickest approach of identifying who is responsible just ends up at a dead end.
My money’s on Gary Hartstein… He’s a huge fan, fed up with politics and uneven distribution of money, and while some might say he’s a bit of a loose cannon, I think he’s actually a great and passionate ambassador for the sport…
I don’t think so
To be fair its not RB whinging but a couple of individuals spouting off their feelings rather than the hard working people underneath them,the rest of the team,i would wager, wished they had the likes of Sir Frank as
boss instead!
Best commentary on the current state of F1 I read in a while. Very passionate!
And right too!
It’s also inexpensive to purchase mass profiles of F1 fans. Hundreds of companies track us with sometimes unsettling precision.
Now think what’s going on and the motivations.
If as I suggest among the possibilities if this is a solo fan non professional in media AND broke, what does he have at zero cost?
Words.
It looks like it lacks any touch of professional input.
And the work is less than a weekend at Silverstone. A hacked off fan might easily chuck that.
And the one free option to get traction …
And all the others not deployed that only take a little time…
Too much is missing to conclude anything.
Has this site trended anyplace recently?
Oh and for shameless plug for a laugh if you have or are paying four figures and above for what I’ve banged on about I would be delighted if nothing else to disabuse you with aid some untaxing insight. The Web needs to move on not keep feeding off the tail created by unending recreation of the wheel, valleyite self regard amplified by the unwitting, more FUD than function and plain human frailty to mistake merely productised commodity visual polish for inherent worth value or trustworthiness. A public service thing but has been known the occasional apple falls from the tree. If I was touting though I’d not start here.Just I’ll gladly back up my take on this one on my own tab.
The company “Identity Protect Limited” is used for Domain WHOIS hiding.
For example, registering a domain with (and getting WHOIS protection from ) https://www.123-reg.co.uk/ will give you that information in your WHOIS data.
Though they may be linked to nefarious organizations, they are not guaranteed bad people.
Mesh Digital Ltd. currently operates out of The Old Forge, Godalming and they are owned by Host Europe Group who also has control of Webfusion and own the brand 123-reg.
http://www.hosteuropegroup.com/contact-us/
I’ve looked at the link and my first thought was; this is definitely NOT something that looks ‘home-made’. A very professional looking website. Mmm……?
“I’ve looked at the link and my first thought was; this is definitely NOT something that looks ‘home-made’. A very professional looking website. Mmm……?”. Nah, this is kitchen table stuff, with a little basec knowledge it’s not difficult 😉
Let’s see…
Let’s also not forget the late, great Ken Tyrrell. Another ‘fighter’ who tasted both the ‘glory’ (Stewart) and the other extremes, including tragedy (Cevert). A REAL F1 legend. I wonder what he’d make of it all at the moment?
I note that saveourformula has no proposals, just the idea that it should be saved somehow.
I figure it’d get more signatures if there were some concrete ideas on how this change should come about, and what needed done to actually achieve the right outcome.
Sure, we’d all love it to come back to FTA TV worldwide, but who’s going to make up the shortfall in income?
We’d probably all understand the fairness of a flat prize-money structure, built on 80% of the F1 circus’s profits, with the winner’s sponsors providing the rest, to a budget cap of match-funding. How would one achieve it, given the current ownership arrangements?
We’d all love more transparent regulation that allowed the “low money” teams to go giantkilling, but where’s the incentive for the “big money” teams to allow it to happen?
bigron…
I’ve noted in the comments on Joe’s blog many, many different ideas on the best way to save F1. A lot of these ideas are mutually exclusive, not all of them, but enough of them that they would divide the many of us who want things fixed. If the saveformula1 petition was wedded to a particular set of ideas it would potentially lessen the support for change it can generate. If someone generated a petition calling for a return to v12 engines, no rear wings, and grooved tyres, there will be a significant number of people who think f1 need fixing but won’t sign that petition. Another petition calling for reduced fuel loads, greater reliance on hybrid tech, and movable aero devices would alienate a different group who would otherwise support change.
Further, before working out the best way to fix something you need to know what the problem is, and before that you need to establish that there is a problem. If a petition to save F1 can’t garner enough signatures to demonstrate a significant number of people think it needs fixing then there is no point discussing what these fixes should be. We need to raise enough voices calling for change that we establish there is a subsequent need to discuss what these changes may be.
As for shortfall in income from FTA TV I am yet to see any concrete figures on what this shortfall would be, if indeed there is a shortfall at all. I would also love to see the viewing figures from FTA markets and estimates of the revenue they generate for team sponsors compared to the viewing figures, pay tv income, and money generated for team sponsors in pay tv markets. I’d especially like to see these figures for markets that switch from FTA to pay tv. I’ve never seen a successful argument proving that pay tv is any better or generates anymore income for teams than FTA. It’s generally an assumption. I’ve argued several times in the comment sections that the entire pay tv argument is built on misunderstandings.
Incentives for big teams etc… if the sport had a proper regulatory body with the clout to hollow through on its decisions then incentives wouldn’t be necessary. It should be comply with the rules or ship out. The size of a team should never dictate the rules or how they are applied.
I agree Joe. Somebody is listening to you.
Reading all the content of the http://www.saveourformula.com site, it wasn’t written by a scammer, it’s very good. I signed the petition.
WOW! Joe always straightforward, but this one is spot-on hard-core 🙂
Maybe it’s run by an F1 insider.
So how many Red Bull sponsored drivers finished in the top 10 on Sunday? They may whinge but at least they try to bring in the fastest guys they can find, unlike lower teams who guy for the guys with the deepest pockets.
F1 will be all the poorer without Red Bull and its junior program. How good were the Toro Rosso drivers last weekend?
I agree that their whining is annoying but I’d rather put up with that then see the team leave and another outlet for talented drivers is closed.
I feel like those that like to criticize Red Bull don’t acknowledge how much Red Bull have bought to the sport since their introduction in 2005.
“I feel like those that like to criticize Red Bull don’t acknowledge how much Red Bull have bought to the sport since their introduction in 2005.” .
I doubt F1 would have been any worse with out them. I’d rather have a Tyrrell, Brabham, Surtees, BRM etc. any day
Thank you for another great post Joe.
Great to hear the “view in the paddock”.
It’s encouraging to know that the long game players (I’m struggling for an appropriate term sorry) have taken that position. Over the last couple of years it has often seemed that everyone is out for themselves, but this smacks of a greater unity of purpose. This is quite possibly a year where some players will have to step up and push for a better way.
Your prose is both passionate and stirring. I hope it inspires more to put pen to paper (txt to screen?) and let the power makers know we care enough about the sport, it’s colourful history and legacy, to save what is good about it before it gets lost in a complete commercial void. Thanks again.
Never a truer word spoken. There is no secret to success, it comes from blood, sweat and tears.
Not always. Some people are just lucky
The harder you work, the luckier you are!
Definitely a pro job looking at the source and makeup of the site.
Hiding your real name in DNS lookups is standard practice, they’re using Rackspace servers and a wordpress based setup that’s well put together.
Also of note some of the photographs used are from professional motorsport media, so again I suspect someone in the know/involved with modern motorsport media in the UK.
I look forward to seeing how this pans out. I fear on it’s own it won’t enable change but it’s good to hear more and more talk of the need for it across the sport.
http://haymarketimages.com/sites/lat_photographic
It is not entirely surprising that someone calling for a revolution may want to remain anonymous, to begin with anyway. The’re only asking for two items of information (one of which can be created specifically for this purpose); most people disclose considerably more personal info on Facebook, etc. Yes the point is vague but thats all – as fans – we have at the moment, so get signing!
Could this be something to do with today’s date?
😉
You make some excellent points Jo, and there are few better placed than yourself to observe and comment upon what is now a surreal world that attracts idiots and ego-maniacs in equal proportions. As exciting as it still can be F1 is no longer a sport, and even if any sport is left it is restricted to a few moments on a Sunday afternoon.
A direct comparison to F1, in so many respects, is MotoGP where huge amounts of money is spent but the Team owners, and most especially the riders, are genuinely passionate, immensely brave and highly skilled, and evry race leaves the viewer gasping in admiration.
What is so often forgotten is that the F1 is only a part of the motor sport world, and that talent, endeavour and skill is found in equal, if not greater, proportions in other forms of racing all the way to Club levels. It is a myth that the F1 grid is filled with the ‘world’s best drivers’ for that is culpably not so and only 50% at best could be included in that elites description. Nascar, Le Mans, Indycar are just three disciplines where the top drivers could, and do, perform just as well as many who are heralded as being the best. The same applies to Teams, only the regular winners in F1 can match the performance and success of top teams elsewhere, mostly racing with a fraction of the F1 budgets but doing it with style and humility, and what is much more important ensuring that the fans get absolute value for money.
F1 is not technically superior either. DTM, Le Mans prototypes are two examples of where extreme technology is applied, and what is important has a direct relevance to road car development too. F1 can be wonderful to watch, and many remarkable individuals are involved, but it is increasingly distorting realty and before too long the truth will become all too apparent.
Nick Goozee
It is a noble idea, but no professional organisation would use a WordPress skin if for example they were an F1 team, and a WordPress skin it is, if you go to the site on a laptop, right click, and press view page source it clearly states it is a wordpress skin. Until they submit some detailed proposals this should be treated with caution
It is clear that the author of the http://www.saveourformula.com site is a fluent UK English writer. S/he uses metaphor and the semicolon appropriately. S/he never ends a sentence with a preposition. S/he knows how to write “proper” UK English. Or s/he has a good editor.
“Formula One” takes too much time to type if you are writing the expression every day; journalists typing a story write about Formula 1 and F1. Don’t bore the reader, don’t waste words.
saveourformula glories in the “Formula One” expression. It’s used every other paragraph in saveourformula’s single blog post. That’s what you get when you ask a professional writer who does not understand the subject to write stuff.
The layout reminded me of Darren Heath’s website so he’s my guess.
For me this is the best post on F1 you have put on the site, really made me think and it’s totally true, cutting out the hysteria following the first race
To the many of us who post comments…
I’m pretty amazed and disappointed in the response the saveformula1 link is generating.
I’ve been reading Joe’s blog, and the comments from other readers for a few months now. I see a lot of people, myself included, unhappy about the state of F1. I see a lot of people with a lot of ideas about how they would fix the sport. Some of these ideas are great, some of them are crazy, some are both, amongst them all enough good ideas to sort out a lot of the current mess.
However, when it comes to the crunch I see a lot of people rolling out a lot of excuses to justify doing nothing. I find people who sit around whinging on the one hand, yet avoiding any responsibility to follow through to be quite pathetic. You know there is a problem, you know it needs to be fixed, you are happy to come to this comments section and tell the rest of us how you would fix F1 but you won’t take it any further. For the cost of setting up a new email address you won’t take an opportunity to raise dissent with the current masters of Formula 1. There is no point, no-one is listening you say, yet every couple of days some of you log in and lecture us on how F1 needs to do this, or that, and how this is all the fault of “insert your pet hate here”.
Worse than this, are the people who will instruct the rest of is to not bother.not only do you not possess any tight yourself, you would rob the rest of us of it as well. Petitions never work, nothing ever changes… petitions can work, I’ve been involved in many successful petitions the last few years that have addressed and righted many grievances. The people who say petitions don’t work are generally people who aren’t involved enough to know if petitions work or not.
If nothing ever changes was true then most of us would not get to vote, own property, run businesses… We would still be living in mud huts and howling at the moon. The only way things change is when people raise a voice, when people unite for a cause and put their passion where their mouth is.
If you don’t care enough about the sport to sign a petition fine, don’t sign. However, don’t dare try and talk others out of it on the basis that you think it’s a waste of time, or won’t achieve anything. The only thing that guarantees not achieving anything is a vocal mob of naysayers. The truth is you expect everyone else to do the fighting for you, to carry the cause and suffer whatever consequences for assailing the breach. I’m going to sign it, I’m not so precious about the possibility of a compromised email address (you can create new ones they tell me) to not take the chance that this petition, or another I care for, might work.
In some countries people have to go to ridiculous and dangerous lengths to express any opinion or pursuer any change. Here, most of us have the luxury of hitting a few keys in a phone, tablet or PC and yet the majority always choose to sit back whinging about it whilst others do the work for them.
While you raise some very valid points, there is no flesh on the bones so to speak, all they are saying is they dislike the state of F1 and asking for an email address.
What measures are they suggesting to improve the show? How do they intend to go about achieving this?
If they had listed a clear set of proposals then they would have got a lot more interest, but simply asking for an email address and not having any clear cut plan is a good way of attracting negative publicity
Until they state what their vision is, in the words of Duncan Bannatyne, “I’m out”
DearJoe, all
Adam – couldn’t agree more, and well said.
I took a couple of high strength brave pills, and signed it. That’s 30 whole seconds of my life i won’t get back!!! So far, my brain hasn’t exploded, I havent been dragged by tractor beam into an alien space ship, and transported by warp drive to planet Zog for research, my laptop has died, but, hey, it was 4 years old.
Just had a look at the ‘why we’re saving formula 1’ and a quote from Bernie ‘We have lost audience, and, I want to know why.’ Funny, the audience drop is not new, and yet Bernie’s quote does not say ‘and, I am finding out why’.
It does concern me that, thus far, there are only 1391 signatures. Similarly, that I am unable to ascertain who or what is to be petitioned.
It puzzles me, human nature- people will wail & gnash their teeth ad nauseam, but, when offered an opportunity to DO something, even something requiring very little in the way of effort, the excuses fly thick and fast. I can’t help but wonder if it is a thought process on the lines of ‘please don’t do anything to change that which I am so incensed about, because, if you succeed…. I might have to find something else to be so incensed about.’
Or, ‘don’t throw in a rope and help me out of this rut, just fur line it, please’
Cheers
MarkR
Its amazing that so many fans have latched on to the web site “issue” I don’t care about it because it won’t solve anything but I am more interested in yoiur comments Joe about the Johnnie come lately teams.
I have no taste for RBR or the drink for that matter, and I find them thoroughly distasteful and verging on unethical. They seem to have painted themselves into a hole of ever widening proportions of late and its going to be interesting to see how they escape. That they have brought Renault to the edge is very unfortunate, and for the sake of F1 I hope that Renault do buy STR and RBR become a customer team for 2016. After the success of 2010-2013 one would have thought that RBR would have negotiated a better deal with them: one that recognized their “manufacturer” status. That they didn’t is their problem and their fault and are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
They are now in the position McLaren was in in 2012 and I would say they will be keeping a watching eye on developments there. Say what you like about McLaren, but IMO they have done the one thing they needed to do and bit the bullet hard. Yes they are miles behind but we know that won’t last forever with their combined engineering resources. What would be even better though is if RBR to a leaf out of McLaren’s book and ate some humble pie and stopped complaining that the world was against them for a while. Dreams are free I guess.
I disagree. Red Bull are not in the same position as McLaren a couple of years ago. Purely because they can walk way from F1. McLaren cannot. Well they CAN but really despite their recent diversifications McLaren is built on F1, revolves around it, has to do it.
This is what Max Mosley warned about a few years ago. There are too many people in F1 for what F1 can do for their marketing and PR rather than for the sake of racing in F1. Not just Red Bull, but the Mercs and the Hondas (this is what, their fourth spell in F1?). Merc and Honda, like Red Bull, will come and go as it suits their corporate agendas. They are involved in F1 but not committed to it.
Dear Joe, all
In response to bobdubery.
Considering how much it costs to be in f1, and, how, historically, costs have always ‘trended upwards’, whilst, at the same time, the reach of F1 as far as viewers goes seems to be ‘trending downwards’, except for the age demographic, which seems to be ‘trending upwards’, why ‘commit’ to F1?
And, as to Max’s comments about too many people being in it for marketing and PR… strangely enough, I think it was f1 which started courting the television networks, which increased the profile of f1, which attracted the marketing and PR.
Seem to recall that F1 marketed itself pretty well to CVC too.
How DARE the Red Bulls, the Mercs, the Hondas (add ”for profit’ corporations here, ad infinitum) come and go as suits their corporate agendas.
And, all praise to Ferrari, McLaren, Williams, committed to F1 in such a totally altruistic fashion. F1 has never sold a single Ferrari, has it? None of these 3 ‘committed’ teams have ever received a cent from F1, either, have they? Of, for that matter, generated a cent from their involvement? And, in their ‘commitment’ to f1, these particular 3 have, always and ever, put the interests of the ‘sport’ above their own, yes? That term ‘piranha club’ is so ironic, maybe it should be changed to ‘Society of St Vincent de Paul’?
Using a broad definition of commitment, you could argue that Bernie has been committed to F1 for decades now, and, CVC is pretty committed…..
Renault committed themselves to winning 4 on the trot with RedBull, and are currently whining about the lack of exposure they received, compared to Red Bull- though, why they haven’t taken it up with their own marketing department beats me?
If we are talking about (relatively) altruistic commitment, folks who are putting a lot in, and getting not much back- how about Sauber, Force India and, especially Manor.
I mean, for God’s sake- it would be hard to argue that the FIA has all that much commitment to F1.
It’s all ‘merchants in the temple’, and, the days of people like Ken Tyrrell are long, long gone.
The ‘sport’ is all the richer for it, and, it could be argued, the fans all the poorer.
Cheers
MarkR
The difference is that Red Bull are involved in F1 but McLaren are committed.
Think of Bacon and Eggs: the hen is involved, the pig is committed.
That’s the difference.
What is Kate Walker up to these days?
She’s still around, working for various outlets
Hi Joe,
I had a read of Gary Hartstein’s blog recently, and watched the video profile of him… between he and you I no longer read F1 news sites such is the unbiased and insightful views you provide on your respective blogs.
My thought is this, and it ties in with the savour our Formula concept… why, oh why, are people like you and Gary Hartstein not involved in F1 in a broader way?
You clearly know the business, have ideas to help rejuvinate the sport and yet no-one approaches you guys or picks up on any of the ideas put forward in your respective blogs.
It staggers me for example that Gary’s idea for an F1 Medical training programme was scrapped… or that, of all the millions of views your blog undoubtedly gets, no-one has come to you from the powers that be and said look, we like your views, can we take some of your ideas.
Maybe, as a 20 something fan, I’m being naive, but when two guys like yourselves have views and opinions not being picked up on by those in power it seems a travesty.
Just my two cents.