Green Notebook from Aspen Creek

Yes, I know that sounds like I have flown from Mexico City to Colorado to spend a few days skiing before popping down to Brazil, but that is not actually the reality.

In Aspen there may already be some snow on the ground, but the resort is still preparing for the opening of the season and none of the ski areas are open, no lifts are operating.

The truth is that I am at the Aspen Creek Grill, a restaurant located next to Dallas-Ford Worth International Airport. Texas is lot colder this week than it was when we were in Austin a week ago, but it is not Aspen cold.

So why have I flown north to go south to Brazil? It’s a good question and the only answer is to say that this is what might be termed “airfare logic” because it is cheaper to fly to Brazil by way of Texas than it is to fly in the correct direction. So while the hardy F1 folk who are going to Brazil headed off to Colombia to change planes there, I went to Texas and will fly direct to Sao Paulo at some point. I was going to spend a couple more days in Texas but the flights did not work out and so I am overnighting at DFW in the same hotel I was in last week and the Aspen Creek Grill is the nearest restaurant. It is a decent place.

It was a bit of a surprise to find a mountain lodge themed restaurant in Texas, but it seems that it was started by an entrepreneur who was an avid skier. He made a fortune with a chain of Texas Roundhouse restaurants and back in 2009 decided to try a different idea to attract new customers. This was not a huge success and so after five years he sold the chain (there were only eight restaurants) to Ultra Steak Inc, a company from Fishers, Indiana, where Michael Andretti is building his new headquarters. Nearly 10 years later there are still only eight of these places, but I liked the Rocky Mountain log cabin vibe, even if the locals were a little rowdy on Monday night.

This was because there are always NFL  games on the TV on Monday nights. I wasn’t paying much attention to the game but the Detroit Lions beat the Las Vegas Raiders. I did notice that a Detroit player with the unusual name of Amon-Ra St. Brown (right) was the hero of the moment, using some very fancy footwork to get where he wanted to go. He wore the number 14, just like Fernando Alonso.

It being that time of year, there was also the MLB World Series, with the Texas Rangers (the local heroes in Dallas) playing the Phoenix Diamondbacks (the bad guys). This meant that those in the restaurant who were not playing on their mobile phones were watching one game or the other, or both. The cheering was therefore somewhat out of sync with the pictures, which was a little odd.

Therein lies the problem of US sports: there is a lot of competition to attract TV viewers across the nation.  This is tough for all sports and it is why IndyCar long ago gave up trying to compete with the big guns and ended its season in September.

NASCAR is in the throes of its Playoffs, a rather haphazard knockout competition which involves a rather large amount of luck which NASCAR hopes will pull in a big audience, during America’s sporting rush hours. NASCAR, of course, has a huge number of races each year, with a schedule that runs from February to November and includes 36 events, plus a couple of non championship exhibition races. NASCAR is not a racing series, it is a lifestyle. The thing is that NASCAR is effectively a domestic series and so the travelling is nothing like as brutal as F1’s global schedule, although the pace is relentless and a lot of those who do all the races have their own planes.

I was pondering all of this, and the valuation of US sport’s teams, while eating dinner. The biggest of the big league are the Dallas Cowboys NFL team, which is reckoned to be worth $9 billion. They say that everything is bigger in Texas and that is certainly true when it comes to sporting franchises and hat sizes. Those twiddly little New York Yankees, from the MLB are second, valued at only $7.1 billion. Both American football and baseball are fundamentally one market businesses, which gives a good indication of why F1 needs to be in the US market.

The fact that the biggest F1 team is worth no more than $1.5 billion gives a clear indication that there is potential for more. And the TV rights revenues back this up. F1 made $780 million last year from TV revenues, the NFL recently concluded a 10-year $110 billion deal and the National Basketball Association (NBA) is hoping to land a new deal for the next decade at $75 billion.

Small wonder there is so much competition to attract fans. Americans, however, have big appetite for sports.

One does not need to be Hercule Poirot to spot that Americans also have big appetites full stop. Quantity very much trumps quality. Having polished off a relatively small steak, I was asked if I fancied a dessert. The waiter proposed a deep-fried cheesecake, which I rejected on the grounds that my arteries will be as clogged as a Q1 session and went for the healthy option: chocolate brownies with whipped cream, ice cream and chocolate sauce.

I felt suitably virtuous as a result…

Anyway, F1 is not doing badly at the moment, despite the best efforts of the FIA to cause trouble. I noted that last week Citigroup upgraded the Liberty Media F1 stock (otherwise known as FWONK)  from “neutral” to “buy”. The bank says that it expects F1 revenue growth of eight percent a year. If I didn’t spend all of my money travelling to races, I think I would buy shares, as I cannot see how they will go down in value.

Still, in F1 one must always be ready for and accepting of surprises. I remember August 1st last year when I was driving home from Hungary. I had decided to do the 1,000-mile trip in a day in order to get home to be a surprise attendee at a family event and so I set off at about four in the morning and drove… and drove. I was somewhere near Munich when I heard that Fernando Alonso has signed for Aston Martin, which came as a shock. I was not the only one who was caught out by the Spaniard’s Amon-Ra-like sidestep, which was followed by the news that Oscar Piastri had jumped ship from Alpine as well.

This left the team with its trousers around its ankles and a seat to fill. In the end they had to pay Red Bull to release Pierre Gasly, who was under contract with AlphaTauri until the end of 2023.

I thought of this when I heard that a well known Spanish  F1 journalist declared himself excited by a rumour he had heard on Sunday night, but was unwilling to say more. It did not take long to hear from Spain that Alonso may be about to embark on some more fancy footwork, with the suggestion being that he is not going to stay at Aston Martin in 2024, although he is supposed to have “a multi-year contract”. The word is that he could pop up next year at Red Bull.

This would strengthen the champion team and at the same time blow a torpedo-sized hole in the Aston Martin challenge. So that would be a double whammy.  The green team has gone off the boil big time this season, after an exciting start, and it is hard to imagine that Lance Stroll is going to step up and lead the team to glory. The best driver with experience would be… Sergio Perez.

Who knows if this is all contractually possible, but multi-year contracts traditionally have options and when Fernando signed for Aston Martin, they needed him more than he needed them… so he probably got the terms he wanted. I am pretty sure he would have wanted an exit strategy in case the team was not up to much.

It would be a move that makes sense for Red Bull because Perez has not done what he needed to do and although Daniel Ricciardo’s revival has looked quite good, hiring Fernando would probably be better. Red Bull would need to handle the drivers carefully, as Alonso can be prickly but at 42 he is not going to stick around forever… so he would fit the bill nicely until Red Bull has secured someone younger. Paying off Perez, who is reckoned to earn about $8 million a year, might not even be necessary. Driver contracts these days tend to have performance clauses based on percentages of a team-mate’s score. After the Mexico City GP, Perez’s 240 points were equivalent to 48.8 percent of Max Verstappen’s total of 491. If Perez is required to score at least 50 percent of the points of his team-mate, this could be grounds for the contract to be cancelled, without the need for compensation.

This is speculation, but it is based on the logic employed in the contracts.

Perez’s popularity counts in his favour, of course, but the decision by Red Bull to put Daniel Ricciardo into the AlphaTauri team was seen by many as a way to see whether Daniel would be a good replacement for Perez. The fact that Daniel out-qualified Sergio in Mexico was significant, as it is clear that the AlphaTauri is not as good a car as the Red Bull. Perez then crashed at the first corner trying to pull off a rather desperate move, while Daniel was able to finish seventh and help AlphaTauri move up from 10th to eighth in the Constructors’ Championship.

Would Red Bull refuse a proposal from Alonso? Such a move would blow up the driver market to some extent and most people would be happy to see Fernando taking the fight to Verstappen next year if the team is still as dominant as it is today.

If you look at the numbers it adds up. At the moment the 10 teams split $1.157 billion of prize money between them. The difference between the Constructors’ Champion and the second-placed team is in the region of $10 million, although there may be additional success payments that we do not know about, such as consecutive title bonuses. In other words, getting rid of Perez would cost less that finishing second in the Constructors’ title in 2024 because he could not deliver enough points. That is a good incentive.

Red Bull was in the news again over the weekend regarding its planned new wind tunnel facility in Milton Keynes. The story was that the team has withdrawn its planning application, which led to speculation that the project was being cancelled. Far from it. The truth is that the team has managed to find a unit adjacent to the main Red Bull Racing facility, which means that the windtunnel can be next to the drawing office. This has been achieved by Red Bull reaching agreement to buy the Trek Bicycle Corporation building. The change of plans will cause some delay, but the work should still be completed in time to design the new 2026 car.

The interesting thing is that the original site is still owned by Red Bull, even if it is adjacent to the Red Bull campus but not quite in it. The word is that this will now be redesigned and will become the new British end of the Scuderia Alpha Tauri operations, although the team will be changing its name next year. This means that SAT can transfer the current staff from the current facility in Bicester, 25 miles to the west of the Red Bull campus, and take on new people as well. They might even be able to reduce the catering bills by sharing canteens… The move will mean that Red Bull will be able to use the new wind tunnel for both of its teams for the foreseeable future, although it is likely that in the medium term the commercial agreements will eventually be tweaked to stop a single entity from owning two F1 teams and that the technical rules will also be changed to redefine the term “constructor” to include the requirement to manufacture more parts of the car, which will mean that teams will no longer be able to buy as much as is currently the case from a rival.

The goal of this will be to make the 10 teams stronger and more self-sufficient, and thus give them more value and more chance of success. This will probably be included in the Concorde Agreement that will run from 2030 onwards, which will give all the teams the chance to invest to create the facilities that they will need. Given the increasing value of the teams, the money required will be easier to justify.

Much of the focus in F1 technical matters today is on what happens in 2026. There has been a change at Alpine with the appointment of Eric Meignan as the new technical director for the Renault F1 engine operation in Viry-Chatillon at the start of October. The team took the odd decision not to talk about this which was bizarre given that any news at Alpine would be seen as good news after the blood-letting in the summer. But it seems that the team wants to stay quiet and let the results do the talking. Doing a better job in 2024 will not be easy because the Renault engine is the weakest and with the development of the current power units frozen until the end of 2025, there is little scope to improve. The best way to find performance is to create a better car that will mask the power unit limitations.

Meignan is expected to focus his attention on the 2026 project.

The FIA stayed out of the spotlight in Mexico – the President did not make the trip. Oddly, the Deputy President (Sport) was not there either and the FIA seemed to be represented only by a bloke from a minor automobile club who is famous for pocketing handfuls of peanuts at gala events, and by someone who is not employed by the federation but keeps turning up wearing FIA clothing. I haven’t checked the regulations to see if one is allowed to impersonate FIA officials, but if we did this sort of thing in real life, we’d be arrested for pretending to be police officers. I know this to be true because Dave, the former Honda F1 chef, was once put in jail in Monaco for turning up, dressed as a Monaco policemen, and telling the F1 truckies to stop blocking the roads. The curry he left on the stove ended up burning… Still, this might give the (independent) FIA Stewards the chance to test out their new powers to fine offenders €1 million.

The federation did issue a complex amendment to the 2026 engine rules to head off a potential problem with teams using their oil suppliers to conduct dyno testing, which is not  covered by the current regulations.

A lot of the limited paddock chatter in Mexico related to a story in the German news magazine Der Spiegel suggesting that the Audi project could be cancelled. It was reported that the new Audi CEO Gernot Döllner is not interested in F1. This may be true but that does not mean that he has the power to stop it. He has said nothing on the subject because, it seems, there is a convention in the VW group that executives in new positions do not make any public statements in their first 100 days in office.  However the CFO of Audi Jürgen Rittersberger has said that the various boards had taken the decision and there is no change to the project. He came out with these remarks when presenting the company’s Q3 results which revealed that Audi sold 1.4 millions cars, up 15 percent compared to the same period last year. The company had revenues for the nine-months of $53.5 billion (a big improvement) and made an operating profit of $4.8 billion. This is down a little on last year, but quitting F1 would mean writing off a lot of money and would be seriously damaging for the firm’s image and credibility.

Perhaps the project is behind schedule and the results of initial power units tests have been disappointing, but buying an F1 team is a good investment at the moment as valuations soar and can be good for Audi’s sales and image if the programme is taken seriously.

Down at Sauber (which will become the Audi team at some point) there seems to be little happening in the way of investment with the Swiss team working on this year’s car but seemingly cruising towards its next name change as Alfa Romeo fades out of F1. There is no sign at all of Alfa Romeo doing anything else in F1 in 2024 and the speculation is that the firm will turn to the World Endurance Championship in the future with one rumour being that it will take over the Peugeot LMH project in 2026 as the Alfa Romeo is a sexier brand in the sport than stodgy old Peugeot, which said recently that it is sticking to its mass-market appeal, rather than trying to increase sales by creating low-volume halo brands and models.

As I am writing this column news has broken that Mercedes’s Chief Technical Officer Mike Elliott has decided to leave the team after 11 years. He says that he has no destination planned and is intending to have some time off before looking at what to do next.

The same can be said about Otmar Szafnauer, formerly the Team Principal of Alpine, who was back in the paddock in Mexico for the second consecutive race, clearly looking for something to do in the future. The smart money suggests that his most likely destinations are either with Ford in its alliance with Red Bull Powertrains, or helping Honda as it begins its programme to supply Aston Martin or whatever the Silverstone team will be called in 2026, if the current ownership decides to cash in on the F1 boom and cash out… If it stays as Aston Martin with the Stroll family in charge, it is hard to imagine that Szafnauer will return, but you can never say never in F1.

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