How should Liberty shake up F1 in 2021? Drivers give their views

2018 F1 season

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On Friday Liberty Media’s managing director of motorsport Ross Brawn will reveal to teams how he intends to shake-up the sport in 2021.

Everything is on the table for the future of the sport beyond 2020: changes to how much money teams earn and can win, a total overhaul of the sporting and technical rules including a revised engine formula, new race weekend formats and more.

A revolution in the sport could be as little as three years away. Are F1 drivers excited, intrigued, indifferent? From the comments of six of them in Bahrain today, a mix of all three. Here’s what they had to say.

“We want the best for our sport”

Ross Brawn, Circuit of the Americas, 2017
The Brawn ultimatum? Why F1’s future hangs on Friday’s crunch meeting
Two years ago, in the wake of Formula One’s disastrous, short-lived flirtation with a new qualifying format, the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association wrote an open letter calling for a major overhaul in how the sport is run to “make it fit and exciting for many years and generations to come”.

Since then the ownership of F1’s commercial rights has changed hands from CVC Capital Partners, who placed Bernie Ecclestone in charge, to Liberty Media. The 2021 season represents their first opportunity to make major changes. According to Sergio Perez, the GPDA intends to do “whatever we can do to help”.

I’m very interested in how the future will plan out in Formula One. Liberty has the future in their hands of Formula One. We’ve seen the past year that we’ve probably haven’t had the greatest show and the audience is going down so I hope with what thy come up they bring the sport more together and we bring a lot of fans back.

I think now the GPDA community is more united than ever. I hope that we can have our voice and we are speaking together. We definitely want the best for our sport. We want to be working together with Liberty to bring the sport closer to our fans.

We’re going to be quite strong, were going to be united as well. We really want to be working together with Formula One to improve the show, to bring the whole field a lot closer. More competition in Formula One I think is what the sport needs and all the drivers we are up for it, whatever we can do to help.
Sergio Perez

Kevin Magnussen, however, takes a very different view:

I enjoy most when I win. I don’t care about racing, if I can win that’s it. All the drivers, their feedback will be for their own best interests. None of us drivers care about making the show better, we want to win. We want what’s best for ourselves.
Kevin Magnussen

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“Fans don’t like to hear ‘save your engine'”

Max Verstappen, Red Bull, Albert Park, 2018
Verstappen warned overtaking is too hard now
While accepting that drivers will inevitably have their own agendas, Max Verstappen believes there are some areas F1 can improve where they are likely to agree:

At the end of the day drivers will always speak in their own advantage. Mercedes, they don’t want to change anything. Other teams of course they want to change things. It’s very political and it’s very difficult. In some ways yes, but you cannot rely fully on drivers and teams because they will always speak in their own advantage.

But I think it’s very clear what needs to be changed is the overtaking because it’s not exciting at all at the moment. It’s mainly like qualifying and if something goes wrong in qualifying that’s it, your race you just follow and saving stuff.

I think also with three engines a year… I think fans in general they don’t like to hear things like ‘save your engine, slow down’. It needs to be flat-out racing. You should worry about ‘oh I need to save this engine because otherwise I might not make it to the end of the season’.

Of course I understand, with cost reduction and everything, they want to go that way. But with all the tricky engine developments and the engine in general being so complicated with all the parts, it makes no sense.

At the end of the day it’s not up to me to decide these kind of things but that’s feeling about it. I think that’s the biggest problem – the excitement and the overtaking’s not really happening at the moment.
Max Verstappen

Brendon Hartley, Toro Rosso, Albert Park, 2018
Hartley is impressed by F1’s efficiency
But while Verstappen is unhappy with aspects of the engine formula, Brendon Hartley spoke up in favour of the importance of F1 as a technological laboratory:

I don’t know all the ins and outs of what’s going to be discussed tomorrow. I personally love the fact that we’re developing race cars that are so extremely efficient.

I think it’s not always relayed the the fans how fast we’re going versus how little fuel we use. If you just compare with 10 years ago the numbers are quite outstanding. I love this point of view.

I think one thing everyone agrees on is the cars are quite tricky to race alongside each other with such complex aerodynamics. I think that’s clear from Australia we struggled to get close to one another. From what I understand there’s a lot of discussions behind the scenes to improve this going forward that the cars can race closer together without being disturbed by the dirty air.

In terms of the complexity of the drive train I’m actually a big fan of this. It’s really interesting being a part of it as a driver. It’s quite amazing the performance we have from these cars with such a little amount of energy per lap. And I’m sure in the next years in road cars, as we’re already seeing, this is the proving ground, same as it was in LMP1, it’s a proving ground for new technologies. I think it’s great.
Brendon Hartley

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“I doubt I’ll be here”

Some drivers are closer to the end of their career than others. Two of them offered very different takes on what the outcome of tomorrow’s meeting might mean for them:

In the end it’s not our decision, it’s up to them. It’s their business. They make plans and obviously take decisions they feel is correct. I don’t know what they’re doing now. I know very little about it and I’m not interested in it, so we’ll see tomorrow what they say. It’s in many years’ time anyhow. I doubt I’ll be here so it doesn’t really bother me.
Kimi Raikkonen

It’s always good to wait to hear some of those and see the future of Formula One. For sure that could or could not have an impact on decisions we make in terms of length or whatever we end up doing in Formula One.
Lewis Hamilton

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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14 comments on “How should Liberty shake up F1 in 2021? Drivers give their views”

  1. They should give 50 championship points each to KMag and Kimi for brutally honest answers.

    1. Both comments made me laugh out loud, which is clearly good for the sport. But for this sort of thing to work you need straight men like Cheko and Brendon to give boring diplomatic answers as a contrast.

    2. I think Kevin’s answer is not how most of the other drivers see it.
      Ego and selfishness do abound, but this is also why most of them want to win a series, watched, respected and loved by as much of the public as possible. Many drivers have spoken of their worry about reduced viewership and paywall tv, lack of spectators at races, etc. Most want the series to be popular, some only for their own benefit. Where is the accolade in winning a series no one watches or cares about. Motorsport nerds v the world at large, most drivers want the global recognition.
      They are all in the same series, it’s not going to make it easier or harder over a competitor what Liberty do, might as well try and get more people interested to see them in their moment of glory.

  2. Good and varying points. K-Mag’s a bit savage, LOL.

    1. Here all drivers make fair points but like what Mag said, officially the drivers end up saying what suits them and their teams.

    2. Yeah. What a great answer from KMag. Brutally honest.

      1. I guess what he is saying is one approach to an answer, but if he (strangely) doesn’t care about racing, and just wants to win, then he better hope the cars get less negatively affected in dirty air, that there is less skewing that favours the top teams, less complex engines that create grid penalties and ultra conservation etc etc. If he just wants to win, then he better hope the current format changes quite a bit, or he never will.

  3. My two cents:

    Let teams develop any engine they want but limit the amount of fuel available for a race.

    Eliminate wings. Or greatly reduce their size (70% – 90% reduction) .

  4. Roth Man (@rdotquestionmark)
    6th April 2018, 7:51

    1. Resolve dirty air situation/less dependency on downforce
    2. Sort out this engine saving nonsense and the grid penalties it’s linked with
    3. Try and close up the grid a little without ruining the DNA of the sport

  5. Well, next time I see Brendan Hartley trundling around in last place I’ll be sure to be impressed by how little fuel he is consuming.

  6. Got to love Magnussen’s honesty. He makes a good point too.

  7. 1. Get rid of hybrid engines. Put something actually technically innovative into the cars. Like 5-stroke V12s in 4×3 configuration for example. The direction of technology should be from f1 cars to road cars, not from road cars into f1.
    2. reduction of aerodynamics is important. Simpler front wings with less elements and smaller angle of attacks, bigger wing elements and generally less appendages on the cars. Standardize floors and make the wings more free but less fiddly.
    3. drs can go away at this point. We have engines and aerodynamics that allow close racing without costing billions of dollars.
    4. Make it easier for new teams to get in. Allow new teams to buy full cars from competitors on their first year. Second year they need to build their own bodywork and on third year they must do the same thing as everybody else.

    1. 1. Not going to happen.
      2. For sure but I would add that I hope and expect the cars to create less wake in the new gen too.
      3. If by ‘at this point’ you mean for 2021 I agree…there’s no excuse or necessity for drs if they’re doing studies and evidence based changes will occur from their two-car wind tunnel research. I predict differently shaped front and rear wings and an overall combination of wings, floors, diffusers like we have never seen in F1, as there’s never been the impetus before like there is now.
      4. I don’t think full customer cars are being considered, nor do I think that in a second year a team would change the bodywork much from the factory example, and indeed would just be doing the same as everyone else. Brawn has already suggested less complex and expensive engines that go back a bit more toward plug and play like they always were until the current hybrid gen we’re in where only the factory can implement everything together effectively.

  8. Give Kevin Magnussen some kind of political role, he is honest and does not care about political correctness. That is what the world and F1 needs now, more than ever before.

    Compare what he said to the jumbled up nonsense that Lewis Hamilton managed to come up with. When you are telling the truth it is easy to construct a coherent sentence. When you are not telling the truth, you get weird sentences that don´t really say anything.

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