Aug 4, 2008

Formula One Teams Organize for Future

Some might think the biggest challenge facing Formula One is Max Mosley’s sexcapades. His recent involvement in a sadomasochistic orgy has been amply detailed here and elsewhere, but the furor over it is just a smoke screen for a bigger issue; namely, the heads of the Formula One teams just plain don’t like Max Mosley and/or the direction he is taking the sport. And, important, they plan to do something about it.

That is why the chiefs of the various current Formula One teams recently formed the Formula One Teams Association, an organization that smacks of a similarly named and now failed experiment in open-wheel racing: Championship Auto Racing Teams, or CART. CART eventually failed, largely because the team owners thought they were bigger than the sanctioning organization, which led Tony George, who owned the biggest sandbox, to make the Indianapolis 500 the keystone of a new racing series. After a destructive decade-long battle, CART finally succumbed to the Indy Racing League earlier this year.

Now, just as NASCAR was experiencing a tire fiasco at Indianapolis that rivaled the Formula One experience at that fabled race track, the F1 team bosses met at Ferrari headquarters in Maranello to form a new organization that, they hope, will put a damper on Max Mosley and his plans to change the sport for the greener. Among his ideas is a plan to turn the race cars into hybrids by capturing energy that currently is just lost as heat during braking and using it as supplemental power on demand. That revolutionary idea is one of several of Mosley’s efforts to cut fuel consumption in half by 2015. He has also floated the idea of enforcing what some are calling draconian cuts in team spending in the same time frame.

Currently the embarrassed but unbowed president of the FIA has virtually unlimited power to make rules changes, since the former rules-sharing provisions contained in the Concorde Agreement between the teams and the FIA expired at the end of 2007. The formation of the team owners group is seen as a ploy to get a new Concorde Agreement negotiated with terms that are agreeable to the current heavy hitters in the sport. The fact that the meeting that resulted in the formation of the group also included long-time F1 strongman Bernie Ecclestone and Donald McKenzie of the series’ financial backers, CVC Capital Partners, is a very real indication that the group expects to have serious clout.

The F1 team owners have threatened to take over the sport before, but never has this threat seemed as real as it does right know. Still, we don’t think the Max Mosley is sweating in his (jack) boots. At least, not yet.