Ferrari chairman says the "myriad of rules" is making "everybody’s lives nearly impossible"; Suggests past dominant teams - including Ferrari - lost sight of bigger picture and tried to protect advantage
Monday 15 June 2015 15:33, UK
F1 must strip back its current layer of “complexity” and make the sport easier to follow for fans, according to Ferrari chairman Sergio Marchionne.
The future direction F1 should take to increase its appeal continues to be a hot topic of debate within the paddock with moves afoot to make the cars faster – by up to six seconds – and more aggressive-looking from 2017.
Such is the concern that the sport is failing to cater for what existing and prospective new fans want, the drivers’ union has even taken the unprecedented step of commissioning a global survey to find out what people want F1 to be like.
Suggestions that the category has become too complex increased at the Canadian GP following the spate of grid penalties issued to drivers. McLaren’s Jenson Button, for instance, was handed a 15-place penalty for breaching the limit on two power unit elements for the season, but given the Briton was already set to start at the back of the grid after not taking part in qualifying, the sanction was converted into a drive-through penalty.
Sky Sports F1’s Martin Brundle expressed his dismay with the penalty system, tweeting: “Drivers lose track time/race results with engine/gearbox failures and also grid penalties, likely followed by time penalties in race. Too much.”
Calls for change have now been echoed by Ferrari boss Marchionne, who argues that F1’s rulebook is doing no one any favours.
“I like to see stands full of people, the highest number of spectators watching the sport and the sport to be a really interesting experience for people who are close to F1,” the Italian, who replaced Luca di Montezemolo in the Ferrari hotseat last October, told Sky Sports News HQ’s Craig Slater at the Canadian GP.
“The important thing is to remove the complexity that surrounds the sport, we have created a myriad of rules which have made everybody’s lives nearly impossible. You can speak to all the team managers and what they have to deal with in terms of the technical repercussions of any decision we make.”
Unusually, Marchionne even suggested that Ferrari themselves – who dominated the sport with Michael Schumacher in the early 2000s – were as culpable as other all-conquering outfits of recent years in trying to sustain their advantage through the rulebook.
He says F1 should now collectively “retrench” for the wider good of the sport.
“I think a lot it has been brought on by a defensive mechanism that is trying to protect people in certain positions, including Ferrari at a point in time when it was trying to preserve its period of dominance,” he said.
“It has been my experience running businesses that those kind of dominations always get taken out. We saw Mercedes come back last year with a vengeance; they have asserted themselves on the track which surprised Ferrari tremendously. But it tells you how feeble victory is unless you really manage it intelligently and I think we have gone too far. So I think we need to retrench, we need to go back to the real fundamental drive of the sport which is simplicity. We need to turn this into a spectator sport.”
Marchionne this weekend spoke out in favour of refuelling returning in order to spice up the show, but the Italian increasingly appears to be a lone voice on the matter among the sport's leading team figures. Although proposed by the Strategy Group, team bosses are thought to have rejected the possibility of its return during meetings in Canada.
Don’t miss the F1 Midweek Report for all the analysis of the Canadian GP. Former F1 driver Mark Blundell and F1 tech expert Craig Scarborough join Natalie Pinkham in the studio. Catch it at 8:30pm on Wednesday June 10 on Sky Sports F1.
