Just when this whole FIA/FOTA saga was getting duller than, well, the last FIA/FOTA saga, the eight big teams from the grid took the whole situation, as Brewer & Shipley would say, one toke over the line. The menace of a breakaway series has been used plenty of times over the months and years, in the protracted and pathetic slanging matches that pass for negotiations between the two sides. In fact, such a series has been announced before, only to peter out in a blitz of renewed negotiation and bickering. But with fully eight of the current teams onboard, the threat nevertheless conveys something more than just the fact that everyone involved with this fight is an idiot, it shows that FOTA has the power to seriously challenge the F1 oligarchy.
Before I get going with this one, it is worth pointing out something quite important: The breakaway series will not happen. As I said last week, the idea that these eight teams will be able to plan, organise, fund and execute the formation from scratch of a brand new, blue-riband motorsport series is laughable. There's the cash issue, yes, but there will also be the organisation of venues, the constant niggle of Bernie Ecclestone trying to sue them for every penny that they've got, the formation of rules and subsequent building of cars to those rules (I don't expect that the FIA will be happy for them to just photocopy F1's design rules and tipp-ex out the bits they don't like), and the organisation of media deals with TV broadcasters, sponsors and race promoters. All this has to be done before Super Racing Series Like F1 But Not F1 can get off the ground.
While it must doubtless be plausible for the teams to achieve such an organisational nightmare in the next few short months, otherwise their announcement would carry no credibility, the extra costs would mean that it would be far from their number one choice. Toyota lost $7.8bn last year, Renault hemorrhaged €873m over the second half of 2008, BMW forced through job cuts as it lost $917m over the last quarter of last year. Do these look like parent companies happy to help finance the ground-up establishment of a, let's be honest with ourselves, frivolous sporting event?
True, the FOTA side of the divide will have the glamour, the majority of the famous names and Ferrari (who are lauded as pretty much the constituent part of motorsport's irreplaceable elite, simply by virtue of having been around for a long time, and for the most part of it, been endearingly crap and Italian). But, as the more appealing Champ Car series proved after the CART/IRL split, simply having a better standard of competitor than your fragmented rival will count for nothing in the long run without the core draws of the brand. They will have no "Formula One" name, no Monaco Grand Prix (one assumes), no decades of history and hysteria to spin yarns about. All they will be is Superleague Formula with a bit more pizzazz, or A1GP with bigger wallets, or more accurately: a formless, nebulous, rich boy single seater series born out of nothing more than childish petulance.
Not that petulance is a trait missing from the other side of the trenches. This week, both sides have been at their most pathetically unlikable, whether it was FOTA's ridiculously pointless gesture of sending representatives to discuss the FIA's attempt at compromise which didn't even have a mandate to talk on all of FOTA's behalf, or Max Mosley's stubborn refusal to accept the idea of a deadline extension in order to get the situation resolved, both sides were being their own exasperating, Machiavellian selves. Quite how anyone out there in F1’s fandom can bring themselves to "support" either lot remains a mystery to me. It’s like trying to decide which invasive terminal disease you’d rather have coursing through your body.
Overwhelmingly, though, opinion on message boards, forums and blogs have come down hugely in favour of the FOTA teams, which is hopefully more a reflection on just how disillusioned the F1 fan community has become with Max and Bernie's belligerence in recent years than any ostensible belief that a FOTA breakaway series will in some way be "a better thing" than F1. To suggest that the eight teams will be able to keep their own distrust and dislike below the surface for long in any new series is hopelessly optimistic, reminiscent of the doe-eyed look on the public’s collective faces when they vote in a new political party to rule their country. This lot will be different, surely? Things will be better for me now? This lot will make the racing series that I personally want in my mind? And there really is a Santa Claus?
Thankfully, though, it looks unlikely that we’ll ever be forced to find out what life would be like having the rabid voices of the internet moaning loudly at two sets of organizational bodies at once would be like, because neither side, deep down, really wants the breakaway to happen. What this new announcement shows is that Max Mosley and the FIA finally have a powerful enough equal in the sport to challenge their heavy-handed running of the sport. This has proved that the F1 teams now feel confident enough, not only with their own individual worth, but with their collective strength, to be able to play more hardball with Mosley than ever before. This is proper granite gonads stuff. Mosley and Bernie will now have to enter an unprecedented period of negotiation in order to rescue the F1 brand. That effort will succeed, but this whole exercise will have been a wake-up call to the pair of F1 boss men.
And they will succeed because, deep down, the two sides need each other now more than ever. The FIA, much as they have been keen to affirm that they could live with the loss of Ferrari, or Toyota, or someone, are not as stupid as to think that they can live without all eight of these teams. A few new hopeless backmarkers joining the grid is a fun idea, an entire grid made up of Cosworth-powered newbies very much less so. The idea of selling a title scrap between Marc Gene in a Campos and Gary Paffett in an Aston Martin-badged Prodrive doesn’t exactly make your naughty parts start tingling in delight, does it?
Meanwhile, for FOTA, the FIA has provided a galvanizing tool to cement the teams together in a way you’d never have though possible a few years ago. It was only 2007 when the grid was nearly torn apart by the scandal of one team spying on another, let’s not forget. But now, they’re cheery and happy and all loved-up. Before you know it they’ll all be swapping mix tapes, etching their initials into a tree trunk and awkwardly snogging each other in the back of a Ford Fiesta. Without a central figure to direct their inevitable moaning and hatred on to, they’ll soon be tearing each other, and their new series, apart.
Or possibly, and worryingly, the FOTA teams are beginning to become too confident in their own pre-eminence. After all, this week it has been Max who has been on his knees and making concessions, with the 2010 budget cap relaxed, any remnants of a two-tier rules system removed and a promise (and it depends on how you view Mosley as to how much faith you put in that) to renegotiate a new Concorde agreement after the entry list has been finalised. But FOTA refused to budge one inch. It was an all-or-nothing approach often used by the FIA themselves, and akin to trying to haggle with the world's most stubborn market stall owner.
But overwhelmingly, the situation will somehow get resolved. No matter what cobbled together entry list the FIA release for next year on Saturday, FOTA's announcement is very much not the end of this farce, it's more like the beginning of a whole new angle for negotiations.
At least it hopefully is, I mean, nobody can really be this stupid? Can they?
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