mario wrote:DanielPT wrote:Rob Dylan wrote:Admittedly I don't know very much about Liberty Media, but this is the kind of attitude I can get behind. And hopefully now that Bernie has gone, the extent of quick-buck money-extraction races popping up around the world will stop.
"I think it's our job to do far more to help the promoters to be successful," said Maffei.
"Frankly Bernie's attitude was, 'How much can I extract from them?'
"I heard him call them the victims - 'How much can I extract, how much up front?'
"So we end up with races in places like Baku in Azerbaijan, where they paid us a big race fee, but it does nothing to build the long-term brand and health of the business."
This sends shivers down my spine. There is so much right in this, so much "let's put the sport back in the right track" that I feel the chaotic universe as we know and love it is about to collapse into a newly created Briatore-like black hole.
The thing is, it is one thing to make those sorts of statements and quite another for them to actually implement the changes in direction they are promising. I'd rather wait and see what they actually deliver on first before getting too carried away...
I'd also agree with your sentiment that there do seem to be a number of fans who have spoken about "going back to how things were", although invariably it is almost always a highly romanticised version of the past that has been heavily stripped of the less pleasant side. It will never be possible to replicate that vision - the world has moved on far from those days, and every attempt to try and "reset the clock", as it were, would almost certainly be a failure as it could never possibly live up to the idealised version that people want to exist and never can.
One thing that Bernie was (and still is) extremely good at is being a businessman. Some of the deals he pulled off for himself were extraordinary. Remember the time he was beaten up by muggers and then featured in a watch advert with his bruised face, implying that the watch was good enough to still. Not sure, he got any money for doing that but it probably did no harm for his relationship with the watch company.
Anyway, my point is the folks at Liberty Media will need to be good businessmen too. You don't run a sport for fun. It's one thing to say you'll take F1 back to the old tracks but when you knock on the door of the Nurburgring and find out that they are flat broke then commercially you've got a situation on your hands. Anyone astute would take the money Baku are offering before considering the "long-term health of the brand". A brand is intangible, the money is right there. Furthermore, given the structure of motorsport, Formula 1 would have to do something very wrong indeed to lose its position as the pinnacle of motorsport.
I'd agree with Mario's assessment of not getting ahead of ourselves. I like many others am excited by the prospect of a return to Paul Ricard but how long will it be before people still calling to axe it after one bad race?
