Monaco is Formula One’s happy place. It is a race that would be laughed out of the FIA as too impractical and too unsafe were it proposed today, but so integral has it become to the sport’s sense of self that it is unconscionable that it should ever be excluded from the annual merry-go-round of races.
But Formula One arrives at its spiritual Mediterranean home under the threatening clouds of a political storm after a meeting of the powerful F1 strategy group last Thursday (May 14) delivered its controversial outcomes.
The strategy group is charged with recommending regulation changes to the governing body. Sitting on the group is the FIA, the commercial rights holder, and six of the teams, including Ferrari, Red Bull Racing, McLaren, Mercedes, and Williams. Force India also has a seat this year as the highest-scoring non-member team of 2014, but all other small teams are excluded.
Last week the strategy group was tasked with making meaningful regulatory change for the short and medium term to address the sport’s rapidly declining attendance and viewership figures.
Nonpartisan consensus suggested that the sport’s finances should have been agenda items one, two, and three – but alas, given the strategy group’s wealthy composition, the topic was given little ventilation.
Instead, almost exactly the opposite happened. The increasingly powerful pseudo-regulatory body both actively ignored the advice of stakeholders in its quest to create “thrilling races” and raised costs.
Its first transgression comes with its intention to allow teams to choose their own two preferred tyre compounds at any given race weekend from next year. Currently Pirelli provides all teams with the same two compounds to best suit the circuit’s characteristics.
The decision is just the latest sign of disrespect the sport has shown its sole tyre supplier: Pirelli said mere days before the strategy group met that it could never support such a regulation because it would empower teams to ignore safety advice and choose ill-suited tyres in pursuit of performance. Strike one for the strategy group.
In 2017 the sport will re-introduce refuelling, despite banning it in 2010 to cut costs and promote engine efficiency. Even ignoring that more pressure, not less, will be put on the small teams’ budget bottom lines, that the sport should wish to return to an era that featured historic low overtaking defies logic. Strike two.
In its noble but deeply misguided quest to “improve the show”, the strategy group stated its headline-grabbing intention to make cars five to six seconds faster per lap.
While there can be no faulting the will to ensure Formula One’s place at the pinnacle of motorsport, its express desire to reach this goal primarily by accelerating aerodynamic development, which is the single biggest contributor to in-season performance expenditure in the current era, simply baffles.
Moreover it is the current generation of aerodynamics that makes it difficult for one car to follow another closely enough to execute an overtaking manoeuvre. Investing more money will only exacerbate the problem while simultaneously pushing the medium and low spending teams further away from the podium. Strike three.
So it is that Formula One enters its weekend of glitz and glamour with anything but the photogenic Monte Carlo seating into column inches.
Unrest is growing only stronger amongst the disfranchised teams, and rumours are intensifying that they are poised to take the F1 strategy group to the European Commission to have it disbanded under competition laws.
Despite its alleged intention to restore the sport to health, all eyes remains firmly fixed on the backroom machinations tearing Formula One apart.