FOTA Championship in 2010?

Thoughts about the FOTA breakaway championship that was announced on Thursday…

I am convinced that development of this series is further along than it may appear. FOTA is comprised of multinational teams and manufacturers that are accustomed to long development projects that require a great deal of coordination among many contributing parties. FOTA would have been foolish to announce a new series at the exact time they would be starting from ground zero. Certainly, much of the groundwork for this new series has likely already been completed prior to the Thursday announcement.

Having myself been around to witness the “civil war” in America between CART/Champ Car and the Indy Racing League, there are very important differences between the two scenarios. In America, the IRL possesed the two key aces in the game: a huge financial warchest in the Hulman family fortune, and the biggest asset in American open wheel racing in the Indianapolis 500. These two resources meant that the IRL was built to win a war of attrition, which is what the American open wheel war eventually became.

Recall, that the CART series was branded the “Indy Car World Series,” and the funding infrastructure was based on participation in the Indy 500, which of course, was under the control of the IRL. Most teams spent a disproportionate amount of their operating budget on that one race, the Indy 500. Following the split, funding began to disappear as years went by without participation at Indy. The manufacturers (except Ford) and the big name teams (except Newman/Haas/Lanigan) eventually “defected” from CART to the IRL. Financially, it made sense in order to survive and thrive.

If F1, the fundamentals are different. The one race that may have more importance that any other on the calendar is Monaco. And there have already been suggestions from the race promoter that the event will not take place if Ferrari were not present. Important host countries have already been dropped from F1 such as France, Canada, and the United States. The site of the very first F1 World Championship event in 1950, Silverstone, England, is set to be dropped as the host of the British GP beginning next year. Unlike in America, where Indy continued to build on its rich history, F1 is currently disposing of its history in favor of moving races to the highest bidding countries that have little or no heritage in F1.

Instead, tracks that join a FOTA series would actually benefit. In all likelihood, sanctioning fees will be dramatically reduced by FOTA compared to F1. The revenue share should be more advantageous for the tracks as well. So would the threat of never being able to host an F1 event in the future deter these venues from joining a FOTA series? I doubt it. Not if FOTA would offer tracks better financial outcomes compared to F1.

Another important factor, ironically enough, is that FOTA exists because manufacturers derive benefits from racing for marketing reasons. This was a critical factor in the FIA’s campaign to make F1 less reliant on manufacturer participation and more friendly to teams like Williams, that exist solely for the purpose of racing. The reasoning by the FIA was that once the return on investment no longer made sense, manufacturers would feel free to leave the sport. What the FIA did not consider was that a core of manufacturers were comitted to participating in racing for the long term.

When these above mentioned factors are combined with the fact that FOTA controlls the big name teams and drivers of the sport, the sum of the parts suggest that the money train will end up leaving F1 and following FOTA, not the reverse. And like in America, it will be the money situation that determines which series will prevail. In this case, that means FOTA. Either there will be a new series that will overtake F1, or a radical change will soon occur in the FIA that will swing the balance of power to the teams.