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The Undercut: Debating how the F1 team boss role has evolved
The Undercut: Debating how the F1 team boss role has evolved
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About this episode
Damon Hill and Mark Hughes dive into the evolution of the F1 team boss role, reflecting on their experiences with iconic team leaders like Frank Williams and Eddie Jordan. They discuss how the dynamics have shifted from personal, family-like environments to corporate structures where team principals often lack the autonomy and authority of their predecessors. The conversation touches on the impact of financial growth in F1, the changing nature of team ownership, and the challenges of maintaining competitive balance in the sport. Insights into the personalities and cultures of past and present teams provide a fascinating look at how F1 continues to adapt.
Topics:
team dynamics
team ownership
financial growth
team principal evolution
F1 culture
competitive balance
driver professionalism
corporate structure
historical comparisons
F1 regulations
You've heard Stay On Track with Damon Hill and Johnny Herbert, and now it's time for its sister show: The Undercut, with Damon Hill and Mark Hughes.
The premise of the show is simple: We give Damon (the 1996 F1 world champion) and Mark (one of the most respected writers and analysts in the F1 paddock) a starting topic and then just see where the conversation takes them!
On this first episode, the topic is 'How the team boss role has evolved in F1' - but as you might expect with two of the most thoughtful minds in F1, the conversation meanders into several different areas...
You can also watched this episode on YouTube.
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You're listening to the undercut with Damon Hill and Mark Hughes.
So Damon, today, I thought we could start talking about team bosses and you drove for
three very characterful team bosses, Frank Williams, Tom Watkinshaw, EJ, they were the
owners of those teams and you were talking to the boss when you were talking to him.
So what were your collections of that dynamic and how did it feel?
Yeah, so you were very close.
The teams were smaller back in when I was driving, it was 150 people at Williams and
that was a big team.
And if you went back not much further than that, then 50 people, 60 people, it started
off with like 20 people maximum would be a big team.
So it was much more of a family feel to going racing.
And in a lot of the cases, I'm thinking about Ron Dennis, for example, and Nikki Lauder
and then Prost, they were similar ages.
So the team principal, the team owner, the guy who managed to run it, whatever you want
to call them, they were almost the same age.
I suppose Ken Tyrrell was quite a bit older than Jackie Stewart and Enzo would be older
than some of the people that race him.
There was a time when, in the 80s particularly, the people who ran the team
were almost the same age as the drivers were.
And so that relationship was very different.
And I think with the generation after that one, you saw.
Yeah, I was just coming in after.
So just I was starting to slip out of that mold.
I mean, if you talk about Alan Jones and Keke Rosberg and Williams drivers,
they might even have been older than Frank, I don't know.
But they were almost the same age as Patrick and Frank.
So having a tough conversation with someone who's the same age as you
is different to if they've got an age advantage.
So when I was at Williams, I thought to myself, there's junior to Frank,
you know, and someone who had to respect him.
And I found it more difficult, I think, to be someone who could insist on things,
perhaps, or be forceful, because he had a natural authority,
but having been around for a long time.
But they were they were very important to those teams because they gave the team
the culture and they had every right to it because they own the teams.
They'd started the teams.
It's the eponymous.
It was the Williams team, Ferrari team, if you want to call it that as well,
you know, named after the founder, yeah, and so forth.
And McLaren was different in that Ron was actually an employee of the team.
But he was a founder member.
But he so he started Project 4, which was MP4, which is where the yeah.
But I mean, he with Neil Trundle, so he started that team up.
But he eventually was sold.
It sold off different parts of it.
But he wasn't a complete owner of the team.
But he represented the team in a massive way and gave the culture to the entire team.
Yeah. So what were those cultures like?
You Williams, Arrows, Jordan, how compare and contrast?
What were they like?
Again, the team changed according to the the team principal, the team owner.
So Eddie clearly was someone who was gregarious and irreverent.
And he created the idea, I think, in the team that they were they were rebellious
or they were sort of mavericks, I suppose, they were there to undermine
the establishment, which would have been Ron and Frank.
They were going to do things differently.
Yeah, yeah. But that now it's team principles become a devalued
title, hasn't it? You know, more or less an employee now.
In most cases, not all.
So you just, I don't know, you think how can you have
the vision if you're not empowered in that same way?
How can you say, I want to get there and this is how I'm going to do it?
Because you so they're just really in an employee position,
just just the same as anyone else on the team.
I'm not sure with the the T.P.
So the person on the pit wall.
So the Lauren Meck is now he's at Red Bull.
I mean, Christian would have gone to all the the team meetings.
I'm not sure whether he does or not, because there's another job
which the team principal used to have, which was to do the deal
with all the other teams and work out how the whole pie was to be divided.
And that so you have to go back to the early 80s when when Bernie started
in the 70s, really, I suppose, and Bernie started bringing teams together
to make this financial agreement between the teams and keeping everyone
together and and divvying up whatever proceeds there were.
And that that was another.
So if you imagine the skill set you need to be able to run a race team
versus being able to go into negotiation with Bernie
Eccleston and the rest of them, quite different kind of characters you need for that.
Yeah, as the sport has got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
So the size has sort of gone exponential as well.
And so those rules get, you know,
you can't have one guy with his hand around the arms around the whole thing anymore, I guess.
And I think that's that is sort of we're still adapting.
The sport is still adapting to that formula one is.
And when you see, for example, recently, we had
John Elkin, his head of Stellantis as well as the the holding group
with Jones Ferrari being publicly critical of his drivers,
but is one step removed from the operation of the team.
That's that's a tricky dynamic, isn't it?
I mean, that's that I think when you're in the middle of that,
it's changing all the time and it's still changing as the valuation
of formula one is is still going crazy.
I think this the sport is changing in ways still in changing ways.
We're not quite sure where it's going yet.
And also, you have to say that one of the attractions,
I think, of the sport was this incredibly Machiavellian
kind of fighting of the barons were come would come together.
And people were interested in that.
They were interested in how what was the divisions between teams
and the thought that some teams were aligned with each other
and doing deals, but it all added to the pot of the intrigue
that made the sport attractive, I think, to fans and in all different levels.
So I often thought that there's there's people who are interested
in engineering and obviously people who are interested
in the business side of things as much as there are people
interested in watching cars go around the circles or following racing drivers.
So it's got a multifaceted appeal, but clearly that's changed a bit now.
Since if you've seen if you're talking about the evolution,
we don't have the founder bosses anymore.
I mean, Christian Horner was probably the last one, wasn't he?
He was traditional.
Yeah, but he the reason it sort of fell one of the key reasons
fell apart was he didn't have equity in the team.
Yeah. And that was the fault line.
That's what broke it apart.
But up until that point, he was super effective
because he was given the reins to to do as he saw fit.
And he just built that team up, didn't
make all the right hires and he had that vision
that like a traditional team owner would have had.
And I think when you look at Ferrari, the last prolonged period
of success of Ferrari was in the Michael Schumacher era,
which you had Ross Braun, Michael and John Tard.
And they form what Ross described to me once is a force field to keep
upper management out.
They were probably the model, the first model of how a modern day F1
team should be run.
Should run. Yeah.
Because they they they delegated different responsibilities.
And John Tard has to be crazy, I suppose we've Ross Braun
putting Ross Braun, say, right, you I'm not going to interfere with that,
but you are going to do the technicals.
That's your forte. Yeah.
And I'll do the politics.
I'll do the making sure we're not going to get the rules
together the wrong way. You tell me what you and that's
what makes this sport really fascinating is that the battle is
fought also with the regulations, with the FIA and there will be
meetings where what's the technical working group?
What if it was called if they still have that?
But anyway, they will be sitting down these new regs
that are coming in for next year. Yeah.
They've not just the FIA haven't just gone.
OK, here they are. Yeah.
Actually, they were involved with Pat Simmons as well,
Formula One. So they've done them partly.
They've gone back and forward and back and forward.
They've gone back and forward.
An iteration process whereby hopefully they've arrived at a
in a kind of true democratic way.
They've arrived hopefully at the right solution,
the one that is best fit or satisfies the most parties
to make a car that is good for entertainment as well,
because it's got liberty involved in now.
And they so the whole style of Formula One really has
I think we're only just at the the foothills of this new era
where you've got evaluations of race teams
going up to 4.6 billion. Billion pounds.
Yeah. Well, no individual, only, you know,
very few individuals, Elon Musk probably one could afford
to just buy well as a frippery. Yeah.
And yeah. Well, the 5% stake, which is said to be
what we're talking about is worth 230 million quid. Right.
So that's just. I mean, that's that would have been
enough to buy a Formula One team a while ago.
Well, not that long ago would be enough 4.6.
If it's 4.6 billion, you could buy the sport by two of them.
To buy two, two of them. Yeah. Three.
So yeah, I think that that blueprint that you talked about
Ross and John and they I mean, they basically
look at them on the Zemmler, give us a budget, leave us alone.
And they protected each other's back to make sure that that happened.
And it lasted for as long as until they all got exhausted with winning.
But I think if you look at McLaren now, they've got a version of that
with Zach Brown looking after the commercial side of it.
And Andrea Stella doing the racing.
That's a good point. I mean, it's very much that model, isn't it?
Yeah. And he's also, I don't think he's got equity in the team.
I think he. And you know, no, no.
I don't think Zach has. No, no.
That he's all by the Barrex. By the Barrex, yeah.
So they basically, but he's done the job of going in there and setting
all up, putting on the right track and everything.
And so we will see over time.
Those individuals will move on to do something else.
They'll outgrow it or they'll, you know, have enough of it or
but then you'll have new people have to be brought in and the
but the what they don't have is complete autonomy over the
the product because the Tiroc, the Ken Tiroc, it was his team.
He could say what goes and so forth.
And that made a culture which increasingly former one is
and drivers, I think, represent this drives are much more professional
than they were when I was racing and the era before me.
They were Mac. They were what they also were.
They were Mavericks.
Yeah, they were Mavericks.
They they didn't fit in society.
It's like you ran away to join the circus.
You I don't want to do normal life.
But for me, that racing driver, that's what that was the appeal of it.
And that was the appeal.
But we're we're in the world now.
Can you go and do that?
I don't know.
But is is the the current generation that's coming into Formula One
and watching as fans, does that interest them?
I don't know. That's a good point.
I mean, you've got a totally different world for them and there'll be people.
So when I stopped that turn of the millennium, the last millennium,
basically years old, I was from the last thousand years.
And but 25 years ago, you've got 25 year olds who weren't born when I stopped racing
and they've never known a world without the internet.
They never know a world without mobile phones or computers
and and now probably social media, too.
So that is they are the they are the consumer
who will decide whether they like Formula One.
So for one in the sense will it's no good.
And they make they don't have a concept of a team owner as such as the personality.
So it's moving.
Maybe I suppose the model is more football in that the team is established.
It's got the name Arsenal or whatever it is.
And Newcastle and you're probably in your case, is it anyway?
And Newcastle, Newcastle, I beg your pardon.
But I'm from the south.
I make allowances.
But so, yeah, that's the that's the entity.
And so Ferrari, I suppose, is the model of that.
Plus, you have actual car manufacturers and brand names associated.
So they've got to have Mercedes.
The obvious example is that anything that happens in the F1 team
is going to have an impact also on them, on their brand.
They have to be really careful.
But getting back to my point, it was that the drivers have been
coached from a much earlier age in all the rights.
We say, right, they're coached to understand that what they say
is going to have an effect.
They are coached to understand that there's different aspects
to being professional.
And I think you see that in football as well.
You see that in other sports.
But when you could say that the sport we loved was when these
crazy bastards drove, you know, they were they were mad.
They were crazy.
You see the Villeneuve's and the Joneses and the in and hunts,
they lived the wildlife.
And that seems to be increasingly impossible.
And some will say that's a good thing.
But it's also part of the show.
So, you know, leaving them.
So I think that the new TPs will not be those Maverick types
or they won't be the people who are able to say, I don't
care because I own it.
So take the high road and the Eddie Jordanson and co will not
be able to do their stuff in the same way because they don't
own the team.
They're just employees and Lawrence Stroll on just he does.
It's slightly different, though, isn't it?
Because he hasn't come in from build it up.
Yeah.
So we had a previous little chat about that.
I mean, basically my impression is that there are
people who come to the sport and learn it from the top
down and then there's those who have worked from the ground up
like the Ron Dennises and you might say Andrea Stella's
or something like that.
They've been in at the ground level or even Stefano Domenicali.
So they do get it.
But maybe they've never risen to the heights of someone
like Lawrence Stroll who can buy an entire Formula One
team and a car company.
But you're learning backwards that way.
And it's quite difficult, I think, to get a hand.
You can waste a lot of money.
Yeah, I was going to say, I think it's difficult.
It's expensive as well.
And I'm sure Lawrence would confirm that.
But he does seem, to me at least, he does seem to be slowly
over time making the right moves.
He does seem to be learning how to do it.
And a lot of very successful businessmen
come into motor racing in all forms and assume
because of being successful in business will be successful in this.
But I think running a Formula One team, especially a modern day
Formula One team, is probably one of the most complex
managerial exercises that exists on the planet.
Probably more difficult to run a car company,
an automotive company, just in terms of the nuances
and how they're always changing
and how you're going to keep on top of that.
And that dynamic between your engineering and the people
and what everybody else is doing, the game theory aspect of it,
I think it's just extraordinary.
And I don't think just because you've
been successful elsewhere, you will automatically be that.
And I think if you're being critical of someone like John
Elkin, I think he would need that.
Does he fully understand that distinction between being
successful in the world that he's been in and looking at something
that he's in charge of and not being satisfied with its success?
And then how do you take the appropriate action?
And I think that's where it gets very tricky when you have
the power, but not the experience and the feel for it all.
So he has the power to completely demoralize and demotivate
the entire organization and make them feel
nervous, which is the last thing you want.
Absolutely.
I mean, Toto clearly, I think, is someone who has got,
he's had the financial experience.
So he understands all the contours on a board of Mercedes
being a member of there and he understands their language
and also money.
And he also understands a team and creating a culture whereby
the no blame culture famously, he tried to instill in Mercedes,
which was, you know, we're not looking for culprits.
We're trying to learn from mistakes.
And that's a modern way of thinking.
And so he's managed to do that.
But then he, you could argue that it's not a fair comparison
because he's come up through motorsport.
He always wants to do motor racing.
And then he started with the German touring cars
running their Mercedes motorsport.
So he's as much ingrained with him as a manager.
He embodies those two different skill sets you need.
I mean, but I think, you know, when do you,
what the entertainment needs is they need the head.
I suppose that there will be like football coaches.
So it will be, now there will be,
it's not impossible to imagine a charismatic
football coach type person being put in a position
at the team to get results by the board,
by the owners, by the, by Mercedes or wherever it is.
And also providing entertainment
because that still exists in football.
But I think it's, it is much,
they're juggling many more different things.
As you say, it's the technology.
It takes, you know, I'm sure that there'll be people
who've got all the money like Lawrence Stroll
and go, I want a wind tunnel.
Then I want it to work.
You tell me it doesn't work
and I have to spend, I guess,
50 million or 100 million on it.
You know, why is it not working?
It's the wrong one.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I mean, Adrian did say something.
I think he went and he went,
hmm, we're going to have to start again.
Simulated as about,
it's going to take us about five years to put that, right?
Yeah, great.
Not way on it.
Yeah.
I just paid a fortune to get you to come and tell me
it's like plumbers, isn't it?
When they turn it, go, I don't know, do that.
Yeah.
They always do it.
They say, wow, D, you should have got me first.
Anyway, I'm going to take me five years
to sort this out.
Well, let's see.
It's going to be a lot cheaper
to get your plumbing fixed, I mean.
But yeah, so it is interesting where we're at
with seeing an evolution.
Is it better?
Is it a better show?
I mean, are those characters,
they're more beholden, aren't they,
for their jobs to the team?
They're less likely to say something controversial,
I think, or entertaining than the Jordans.
I mean, not that Frank said anything entertaining.
He did, once the twist says something pithy.
Patrick Head was much more entertaining.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And what was the most pithy thing Frank ever said to you?
Oh, God, I mean, I think there was something,
print, there was a back page of the song that was one word.
It wasn't terribly complimentary.
But no, he was a man of few words.
You know him probably better than I did.
No, I don't think so.
No, you don't think so, no.
But yeah, he knew that people like we're doing,
there's a lot of talk about stuff
in Formula One, but actually it's what you do.
He could do a very good impression
because he was originally from South Shields,
so he'd do an impression of me asking the question.
Did he really?
Yeah, it was very good.
That's another side chin that I never saw.
He did do an impression of me.
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Was there a downside to that,
to having the boss plugged into the mains power directly?
Was there a downside to that for you?
Like, do you feel like more victim of the whims of...
Well, I think if you've got a person,
I mean, Frank was on the floor of a factory every day.
He'd go down, he'd see the people in the factory.
He'd be there, he'd lived in the factory.
So if you've got an issue, you go to him,
because he knows, and he knows what you're talking about.
He knows, whereas with, you've got these removed entities,
like the Elkins perhaps,
how do you get to speak to them?
If you're an employee, there's 1,200 people.
Can you pick up the phone to Toto?
I mean, via some sort of other route,
maybe you can express your opinion,
but you're less likely to, I would think.
Yeah, you might get told you should stop talking
and just concentrate on driving.
Yeah, well, that's not the best way to ask,
because we can't drive and we've got to talk,
so we'd be ruined, but yeah.
So, I mean, I think it's...
It is...
We are losing that dimension to the sport
where the teams are there,
but they're becoming more protected
from anything that is approaching
an individual personality,
because as you know, in business,
they're worried about, people worry about an interview.
We might do anything.
You don't know what they're gonna do.
You know, they could go off the rails,
they could say something stupid.
So, they're a risk,
but they are really, it was a dimension
that made Formula One very, very interesting and intriguing.
Yeah, it was.
Yeah, yeah.
Just remember, we were talking before about
how a team boss used to have to go in
and do the negotiation with all the other teams
and do the negotiation with the FIA
and manage the books of the team and then run the team.
There was, I remember Patrick telling me a little anecdote once
about the six-wheeler that developed in the early 80s,
and it was four-driven wheels at the back
and little small wheels,
and it was fantastically fast,
because what it did was increase the size of the Venturi,
so it had massively more ground effect than a conventional car,
and it didn't have the big wheels in the way of the exits.
Clever.
They were testing it with first Alan Jones
and later Keky Rosberg,
and they hadn't yet got to the point where they could race it
because the transmission wasn't yet reliable
and the other thing it had was fantastic traction in the wet
because the first set of wheels would clear a dry patch
for the second set, which would really push.
Yeah, amazing.
Conceptually, it's perfect.
It was brilliant.
And Patrick said Frank had been off to the latest meeting
with the team bosses and the FIA, and they come back.
And Patrick said, anything get decided?
And Frank said, no, not much.
We voted through the ban on four-wheel drive.
And he said, you did what?
He said, yeah, why?
He said, well, what were we just
been doing for the last two years?
He said, oh, I knew it was a six-wheeler.
I didn't know it was four-wheel drive.
Yeah.
That's why communication is so important, isn't it?
Yeah.
Can you imagine Patrick comes to the force?
I think that was constantly Patrick's frustration
was he Frank was doing that sort of thing at the time
because it was his team, ultimately.
And I think he just thought, well, I can do all I like.
But he's also going into a meeting.
I have no idea.
But you hear these stories and there's some great books
out there about how it used to be
and how it was all put together.
Focum meetings would have been entertaining.
And you hear anecdotal stories about who said what to what
and to whom and all the goings on.
And people like Max Mosley going through the waste paper
basket because they'd turn all their notes away
and then find out exactly what they were thinking
and all this stuff was very far from our point of view.
It was quite funny because we weren't involved.
It didn't cost us millions of millions of pounds.
But that was a small family, wasn't it?
And that's the problem.
It was a cliquey thing, a small family.
And they fought like absolute animals with each other.
And it was ruthless as hell, the Piranha Club famously.
But it had to stop, I guess.
If you want to go beyond, and I
think that that's what's happened to Fallen on now,
it has gone beyond because Bernie had his limitations.
He didn't understand social media.
He didn't understand the internet.
He didn't understand where value, extra value could come from,
whereas liberty had.
Yeah.
And I think we thought the end of the Bernie era
was the absolute top, the value of Fallen on, didn't we?
Well, I mean, he famously sold.
I think it was he sold a slug of F1
without asking all the other Focum members.
And that's where it all started to get a bit.
Who owns this, anyway, kind of an argument.
And yeah, but the slug he sold valued, who was the person?
Who was the financing that bought it?
Oh, the banker, the German banker guy.
I don't know when you're talking about the thing.
The Deutsche Bank guy.
No, he, that was another story.
But we can't get a better point.
The valuation made Formula One worth 1.2 billion or something.
And I remember thinking, I'd never heard of a billion anything.
So shit, a bit of pounds, dollars, you know,
per se, I'd never heard of a billion in money of anything.
And that, of course, is just small fry now.
But yeah, this inexorable rise in value
because it's gone to another level.
But as it expands, it's attracting more.
Yeah.
They're thinking, right, this is the new ground floor.
That's right, yeah.
And then they go in, they go,
how much is it?
It's 4.6.
They go, yeah, OK, where do I sign?
Yeah, we'll be 10 next year.
Yeah, it sounded ridiculous.
But it was only before the Brad Pitt film,
which was the latest boost to the valuation of F1,
because these teams are franchises.
So the valuation of F1 and the team's just
Incredible, the most successful product
that's Apple TV films have produced.
And the most successful film that Brad Pitt's been in.
Yes.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
So people inevitably think, what is this thing for, the one?
Yeah.
And that's just off the back of a previous boost
of Netflix, so the drive to survive.
So beyond Bernie's imaginings, if you can believe that,
you know, and we used to think Bernie
thought bigger than everyone else.
I mean, because when I stopped racing,
he was doing digital TV.
He's invested quite a lot of money
and a massive amount of money
into this thing called digital television.
And he saw, he was always 20 years ahead.
So he saw that something's coming down the line
and it's pay-per-view and it's digital.
He was right, it's just he was 20 years too soon.
And then it's the same with China.
You know, he had a Grand Prix in China
of 20 years before it started to come on song.
But what's happened since is this ability now
for fans to engage in their own way.
So now we watched and we think nothing of it,
but you'll see a different angle of an incident
that the TV cameras didn't catch.
For instance, Bortoletto's accident in, oh my God.
I mean, you watched that from the grandstand.
Someone's videoing it.
It's a lot more shocking than it was from the TV coverage.
But that's been allowed by Liberty.
They said, okay, you can film.
You'll take your cameras to the track,
take film stuff, we won't stop you.
Which is bigger picture in a stuff,
which is beyond, I think those guys,
because perhaps because they went into a board meeting
with only 10 other guys,
they felt very much like people are trying to get in
and we need to stop them trying to take our stuff.
And it was very protective.
Yeah, you're not having it.
And the more I say to you, you can't have it.
The more you want it and the higher the price goes.
Well, as recently as 2007, 2008,
after the Photoshop industrial espionage scandal,
so-called scandal.
I think you mean to look off in, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, Stephanie Gate,
so we call that.
There was apparently a meeting
with the team bosses in Bernie
and Ron was saying, okay, he accepts that,
they have to pay the fine.
But the, and the position in the constructors championship,
all the points are deleted, okay, fair enough.
But can we still have the money as though
we'd had those points?
And so, Bernie said, well, it's not up to me,
it's up to the other guys, isn't it?
So, so he gets them all together and Bernie said,
Ron wants to make a little speech to you.
So he put the case forward and he'd prepared his notes
in Givi's case and everyone said,
okay, I've put my case, I'll leave the room now.
And apparently Bernie said, right,
it wants to hand all the money over to Ron.
Hands up.
No hands came up.
No hands.
Sorry, Ron, I asked, but yeah.
That's how it was.
It's probably the wrong arena, wasn't it?
Asking for clemency or any kind of pity in that world
is it's not going to get very far,
but it is an example of how it was run.
That was an example of the world that it was,
which was, it's now,
so really 10 people sort of ran the sport.
10, Roy, he calls Mac, it's Macs and Bernie.
And then you had also the previous president,
anyway, Macs represented the FIA,
but not all the time too,
it was only laterally that he represented the FIA,
but the FIA were involved,
but not in a financial way.
And of course, that is another big discussion
as to where did it,
how did it all go so wrong with the FIA?
They had the rights to the sport
and they lost it to Bernie, but over time.
But when you come to sell the sport,
they can ask the question,
well, who owns it?
And you can say, well, we own the commercial rights,
and they'll go, yes.
And what are you both, what are you saying?
Well, it's like saying,
you can buy the commercial rights to a house,
but you can't own the land that it's on
or something like that,
because the FIA are important
in representing the sport legally.
So in a global sense,
who do you go to when you're talking about the sport?
It's, if you want to do business, you go to F1.
If you want to talk about legitimizing it,
then the FIA, other people who can say,
we've legitimately checked this out
and it's okay, she lets us bridge the proper sport.
Legally qualified enough to make a call on us.
Yeah, how do you define what the ground rent is?
Yeah, you're going to get the mother-in-law,
whether you like it or not.
No, all father-in-law, I mean, it's trouble for that.
But anyway, but there you are.
It's always interesting, well, it was.
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It's gonna be interesting to see how it develops
from here with this, if this is the new sort of ground
floor, so how is that role of Team Boss gonna involve?
It's a take me to your leadeth question, isn't it?
Yeah.
Can I speak to that?
Well, which leader do you want to speak to?
And you can, well, I don't know.
Who's in charge of it?
Who's ultimately in charge of it?
Yeah, what's your question?
Well, we've got Mercedes on the board.
You might speak to the board on Mercedes,
or you can speak to Tohto,
but he's only a small shareholder and...
Yeah.
And when he speaks to the guy on the pit wall.
Yeah.
Oh, but he doesn't own it anymore.
He's got no...
And we don't know how long he's gonna be there.
Yes.
And the board's not happy.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the guys
who are very successful team principals now
are engineers, aren't they?
Yeah.
So, you know, you get...
It makes sense, doesn't it?
Yes.
It makes sense.
It seems to be becoming more of a trend now
that that role really needs
somebody with an engineer and background.
And so that's further probably decoupling
the two roles, the boss and the guy
actually running the show.
And it's just really...
It all comes from the expansion of the sport,
the commercial expansion of the sport.
Well, the dilution of influence and power, maybe.
Yes.
You know, as well.
So, it's the way of the world, perhaps,
you know, that we are all becoming subject
to some much more ultimate, you know, power.
And it may be AI eventually by the way they're talking.
I mean, but, you know, we are powerless,
if you like, to be completely autonomous.
And, you know, the idea of starting from scratch
in this sport is, you know, it's laughable.
You're going to be 50 years before you get anywhere,
20, 10 years at least, you know, starting from scratch.
Well, of course, Cadillac are starting from scratch.
Yeah.
So, that's an interesting point.
There's now going to be 11 teams.
And they are starting from scratch,
but they've managed to do the negotiation
with the other teams and convince them
that it's there that they should come in.
They kept raising the price, didn't they?
Because, of course, that means that there's less pie
to go around.
They're not having someone turning up now
and just helping themselves to a slice.
Yeah, they're saying our participation
will increase the size of the cake.
And they had to show that.
Yeah.
And therefore, your smaller slice
will actually be worth more than your big slice
at the moment.
It seems to be true at the moment.
I think expanding, everybody's happy.
Yeah.
Well, it's an ever-expanding universe, isn't it, Mark?
Apparently.
Apparently.
But they keep changing their minds.
Yeah, there's different theories on that now.
Yeah, every other month, there's a new theory
that it's contracting.
So, with F1, anyway, it's expanding.
So, that's a good thing.
Is it?
It's just...
It's getting bigger.
The audience is going up.
I'm not sure if it's plateaued yet in America because the...
No, I think it's still going up in America.
It's still going up.
And I do think that we've got a whole new influx
of young people watching.
Average age has come right down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I tell this story that since the Netflix thing,
there's these kids who were the same age as my children.
We used to go on holiday with a family
and their kids would...
They never asked me about F1 ever.
And then, about a couple of Christmases ago,
they'd go, hey, you used to be in F1, didn't you?
Do you ever watch Netflix?
And it's like, bingo, suddenly I exist
because I was a F1 driver and that's because of F1.
They were not interested before.
So, that has been a phenomenal success
in hooking people into the drama.
And I know that some drivers don't like it.
They think it's over-engineered as a story,
but they're like it or not, they're benefiting.
They are benefiting because they go to America,
they're well-known.
Max is very critical of that aspect of it, isn't he?
Yeah, I mean, he benefits, as you say,
because his salary is derived from the from the worth,
but the commercial worth of the sport,
but he's sort of more old school in that regard, isn't he?
I think because he's so successful,
he can be more natural like it.
Yeah, I mean, I think people can think of it
as a pure sport in the sense that they want to just arrive.
They just want to, they don't want all the stuff
that comes with the obligations,
perhaps you have to observe,
but there's no way of doing it.
You've got, someone's got to pay for it.
I mean, the question is, do you need 4.6 million
or whatever it is, or 150 million to buy?
I mean, you could argue the budget cap
for one Formula One team would pay for an entire series
because F2 is budget is what, 2 million,
probably 3 million by now, I don't know,
but you've got enough, 20 cars, 20 times three.
You don't need 150 million, you could run it.
So the question is, can you provide the entertainment?
And is that one of the things that will be considered?
Is that how can we reduce the cost of the product?
Will the teams be implicated?
The owners of the team,
let's say there's people now that own as an investment,
which without paying, it's got a combined ownership,
hasn't it?
They might be saying, okay, well,
why are we having to spend so much on the driver
or this, do we, to reduce the out getting
to increase the revenue,
the cost cap actually does solve that aspect a bit,
doesn't it?
Because before you, the more money you got in,
the more you throw at the car,
make it faster and faster and faster,
whereas now that sort of has to stop
and money that's coming in is just spread among the shareholders.
And it's an odd thing to think that a sport
that is so incredibly competitive as Formula One
has evolved an almost tall poppy kind of mechanism
whereby nobody gets too far ahead.
I mean, if you suggested that in politics,
you might say, well, that's a kind of socialist state,
isn't it?
You know?
Is F1 socialist?
Is that what you're saying?
Well, I think it's a, I think it has presented a workable,
and it's become more successful
as a result of adopting that.
I mean, if you were to say, okay,
Elon Musk and Co, you're only allowed to earn so much
individually or, you know,
there was a cost-capping element to income, let's say.
Then they would force the revenue to go,
you might, people would say that would mean
that there's no motivation,
but of course, the motivation in our sport
comes from the fact that people want to race
and want to win and the people want to watch it.
Yeah.
So the product is always going to be there.
What it stopped is a unsustainable expansion
and a dominance in the sport of people with more money.
And I heard, I was hearing on the radio
talking about the Professional Football Association
talking about revenues for footballers
because now they're earning half a million quid a week
or something in particular as footballers.
So they are the expenditure in the same way
in our sport, the cars are the expenditure
and the teams are.
I mean, why do you need 1200 people?
No, I want those 1200 people to have jobs.
Don't get me wrong.
But if a team is given money,
it would spend it with Frank Wood, you know,
Frank would argue, I don't want to pay the drivers.
I want my car to go faster.
So I want to spend it on the car
and I want to spend it on the personnel.
And if you gave him a trillion,
he would have spent it all on the car
and he would still pay the driver
a minuscule amount of money.
Yeah, yeah.
So, but that's the problem
is that you're in an arms race then.
Yeah.
And the two teams that just go dung-dung-dung
and the others just go all the way.
Yeah.
And it was there, that phenomenon was there.
I mean...
Which they fixed.
Yeah, they did fix.
They fixed it.
Yeah.
And there was a time, 92,
so your first season when you were in the Brabham.
I don't know how far off the pace that was,
was it six, seven seconds or something?
Yeah, sick, can you imagine?
Yeah.
They wouldn't get past 100,
did they have 107% rule then?
I don't know, I think they had 110.
Which they had?
Yeah.
You wouldn't have to drive it all of a sudden, would you?
But I think if you qualified
two seconds off the Williams pace then,
you'd be on the second, third row.
Yeah.
Yeah, we had quite a big advantage.
It was quite nice.
But yeah, it wasn't very good for watching the reps.
No, so that has been fixed.
So, there's aspects of it that have worked brilliantly well.
Yeah.
But I think we just,
the sport just sort of,
the sport will just take in whatever's there
in the outside world to go fast.
But it's recognised that if somebody,
let's say somebody finds a tweak,
well next year, we're gonna find out.
2016.
If someone has found a method to dominate
for the next 10 years like Mercedes did,
Liberty have said, we don't want that,
we want a close racing.
So, what is the, what have they put in place
apart from the cost cap and the resource restrictions?
I suppose that they are the solution.
Ultimately they will be.
But otherwise, it's acknowledged
that something needs to be put in place.
They might bring in something else to say,
okay, we've got this all wrong.
And I was thinking,
what if you had a kind of show and tell rule
where you say, okay, on a date,
if one has to reveal their cars
and they have to reveal a certain amount of information,
the technical information about that car
in advance of the first race.
And if anybody, one thing, one thing for sure,
people wouldn't actually be sure
which one's gonna be good.
But at least if they had an insight
into how a team is beating them,
they would be able to do something about catching up
at the start of the season.
And then you'd be watching this kind of
levelling out process as it goes through the season.
And you imagine selling out here to Frank or Ron?
Well, Bernie turned up at Anderstop, didn't he,
with the fan car.
He said, it's not good for the sport.
I'm sorry, we're not gonna do it.
So it has happened.
I mean, it may not be necessary.
It may just be next year.
Everything's gonna be very close,
but rule change is always a risk.
Would you fancy being a team boss?
I think in my sort of my lazy fantasies world,
I've been a team boss.
I think every driver has sort of thought to themselves
that I can, you know,
but I don't think every driver
wants to go into the office every day.
I mean, Christian was in his office every day,
pretty much.
If he wasn't there, he was at a racetrack.
Or he was out trying to get money.
Or he was out trying to get money.
Or he was at a Flamin team meeting somewhere.
It's full on, you know,
and I'm 65 now, so it's not gonna happen at that.
But if they're gonna subdivide the rules
and make it so you need a guy that just swans around.
You want them up?
Yes, I'm up.
Oh, excellent.
The Athletic.
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Hey, it's Raj.
And Noah.
And we're back with a new season of Am I Doing It Wrong,
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we have about trying to get our lives right.
Because we're still doing a lot of stuff wrong.
But who isn't?
That's why each week we're talking about the topics
that we could all use a little helping hand with,
whether it's making new friends as an adult,
managing our emotions or even dreaming.
We'll be talking to experts in their fields
who are definitely doing things right.
So the rest of us can be a bit wiser
and a lot better equipped to handle whatever life throws at us.
Subscribe now and listen to new episodes of Am I Doing It Wrong,
dropping every Thursday starting January 1st,
wherever you get your podcasts.
And for the first time ever,
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Love y'all.
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