Liberty Media have spent an enormous amount of (Fiat pretend) money to purchase the sport from CVC. Lets not kid ourselves though, probably no money changed hands just some deals where very rich people pushed around some very technical legal documents……..
So they have this cash cow that is very well know throughout most of the world and they are desperate to change the rules and come up with ways to make it more popular so they can get a “return on investment”.
They have hired a few really brainey people like Ross Brawn to help them out with the task and we should see the cars change again and again over the next few years while they try to find something that may or may not work.
Good luck with that, all you have to do is ask any F1 fan his opinion and you’ll probably find most fans want excitement and overtaking. Not to difficult.
The fans, this is basically what this article is about, thats you and me the people who watch F1.
What Liberty is forgetting is the amount of sponsorship on the cars, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to paint logos all over the cars, we then see our favourite team win and go out and think well maybe I’d like a RedBull or perhaps buy a new bright red Ferrari so I can look cool driving up to the shops.
They expect the end user to support these brands with hard earned money or sweat equity your hard work that you have done in the real world. They now expect that you pay to watch the sport, something that should be free as the sponsors have already paid huge sums to get it running in the first place.
I will now define Sponsorship in this context :-
One that finances a project, event, or organisation directed by another person or group, such as a business enterprise that pays for radio or television programming in return for advertising time. (Source https://www.thefreedictionary.com/sponsorship)
So the sponsors pay and you then pay aswell to watch a boring race, that chances are will be won by a silver car being driven by a guy who would rather be flying around with his dogs in his private tax dodging jet.
If you live in Italy and happen to be an F1 fan the only race you will see is Monza. In England Sky will become the only broadcaster of F1 in 2019 so a paid subscription will be needed.
In Australia I can’t see the entire season, they resort to replays most of the time and its just pathetic watching a race in 1 hour totally destroys any excitement that may exist.
Its just madness they expect to make money directly of the backs of fans hard work, I can tell not many people are happy about this.
There is also a proposal to push the race start time back to make it more “viewer friendly”.
This might allow more insanity like the Michael Buffer Austin farce, which I didn’t see because I refused to (pay to)watch it, or perhaps its for comfort breaks and additional "words from out sponsors”, but wait the fans are paying to watch so why have ad breaks?
I just can understand the insanity of this world when you are forced to pay for something and they still have adds and sponsorship logos on everything, that you have just paid for?
It makes me sad for F1, but at least we have Formula E and you can watch that on Youtube for free anytime.
The image was originally posted to Flickr by nimame at https://flickr.com/photos/78919492@N00/36329260414. It was reviewed on 12 October 2017 by FlickreviewR and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.