| Let's face it, Formula One is not a proper sport - it's just a money game. The winning team is invariably the one with the most financial backing to attract the top designers, the best team managers, the best aerodynamicists, the best logistics operation, the best IT package...and that's before the best driver ever gets near the car.
OK, the old adage "Speed costs money, how fast do you want to go" applies in any form of motor sport even at club level, but nowhere is it more apparent than the disparity between Formula One budgets. I don't follow the sport closely because for all the razzmatazz and big bucks it's still deadly boring, so I might be ill-informed but I heard somewhere that Ferrari's yearly budget was some 300 Million, I don't know if that's Stirling, Euros or Dollars but that's immaterial because it's still ten times the budget of someone like Minardi.
So the whole thing is not about sport, it's about big business. The global corporate sponsors want to see some payback for their big bucks and countries want the kudos of having the big glamour circus in their back yard with a GP in their countries name. In the middle of all this Bernie Ecclestone plays his power games and plays off countries angainst sponsors. How much did China pay to get the Shanghai GP? Shedloads, no doubt, and that's after having to build the circuit. Cigarette companies and technology companies are falling over themselves to get exposure in China and Mr Ecclestone is astute enough to charge the Chinese for the privlege of having these corporate sponsors tout their name in front of the worlds largest potential market and charge the sponsors for the privelege of getting their name around in China.
Neat trick if you can do it, good business...but a sport?
The US and Western Europe are dead markets as far as F1 is concerned. After all, who's going to pay for a car when you can't even put your logo on it in the UK (and many other EU countries), or when you get litigation from US cancer victims claiming "but I thought Scumacher smoked Marlboro..."
Ecclestone needs to keep the whole circus funded otherwise the whole thing collapses like the hollow sham it really is. Gotta get big bucks otherwise we've got no cars, drivers, glossy jet set image or Hello magazine lifestyles..
Sport?  |