Bernie Ecclestone: Good or Bad for F1?
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Hello fellow F1 Fanatics, I’m trying to breathe some life into lastwordonsports’s F1 section where I’ve started writing for, and I’m doing an article based around Bernie Ecclestone and asking the question whether he is good or bad for Formula 1 as is, and what I’m looking for are the fans’ opinions on the subject.
I’ve been on this site for a good number of years and have massive respect for this community, knowing first-hand that your opinions of the sport have been all for the good future of F1, so I’m looking around for some comments on the matter, the best of which I’ll feature in my article.
Feel free to state whatever you wish, I’ve already covered Barmy Bernie’s Double-Points rules, so whatever good or bad thing you want to state about him, please do so and I’ll be delighted hear it.
We have to give a lot of respect to Bernie for what he has done for the sport. He took it from a sport to a global phenomenon which raises billions of pounds a year.
However, his whole, 20th century way of dealing with the business of the sport is just wrong. I think that we could have 12 to 13 healthy teams if his commercial rights setup was changed. He could make it fairer, but he doesn’t, he would rather have 10 teams than 12 or 13.
He doesn’t care what people think, his rule of double points has been dismissed as stupidity by a majority of teams, drivers and fans. Yet he won’t change it, nor will he change cheese tyres or DRS. The one thing that needs changing is him.
Teams can barely afford to compete, he massively undersold the rights so that he could stay in control, almost instigated a confused medals system and successfully violated F1 with double points nonsense. Work it out for yourself what I think…
Would you agree that because he has made himself seem indispensable to the business of Formula 1 is one of the reasons why he has to go?
I think my opinion is well known to regular readers of F1f, but I do seem to have to keep rebutting this idea that Bernie took a little known European race series and turned it into the #1 global race series, F1 was the number one global car racing series long before Bernie got involved but there was not the bandwidth available for satellite TV coverage of live events, whether by accident or design Bernie got the teams to sign away half the total income of F1 just as this technology was becoming available, in return for which Bernie looked after the selling of F1 to the racetrack owners and the TV networks, any good sports management company could have done a similar job, and for a lot less money.
These are some very analytical questions, thanks very much, so I take it from the general feeling that his ways are now too old-hat for the sport’s modern iteration. I’d love to have Keith on board this topic, is anyone close to him who can encourage him to offer his opinion?
As a bit of context, I spotted a very forward-thinking article in the latest Autosport by Jonathan Noble making mention of F1 broadcasting’s lack of utilisation of social media and incessant blocking of videos from YouTube, what do you guys think to F1 getting more involved in aspects outside of television broadcasting?
The world is moving forward. Its no longer about just watching it on TV, its online, watching live timing and live chat. This is where it is going and F1 is starting to look like a technology dinosaur compared to other sports.
The thing that annoys me most though is the deleting of YouTube videos. Let me explain, imagine if you owned F1, you want to get people interested don’t you, so what do you do, you delate any part of history that ever crops up on YouTube and totally prevent anyone from watching old races. It is just appalling. I would be willing to compromise if they were available from somewhere else, like the Official F1 reviews at the end of the year. But some of them you can only buy on VHS! What is going on there?
Bernie was the right person at the time and he took F1 to what it is now. But time has changed and what F1 needs is a new person with fresh ideas.
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