06/05/2011
NEWS STORY
McLaren boss and FOTA chairman, Martin Whitmarsh, has said that the teams should own the commercial rights to F1.
At a time when Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, in league with investment giant Exor, is claiming that it might make a bid for the sport, even though CVC and Bernie Ecclestone insist that it's not for sale, Whitmarsh has effectively thrown the teams' hat in the ring.
"I think it ultimately is desirable to have team ownership of the commercial rights," he told reporters in Istanbul today. "To be sustainable you need the appropriate level of investment to promote and develop the sport, you need the appropriate distribution of the revenues to teams to make it sustainable and those are the primary things. If you have all those things and you have good owners, whoever they are, that is positive.
"The teams then, I think, have all got to look at whether we, each of us, want to be involved in an ownership model in the future, if the current owners want to sell. I suspect they will at some stage.
"The teams want to ensure first and foremost that we have stability," he continued. "The teams want to ensure that the sport is sustainable and, to be sustainable, you need appropriate investment in the future, the appropriate distribution of the revenue to the teams. To most, who owns F1 isn't the biggest concern."
Asked about reports that four teams - McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull - would be meeting with representatives of News Corporation next week, he denied it as media fantasy.
"We have to be respectful of our relationship with the current commercial rights holder and in the limits of that we are not entering into any negotiations," he said. "But we are all part of entities where our shareholders talk, they have businesses and they may well be having discussions. But it's not for me to confirm what they are doing and where they are going."
Asked about the need for F1 to remain free to air, as stipulated in the Concorde Agreement, Whitmarsh said: "I think it's clear that the business model of all the teams relies on free-to-air. We're selling a large, broad, media exposure. That's the business model and I'm sure that's the business model all the teams will require going forward.
"However, it's a much more complicated issue than terrestrial free-to-air versus pay-per-view but I think that what we require in Formula One is a mass audience to television, mass audience to the pictures we produce, whether that's internet or whatever that means."