14/11/2014
NEWS STORY
Whilst the F1 supremo's thoughts on young fans and social media are now well and truly documented, some of his other thoughts expressed during a recent interview with Campaign Pacific-Asia need the widest possible audience.
Asked about the demise of Caterham and Marussia and the prospects of the sport's remaining "struggling teams", he replies: "Nobody will miss the two teams because they're not front-running teams; they've only got a name that people would know because of the problem they're in. If you want to get recognised you've got to do something. This poor guy in South Africa [Oscar Pistorius], for instance, has got more interest because of what happened with him than when he was winning gold medals. He won medals and afterwards nobody thought about him. If this case hadn't happened he would have been forgotten, probably.
"Same with these two teams. You need teams like Ferrari. If you go anywhere and you say to somebody 'Ferrari', they'll know what you're talking about. If you say 'Marussia', they won't. So that's it. It's brands again, isn't it? Ferrari's a brand and it's a brand that's particularly connected to a product and it's known for that product."
Has F1 become impossibly expensive to be involved in? "Don't spend as much," he replies. "These teams don't need to be in financial trouble. They need to think about what they have got to spend and do the best they can with that.
"Take Williams, for example. Years ago Frank had a very small budget and was generally in trouble. Yet he always paid every dollar that he owed. He ran his team accordingly with the amount of money he could come up with. He didn't have dreams about competing with Ferrari. Eventually things got better and he built the business and now he's where he is today.
"It's the same for everything in life, isn't it, really? It's the same problem with ladies and credit cards."
Asked if F1 can compete with football, he responds: "Children can go and get a football and play football. It's not easy to get a Formula One car, or for that matter not easy to get into any form of racing, even go-karts, which is where most of the drivers have come through to Formula One. It's still very expensive. There are probably millions of talented would-be drivers out there that will never get the chance. You need support from someone.
"The fact is we can't make Formula One more accessible to people. It's no different in a way to Miss World, if you like. It doesn't mean she's the most beautiful girl in the world. She's one of the most beautiful girls in that competition. Like heavyweight boxers; there are probably better fighters out there who are even better than world champion boxers but just don't have the opportunity to do it. It's the champions that have had the opportunity. It's the same with this business; it's the guys that are here that are world champions and they have had the opportunity.
"Sebastian Vettel had support from Red Bull; without that he wouldn't be world champion. So that's how it is. Yes, it's difficult to make a start. The teams are always looking for more talent, probably because they're having to pay out a lot of money to the people they have now. They are waiting until the new breed [of drivers] comes through"
Asked what's next for F1, he admits: "I think we've got to wait a little bit for things to settle down. I hope it settles down and we are going to be able to retain the audience. We're never going to grow it. The only sport that's really grown - not by marketing but through availability - is football. You turn the television on and you'll always see a match, whether it is the English Premier League or something else, even in Asia. It may not be live because of the time difference but they've captured an audience and they want to see what's going on."
Asked what the F1 brand stands for, he replies: "I suppose it is a major sport and most sports are in the entertainment business. Sometimes we tend to lose track of the entertainment and get caught up a bit more on the technical aspect of Formula One, which I'm not happy about. We are very technical and we need to stay that way but I'd rather see a bit more effort on the entertainment. That normally balances itself. And it will because we've just gone through a particular phase, so when we've worked that out, we'll be back to where we were. Obviously for people involved in Formula One for marketing we have a worldwide audience and an audience in the right bracket for people that are perhaps what you might call up-market. We're different to the football crowd, if you like. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that market at all. Quite the opposite: the football audience is a super market but I think they're a different type of viewer."
So, how might more of the entertainment factor be brought in? "Entertainment is what people want to see. If you asked me tonight to go to the ballet and said it's fantastic, I would say, it's not for me. Sure, it's good entertainment for a lot of people but it doesn't suit me. If I asked people who like ballet if they wanted to go to a Formula One race, they wouldn't particularly want to go.
"We don't know what people like and don't like," he admits. "Maybe if I tried it, I'd love ballet. I just can't understand the reason why they have these girls dancing on their toes. Why don't they get taller girls? It would be so much easier.
"Today, there are so many forms of entertainment. I may be speaking against us, but previously the amount of entertainment was limited. There were fewer TV channels. People didn't have much choice and now they've got plenty of it. So there's generally a lot of competition."
Asked what drives him, and what he thinks of those who criticise him, he says: "I run the business from day to day. I get up in the morning and I really don't know what's going to happen; I'm a firefighter. When the fires start, I have to put them out and we're always having fires.
"I don't say anything to these people because the majority of them don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about. They have to fill the columns of a newspaper and if what they write happens to be true it's more by luck than anything else. They make up stories that they think the public wants to read, and nobody wants to read good news. Everybody in their life has got a problem so they're so happy when other people have got problems. Good news never sells. The answer is stay away.
"I had a book written about me called No Angel," he concludes, "which apparently sold very well in a lot of languages. This guy, Tom Bower, has buried a lot of very important people, from politicians to business leaders. I asked to speak to him before he started writing and I said: 'I'm not going to try and persuade you to write anything except the truth but I will tell you one thing I'm no angel.' He took that as the title of his book, and he bothered to find out the facts. But he had an easy job. I'll tell you why: I'm really an angel."