22/06/2015
NEWS STORY
After just one year, empty seats in the stands at the Red Bull Ring suggest that Austria's love affair with the sport is already on the wane, this at a time the German Grand Prix has been dropped from the calendar. Elsewhere, Silverstone is offering fans a 44% discount on tickets for the British Grand Prix, an event that during the golden era was sold out well in advance.
As fans continue to bemoan the current state of the sport, which has also come in for criticism from some noticeable names within the industry, Red Bull's Christian Horner believes that Ross Brawn is the man to take F1 forward.
Be it Mercedes dominance or rules which have resulted in drivers on a twenty-car grid receiving twenty-five place penalties, fans are unhappy, and the knock on effect is that the sport is losing sponsors, the lifeblood of the sport.
Whilst Bernie Ecclestone insists there isn't a problem the fact is F1 needs sorting out and Horner believes Brawn is the man to do it.
"We need someone independent, someone not currently involved, like a Ross Brawn, who understands the business, understands the challenges to write the specification for what a Formula One car should be," the Briton told the Press Association.
"We have gone too far and it is too complicated and we need to bring it back to basics." he continued. "Formula One has a huge amount of following around the world but we need to a better job. The cars need to be more of a challenge. There needs to be more competition, we don't have that at the moment. There are a lot of discussions for 2017 at the moment but can we wait for 2017? We need to accelerate some ideas and decisions need to be made so people know what's coming.
"We need to simplify some of these rules. Taking penalties and then further penalties in the race, drive-throughs, for example, is too complicated. It isn't right that we don't know what the grid sheet is until 10pm on a Saturday night after qualifying.
"The cars are too easy to drive and you don't see the drivers working as hard as they were a few years ago. You never hear a driver complaining about his neck these days.
"The Strategy Group is pretty inept," he concluded, "and it needs the commercial rights holder and the governing body to decide what they want Formula One to be and then to put it on the table in front of the teams and to say, 'These are the rules, here is the entry form'."