24/01/2017
NEWS STORY
F1's new technical managing director Ross Brawn says that simplicity is the key to the sport's future.
It would be easier to list what Ross Brawn doesn't know about motorsport than what he does know, the Briton has won multiple world championships in F1 as well as playing a key role in Jaguar's Sportscar success in the early 90s. Indeed, his eponymous F1 team, having won the drivers' and constructors' title in 2009, was subsequently sold to Mercedes which continues to dominate the sport.
Despite his engineering background however, newly installed as the technical head of the F1 company, the Briton insists that keeping it simple is the key to building the sport.
"What I want to develop along with all the other stakeholders in F1, the teams, the FIA and so on, is to get a vision of where we want to be in the next few years," he told BBC 5 Live.
"I know from experience that F1 tends to be reactive," he continued. "It has a problem and it reacts and tries to find a solution, but very rarely has the vision of looking forward three-to-five years and deciding where it wants to be.
"So I think we know what fans want," he said, "they want entertainment, they want close racing, they want to be able to understand what's going on. I think everyone agrees on that, but it's finding the path with all the other teams and all the other people involved to achieve that.
"Simplicity is a key objective for the future," he continued. "I've watched for the last few years as a spectator, and there are times even I haven't been sure what's been going on.
"It's a great sport," he enthused, "it's a fabulous combination of the drivers and their personalities, their competition, and the cars and the whole thing... we just need to look at it and see how we can improve the show.
"The fans want racing, and we haven't seen too much of that. We've seen a great competition between two drivers in the same team for the last few years, and that's no fault of Mercedes. They've done a fabulous job. I think the fans want racing, they want to understand what's going on in the race.
"There are different types of fans of course, and that's where the complication comes. There are fans who come to the races, there are the fans who watch TV and the fans who watch through other media. It's finding a balance between all of those requirements.
"We want the race, for instance, to be as big a show as we can make it, so when you come to a race for a weekend, you're entertained from beginning to end."
Clearly, Brawn is singing from the same hymn sheet as Carey and has the same desires for Liberty's new purchase as the rest, but like Carey's insistence that the British Grand Prix will be safe there is no explanation of how this might be achieved. Furthermore, such changes, to the sporting side of things, are not the work of a moment and will take years, and in the meantime fans will to continue to drift away.