“The 84-year-old Briton talked to a farmers’ leader in front of a plastic cow in the fan village at the Spa circuit and then chugged from a litre of milk,” read a Reuters report heralding the glorious resumption of racing at the Belgian Grand Prix after the mid-season break.
The Belgian dairy farmers, incensed over legislative changes made to the European industry, threatened to blockade the roads into the grand prix circuit.
The police were unable or unwilling to prevent the disruption, which left the sport with no choice but to wade into the situation and defuse it itself.
Enter Bernie Ecclestone, who gave the farmers the platform they needed without having them grind his show to a halt, solving what could’ve been a non-start to the second half of the season.
Calls to make Bernie’s milk chug an annual event have thus far gone unheeded, but the moment was nonetheless demonstrative of the way Formula One can use its sizeable muscle to look out for itself.
Yet Bernie’s lactose miracle was in stark contrast with the rest of the weekend’s proceedings, which were dominated by bailiffs circling the Lotus garage in yet another example of a team on the wrong side of a contract dispute.
Lotus have been battling litigation moved by former reserve driver Charles Pic over lost seat time in 2014 and, though less ludicrous than Sauber’s infinite driver line-up that ended up in the Victorian Supreme Court at the start of the season, has put the team on the brink of administration, possibly within weeks.
Exacerbating the situation is the will-they-won’t-they Renault buy-out prospect, with the French auto manufacturer teasing a potential re-entry into the sport as a fully fledged constructor by buying Lotus.
While Renault agonises – and reportedly sounds out other teams’ openness to sale – Lotus’ owners are unwilling to invest further in an asset potentially about to be taken off them, leaving the team floating in no-man’s land until the sale is executed or the team folds.
This shouldn’t be allowed to happen in a sport with an economic footprint measured in billions. That a business behemoth is putting the livelihoods of hundreds of workers at one of Formula One’s oldest factories at risk is absurd.
Formula One today exists in a scratch in time – between the handshake-deal empire that fostered its early growth and, hopefully, a self-sustaining business model that will propel it into the future.
If the sport’s total revenue flowed to the teams, it would be up to them to operate sustainably; if the teams were forced to operate under a budget cap, they wouldn’t find themselves in spending rivalries – but today we have the negatives of both and the positives of neither.
When once Bernie Ecclestone would be able to act as a safety net to the independent teams – the Williams Formula One team in particular was able to become a force of the sport thanks to money loaned from the Bank of Bernie – the acquisition of the sport’s commercial rights by private equity firm CVC Capital Partners has disabled him from wielding supreme power.
Now the commercial rights holder, as the company holding the sport’s income, has hamstrung itself by locking the sport into a dysfunctional business model.
The evidence is abundant. The collapse of Caterham and HRT in recent years, the near toppling of Marussia at the end of 2015, and the current teetering of Lotus could all have been avoided if the sport had either the autonomy it used to enjoy, or the regulatory framework that made it sustainable.
The collapse of these teams has had dire knock-on effects. Force India was unable to run its 2015 car until Silverstone because parts suppliers demanded cash up-front, despite prize money being paid one year in arrears, after the smaller teams collapsed without paying their debts. Lotus, too, is feeling the pinch of having to pay ahead of time.
While Bernie valiantly chugged his milk to neutralise the threat of a roadblock, a blockade of a different sort continued to grow unfettered.
The locked-in inequitable pay structure that squeeze the smaller teams, an unwillingness to work with the FIA to implement cost control, and a failure to prudently reinvest the sport’s earnings of the current business model are proving far more disruptive than a collection of angry Belgian farmers.
Who’s going to step up to lead the sport out of this one?
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