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It took Shakespeare 25,948 words to fully detail the tragedy of his star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, but Circuit of the Americas chairman Bobby Epstein required just two to describe his grand prix’s relationship with Formula One.
“We’re screwed,” he told Austin’s American-Statesman.
Sometimes brevity can be its own form of beauty.
The latest chapter in Formula One’s rocky partnership with the United States of America, following a paltry three years of calm after the circuit’s debut in 2012, comes courtesy of the office of the Governor of Texas. The administration has with immediate effect reduced its financial support of the race.
The grand prix promoter had been promised US$250 million over 10 years – $25 million per year – by the state, but following a change to the formula used to calculate the race’s benefit the subsidy has been reduced to $19.5 million.
The $5.5 million reduction is mere punctuation in three weeks of turmoil in which the hurricane-affected United States Grand Prix recorded a devastating loss from crowd figures 20 per cent lower – which could have reportedly been 30 per cent lower were free tickets not circulated among the community in light of the weather – than those recorded for the inaugural 2012 event.
Bernie Ecclestone, playing his typically delicate role, swung into action.
“If [the subsidy has] changed, it’s going to be difficult to continue the race in Austin,” he told the Statesman.
The average life expectancy for a Formula One circuit in the United States, the world’s biggest and most desirable economy, including the frighteningly real Caesars Palace Grand Prix, is less than six years. With four races already run in Austin, the stats aren’t promising.
So if Formula One, that capitalist sport among capitalist sports, can’t cut it in the States, what’s the problem?
For too long it’s been easy to write off the United States as ‘not getting’ Formula One, but this simply isn’t true. Considering the way the sport has treated the country over the years, it punches well above its weight when it comes to engaging with grands prix.
The only real difference between the United States and its mainstay continental cousins Brazil and Canada is that its slice of Formula One and European motoring history is narrower. And though it can claim ownership of the likes of Mario Andretti and Phil Hill, and more recently Haas Formula One and Alexander Rossi, its achievements in this European-dominated sport are dwarfed by its own domestic sporting achievements.
In short, the United States doesn’t need Formula One in the same way a number of other countries feel they do.
However, this obviously does not preclude America from hosting a race – the calendar is littered with nations of similar and lesser Formula One histories. Why, then, does the sport struggle so much in a market of which it claims it wants very badly to be a part?
Unsurprisingly it is the commercial rights holder that continues to make life difficult for the sport it guards. The enormous race fees, pushing race promoters to the brink, have been well chronicled by this column and others. But the United States Grand Prix isn’t even a case of CVC et al. pushing the limits; it’s one of it not knowing where the limit is at all.
Formula One is made valuable by the power of its brand, but by now it is common knowledge that television viewership, upon which the sport’s worth is validated, is in decline.
Consider this admittedly unscientific but nonetheless instructive comparison: Texas has reduced its subsidy of the race by $5.5 million, or roughly 20 per cent. Meanwhile, the dip in television audience size over the corresponding four years – from 515 million viewers in 2011 to 425 million viewers in 2014 – represents a decline of approximately 20 per cent.
The beginning of what could be Texas’s painful withdrawal from the United States Grand Prix is a brutally honest reflection of Formula One’s declining value.
From here it isn’t too much further to dig for the reason behind the sport’s increasingly inaccurate self-valuation: ‘exclusivity’ has long been the centre of Formula One’s brand, and that very same value is now proving its undoing.
Exclusivity adds value when a brand is aspirational, which is how we bill the Formula One lifestyle – Monaco will never fall off the calendar, for example, because it is the manifestation of the sport’s designs on exclusivity. But from this starting point Formula One has spiralled madly out of control.
The calendar is increasingly occupied by races backed by governments looking for a quick PR boost, meaning the market has become distorted. And because exclusivity is now synonymous with money, races with value beyond money, including the Italian, German, and United States grands prix, find themselves on the outer.
Italy is going down fighting, and it may yet save itself from oblivion, but when the United States lacks any overwhelming emotional reason to fork out for a contract extension we cannot count on it to do the same.
Instead Formula One will enjoy the exclusivity of racing at Azerbaijan on Le Mans weekend, the exclusivity from its European heartland as it prices out its core fans, and its exclusivity from the most significant economy in the world despite Formula One needing the US far more than the US needs Formula One.
That really is a tragedy.
Follow @MichaelLamonato on Twitter during the #BrazilGP weekend.