Does F1 miss FOTA? If so, why?
DR: "Yes, F1 really does miss FOTA (Formula One Teams Association) but I'm not sure if F1 misses FOTA for the same reasons fans miss FOTA. It was always going to be hard to get a general consensus with all the teams. We are seeing that now even with lower end teams, like Force India tried to block Marussia’s return to F1 so we're not going to see alignment of interests. I'd like to see if we can get FOTA back as a way of getting better access with fans and I would like to see a revival – perhaps not being an organization of teams but rather as a marketing engine for F1 to market itself.
I'm originally from India and I saw how badly it was promoted in New Delhi ahead of the race and now we no longer have the Formula 1 race. So I’d like to see FOTA be an organisation intended to engage fans and work with sponsors and teams to organise activities, contests, concerts and make it a more cohesive and organised way of messaging and showcasing F1”
DC: “My involvement with FOTA has been
watching Oliver Weingarten organising the fan events. I really like what he did in terms of getting us involved and actually bringing teams and drivers to the fans. I don't really know a lot a whole lot about what FOTA happened between the teams other than a whole load of politics getting in the way!
When you have small new teams running on crowdfunding and trying to do a small Silicon Valley approach of investment vs some of the most recognized brands in the world and according to some reports, have a completely different way of doing things, it is a completely broad spectrum of politics so I do not know how it could have been done better, to be honest.”
DR: “It is always going to be hard for FOTA to have all the teams on board mainly because of how the Concorde agreement has been set up and manages what amount of money to each team gets, none of their agendas are going to line up. Which is why FOTA ended up breaking up in the last place. With the politics in place in F1, do we really thing FOTA can return in
its previous guise? "
BS: “I think they need a different style of communication before FOTA is going to work. There are many schools of peace-making and finding a common solution and as long as everyone is hell-bent on their own agendas, it is not going to happen. I think it'd take someone heavyweight like Marshall Rosenberg to get FOTA back working to be honest. He's an extraordinarily successful peacemaker – he achieves peace between warring countries”
RZ: “The thing that I always found strange about why it failed is that in all sports, you have big teams that have lots and lots of money and those that don't have lots of money competing against each other- that's the nature of sport; and the whole sport works just fine.
In Major League Baseball and the Revenue Sharing Agreement (RSA), and you have the New York Yankees whose revenue is literally 10 times that of a small team – they end up ‘giving’ a lot of money to the small teams, but they get along just fine.
In fact, the small team is happy because that money isn’t reliant on beating the big teams, it’s just been given to them to balance the system. So there are ways to make these seemingly incompatible desires work together, though for some reason it never works in F1. I don’t know why – it’s not like F1 has bigger egos than those in NFL”
DC: “Do you think it is to do with regional differences; because in the US everyone comes from a similar background. Whereas in F1, it is truly a global sport and everyone comes from different cultures?”
DR: “Everyone (in F1) is always struggling to not be the bottom placed team because they won’t get any money, which creates a vicious cycle”
RZ: “That starts at the top too; unless Bernie can ensure that the 10 to 12 teams are on the grid every year (i.e. guarantee a share of the prize money to all teams) then it's not going to happen because the motivation for the likes of Red Bull or Ferrari to help out Marussia is virtually zero since there's no penalty for them if the grid is smaller and there is no gain if they keep a team on the grid”
DR: “The one that I did really like but didn't stand out at the time was Burn and Lotus they did a lot of marketing. I got to speak to the Head of Marketing for Burn. They had some interesting strategies at different races across Europe and the US: they did the Daft Punk link-up for Monaco, they held a lot of concerts and worked with street artists. I like the way they made that engagement work. The investment was about $10 million per year so I think they made their investment work - I definitely recognize Burn as a F1 brand now.
We are starting to see very similar brands in F1; we are seeing Technology companies and a lot of energy drinks companies. So it might be hard to see how there will be room for a new industry to break into it unless they have relevance in the engagement that they are trying out for the team.