12/03/2017
NEWS STORY
Round about the time that FIA President Jean Todt was ruling out a return to previous forms of engine configuration, claiming that "society" wouldn't allow it, Liberty Media's chief executive Greg Maffei was saying quite the opposite.
Speaking at the Deutsche Bank 2017 Media & Telecom Conference, Maffei, when asked about Liberty Media's plans to make the sport more competitive, and specifically if it was planned to "go back to the bigger engines", said: "Yes, there's some things to be done around engines, there's some things to be done around DRS systems, there's things to be done around how people qualify, things to be done more long term which are trying to balance out the amount of money received by high and low end teams.
"If you think about the NFL, a hard salary cap, strength of schedule, draft picked in reverse order, all of those are things done to balance out teams," he continued. "There's massive differences here (in F1), top teams spending five-hundred million, the bottom teams spending one hundred million. That's just crazy, that's hard to address.
"So trying to equalise some of that out, trying to equalise how some of the payments are made, we need to make the races more competitive, from the ground up including how the structure of the teams works."
Ignoring quite how Liberty intends telling the teams what to spend and even the thought of drivers being drafted, the inference in terms of engines is interesting.
As the sport's governing body, the FIA decides on the rules, and Todt has made clear what his feelings are.
However, as the owner, and seeking a dividend on its investment, Liberty will be looking at whatever might improve viewing figures, especially at a time TV numbers are falling.
Another interesting revelation by Maffei is that when Heineken came to the table as an F1 sponsor, it brought information on the sport's fan base that was light years ahead of what F1's own powers that be had available.
Liberty will be interested in bums on seats and couches, which in turn will attract more sponsors like Heineken. Liberty will not be influenced by what "society" might think.
As for Todt's vision of hydrogen powered cars and driverless cars – maybe even driverless hydrogen-powered cars – we're sure Maffei will treat that with the contempt it deserves.