In the previous article we explored what is required to maintain a successful business and healthy teams. Very much like the human body, Formula One is an interconnected "system of systems". While one can consider the respiratory system as a single system, one does not get a fully functioning healthy human until one adds the digestive system, the pulmonary system, and all the other systems that must interact successfully for viable life.

So it is with Formula One. A great business model is nothing without the supporting system of healthy competitive teams. And both are worthless without a viable audience size that can keep the oxygen this system needs for life (incoming fresh cash) flowing at the required rate for healthy existence.

Let's look at how Pitpass readers think fans are best served.

The most common suggestion was that of a full return to free-to-air TV coverage. I need look no further than my engaged delight at watching the Australian Open to know free-to-air gets you plenty of viewers if your product is right. The business model here was to make me "pay" by watching a significant number of adverts during breaks between games and sets.

That's fine. As long as advertisers see a benefit they will pay for advertising slots within highly rated programs. It's a problem if that's not how the channel is trying to make revenue. It's also a problem if the adverts come at highly irritating moments. Most American sports, especially ice hockey and football, are built around rules that cater to frequent ad breaks that do not interrupt play, because play has just ceased. Time-outs, touch-downs, quarter-breaks... The rules of American sports are actually built to work with frequent commercial breaks.

Here Liberty has a problem. They would need to buy back all the pay TV rights so recently sold at huge expense to return Formula One to free-to-air around the planet. If the Australian Open had offered me (badly) edited highlights of the final on free-to-air, chances are I'd not watch. The shocking highlight shows currently provided on free-to-air for non-live Formula One races are more of a turn off for fans than a turn on. You simply cannot follow the race unfolding.

And Liberty have no ad-friendly rules supporting breaks. Pit stop time? No. End of first lap? No. Half-distance? No such thing. Free to air supported by frequent high paying ads is a complex model to make work. Yet fans, if we use Pitpass readers as an example, want an enjoyable free to air viewing experience... or they are turning off.

Similarly on-line media either works on a "pay per clicks" model, a pay to advertise model, or a pay to access content model. Successful YouTube programs work because of the advertising revenue stream generated by placing adverts in and around their content. It's actually the same model as current free to air commercial television. It's possible that Liberty could use this model to generate on-line revenue streams. So far the subscription model for pay TV has only served to reduce viewing numbers, and thus act against the benefits of high viewing numbers driving advertising pricing up. Most fans seem particularly adverse to paying for content. This means Liberty must generate a worthwhile free model, while providing compelling paid for content for the hard core fan.

This presents a real challenge for Liberty. Balancing the needs of high viewing figures against the need to charge for premium content. If the free feeds are good enough, why pay for the premium feeds? If the free feeds are poor, the viewing numbers drop and you've got an audience size problem. Vision, balance, brilliance, and awesome content on all feeds are going to be required to get this part of the business model working right.

Can pay per view work? If you have a huge established fan base that is addicted to your product and you provide excellent coverage, you will generate revenue, and yes the fans will pay. Here the English Premier League, and Professional Boxing are great examples. The EPL is working off a one hundred year old fan base, where people who played as kids, and have followed ‘their’ team all their lives simply cannot live without the EPL. The EPL did not generate this loyalty. They exploited it. Similarly Boxing has a huge loyal betting (and mostly well monied) audience that loves nothing more than the sound of glove smacking skull for a few dollars more. It is not a complex model and it did not have to grow a fan base. It simply placed a dollar pay wall around a product people already loved. Simply put if you are not an A-list Hollywood Star already you are unlikely to even have the chance to purchase tickets to a Floyd Mayweather fight, and boxing does not care. The promoters and fighters are making huge amounts and are not fussed about growing the fan base. Watch any Rocky movie and you'll see the base requirements to train as a boxer are having ten hours a day six days a week to train and a skipping rope. For what it costs to run Ferrari for a week you could run five hundred boxers for a life time. Formula One needs far more money to simply operate than boxing needs to make huge sums for all its vested interests.

And then we have Chase Carey's favoured example. The Super Bowl. World Famous all across America. Just as World Series Baseball kindly allows the Canadians to come on down, so the Super Bowl means nothing to the other around 6.5 billion people on the planet that do not live in North America.

Pitpass readers, and the wider Formula One fan base, love the sport for many different reasons, but they are all subtle and complex. Dancing girls, Lady Gaga, expensive ads, and fireworks are not the main game. Yet again all we learn from the Super Bowl is that exploiting existing passion for a sport is a great way to make money. Like boxing and the hundred metre sprint, the Super Bowl is a very simple undertaking where the biggest expense, once the stadium is built, is player salaries. Formula One is a technical sport like no other. Cycles are complex, but under current UCI regulations around $20,000US will buy you the V12 Ferrari of bicycles. Similarly the Americas Cup, and open ocean racing will absorb huge amounts of money, but nothing like that required to run a Formula One team year after year.

Pitpass readers get this. We do not want a one make series (More on that in the third part of this reader input review). We want an exciting sport of driver and machine. A balance of power that the media presents in an exciting format.

If Liberty Media thinks Europe, Japan, the wider Asia, and trusty old Blighty are all crying out for a manic Super Bowl experience they are going to get a shock when they build it and no one comes. Fans want authentic human engagement. Not glitz and mirrors that seeks to continue to hide the fact that you've done nothing special since putting young Neil on the Moon nearly fifty years ago.

Talking of the passing of time, our subtle and complex editor Balfe has vented at length about the failings of the F1 App and various online "applications" that generally left his heart rate elevated due to irritation not excitement.

As for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and the rest... well Formula One so far has treated them like ice cubes on the Titanic. A distasteful distraction. Clearly folk want better than this. Editor Balfe has stated that he is a hard core fan willing to pay "that bit extra", to receive in return "additional content that is worthwhile". And that is where for editor Balfe and many fans it falls apart. They pay the money, and receive nothing but frustration in return. Liberty simply have to ensure massive value for money from paid for services to ensure they can survive alongside free-to-air output.

As regular readers might recall I am very fond of video games. I've been playing driving games since "Night Driver" came out in late 1976 in the arcades (remember those...?) and 1978 on the ground-breaking Atari 2600 home video game system. It was a simple game with raster graphics serving up white picket posts to mark each side of the road, and the driver (player) needed to remain within the posts as they flew past at ever increasing speeds.

Yet here we are over forty years later and still Formula One does not have a sensible online real time gaming or interaction option. Forty years! Good lord. No wonder Pitpass readers want good on line applications, meaningful data in real time, and possibly entertaining near-real time gaming options.

Grand Turismo introduced what it called "B Spec" some years back. In this mode, rather than driving yourself you instructed your driver how to run a race. This could be done in real time, so a 12 hour race took 12 hours, or in multiples of real time to speed things along. You controlled driving style, tyre choice, and pit calls.

What I'd like to see is an interactive game mode whereby I qualify in the same conditions as the car for that weekend, say within twelve hours of actual qualifying, and then I set up my B Spec driver to run the race, starting from my qualifying grid position. Then I can watch the race in real time, and have my driver "competing" at the same time. It would be the job of moments to watch the race live, while monitoring a good Formula One real time application and make pit calls for my driver, but my main game is still watching the race, now with added excitement. Combining my qualifying position from Saturday with my B Spec driver management, can I beat the real teams? You could have leagues in each country/time zone and run a virtual championship alongside the real one. You could even purchase your set up from an existing team, so you align with them. You might come third in the race against the Mercedes, but if your virtual Red Bull beats the real world Red Bulls, how exciting is that? Then you can run virtual leagues of specific teams... which is another revenue stream...

This would be a combination of live TV, live streaming data, and gaming. You could have paying options to get weather data faster, or inside data on other team's strategies as a way to make money for Liberty, and give those with dollars to burn a slight edge. Or have a simple league with limited control for free, and move up leagues and control complexity as you pay for more data and more freedom to act. Take it away Liberty (and send me a cheque for that one please).

Fans want high grade television coverage, and great online data for free. They would then welcome higher value (more depth, more detail, real time) data for a fee. But it is clear readers consider a great free experience as key to maintaining a huge fan base. Then cater to the die-hard fans with great pay-for services.

Enough of the air waves and virtual worlds. One area where Formula One can learn from other Sports is on the day engagement at the venue.

Going back to my original comparisons with Bruce Springsteen and The Australian Open both are highly engaging to attend, and compared to a Grand Prix weekend, not that expensive. The Springsteen concert was a spiritual experience. The concert I attended he was on stage three and a half hours, for non-stop music. He ran around the stadium. He stood on the barriers, he drank beer with a fan, he hugged kids. He had people on stage, he got song requests from banners in the stalls. And at the end he thanked us, the audience, for coming! We felt like he had come to see us, not the other way around. That is how you thank fans, and have them begging for more. Without question fans see most modern drivers as far too distant, and they want more "Bruce style" engagement.

The corporate speak. The set answers. The storming around visor down when the day has not been perfect. The ridiculous pictures of the latest fifty million dollar apartment, boat, aircraft, that 99.998% of fans could not afford over seven lifetimes let alone this one. If you got every person on the planet with a true collectable Rolex (let's say any of the semi-rare one's worth more than thirty thousand US) you'd not fill a quarter of the empty grandstands at the Chinese GP.

Liberty needs to bring the sport back to the people. And that means the drivers, the teams, all the people involved speaking directly and honestly to fans. This is one trick we can learn from American sports. The players all speak at great length to fans, give interviews, sign items, and are available during events. Sure they then disappear off to multi-million dollar homes, but they do not live on a cloud over Olympus during events. Hopefully Liberty can help Formula One rediscover its human side and reconnect.

Like any showman Bruce showed us what he wanted to show us. In truth I've no idea what he would be like face-to-face over a warm English beer. But that's not the point. The one chance he had to connect with me in a stadium he managed to make me feel like me being there personally mattered to him. It is that level of personal connection that Pitpass readers, and I, want to see returned to Formula One. We have heroes, but the current format does not let us see them clearly. Indeed it lets us see them hardly at all.

Many readers, plus folk such as Christian Horner, talk about the need to make the drivers Gladiators again, and reignite the base spirits that excite us about competitive sport. While the cars and circuits have a huge role to play here, it is how it is presented and connected in the media that will win or lose the day.

Lesson Two: Make the free content engaging and enjoyable. Make the paid for content value added for the hard core fan, and exciting (game based) for the young fan. Get all involved in the sport down off Mount Olympus and back in the game with the fans. Connect one-on-one to rediscover the passion. Dare to be human!

Pitpass Recommendation: Free to air is the life blood of viewing figures for Formula One, it has to be an enjoyable easy to access option globally. Then to earn the money make the paid for content amazing. Mobile apps, timing apps, personal virtual qualifying each race weekend, followed by racing your B Spec driver on Sunday in a global league. Align with teams, gain their set up and data (even Lewis’). Drag the stars down from Olympus and make them connect as humans with the fans. Use the media to clearly support that this is a complex team game. People love the technology and the humanity. Showcase both!

Next we move to reviewing the Sporting Regulations. A place where Pitpass readers clearly find the most passion, and the least alignment of agreement on the path to enlightenment and salvation!

Max Noble.

Learn more about Max and check out his previous features, here