Never one to mince his words or shirk at giving an opinion, former F1 team boss Flavio Briatore had some choice comments to make on the current state of F1 when speaking to the Spanish press yesterday.
“F1 is becoming increasingly difficult to follow, go back to basics and what really matters is the racing. There’s too many rules that don’t improve the show. We don’t need more technology, we need to show the drivers that aren’t very good outside of the technology.
Why not punish the team’s championship points rather than the driver? Why should Hamilton or Alonso suffer for putting in a new engine?
The rules are so complex, even the journalists don’t quite understand how the engine sanctions work and that’s bureaucracy, not racing!”
Briatore believes the human factor is the most important aspect of the sport and has a solution:-
“For me F1 should be a sport where the best drivers in the world battle with each other in more or less equivalent cars, that’s what counts, nothing else.
The bosses have many meetings, but these meetings serve only to set a date for the next meeting. They do nothing, they don’t agree on anything, between themselves they can’t even choose the mineral water for the table much less an intelligent direction for this sport!
Hotels for Monza are now only 60% full for a race weekend, whereas before there was a waiting list for a GP. In my time, F1 was glamour, now there’s little of that and the fans at the circuits are getting older. Nobody does anything!”
The Italian is always quick to pile praise onto is former driver, Fernando Alonso, and whilst appraising Ferrari’s plight he makes clear what he thinks of Sebastian Vettel:-
“Ferrari are missing something, it has maybe 80% of what it takes to win but still lacks the important 20% and when you see Vettel has at Ferrari, we see how really good Alonso is. Clearly it was he who made the difference, not the car.
Verstappen is great for the image of F1, he reminds me somehow of Schumacher and Alonso, he has all the features of a future star, a gift from heaven for this sport.”
It feels dirty to even agree a little with this slimey weazel.
Fully agree and he ain’t wrong.
He don’t talk bullshit. It is exactly as it is. F1 need more action, and you can only do that if the drivers can be more competitive with each other. I also agree with him if he say that not the driver but the team have to be punish in the world champion standings for changing engines.
Michael, it would be OK if a team with deep pockets forfeited the constructors championship in favor of supplying fresh engines to its divers each weekend?
no, win as a team, lose as a team.
I have to agree with the old bugger. Trouble is the problems are so deep seated they cannot be fixed by anything short of revoliution! I started to draft a reply on those lines but gave up as life is too short!
“For me F1 should be a sport where the best drivers in the world battle with each other in more or less equivalent cars, that’s what counts, nothing else.”
This is from the man who had tuned mass damping on his cars.