Never before has F1 seen such an era of utter dominance by one team than what we’ve seen from the Silver Arrows from 2014.
The Ex Ferrari president, Luca Montezemolo threw some light upon why this has been the case during rather candid talks with the Italian press yesterday. He explains the reasons for the superiority of Mercedes-Benz since the Formula 1 entered the new turbo era at the beginning of 2014.
“Nikki Lauda recently told me that Mercedes started on their hybrid in 2007” begins Luca
“This is why they were never going to question whether F1 should take the step into hybrid or not”.
Lamenting the current state of play within the sport, clearly the Ex president thinks hybrid should’ve been shelved long ago.
“For me hybrid was a wrong move, but I couldn’t appose it as it would’ve looked like Ferrari was afraid of taking the step and a Ferrari in fear, would not have been my ferrari”
With regard to the future of f1, Luca says plenty.
“The races must be shorter. Communication is improved. The regulations must be simplified and then maintained. We must emphasize the concept that the Formula 1 is a sport with rich tradition on historic European circuits. Finish with Grands Prix in Korea or India! The USA? Okay, but with a maximum of two races. It must be ensured that the spectators stream into the racing stages. No sport can survive without spectators. “
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Stop with Korea and India? I don’t have any numbers on the numbers of visitors of those races, are they well visited? Fans get a better connection to the sport when they can visit a race.. Will Koreans still love the sport although there isn’t a local race?
Liberty’s target will be to reinforce the idea F1 is a world sport, not a European thing. Not sure whether I am seeing eye to eye with LDM on this…
The Korean GP was set up and implemented for one reason only, to try to entice major Korean automotive industry companies like Hyundai cars and Hankook tyres to invest in F1.
The long term success of Hankook tyres (since 1941 in the Asian market) and the skyrocketing success of Hyundai and KIA’s car sales meant they didn’t need F1 to sell their products globally.
The snowball-effect of negativity kicked in rather quickly when the fiercely loyal Korean people weren’t interested enough and didn’t get involved because their was no local company to follow. The Korean GP was quickly seen as a complete fizzer before it got popular enough to attract a fan base.
The government pulled the plug on financing it because they believed F1 had no relevance to their country and it cost far too much to continue to finance it when grandstands were empty because there was little or no enthusiasm for it from the people.