Bernie Ecclestone considers the FOTA unnecessary
The F1's chief financial officer believes that teams would be better off working on making their cars faster rather than dealing with the commercial management of FOTA.
The Formula One Teams Association, better known as FOTA, was established in July 2008, following a meeting organized in Maranello. This association aims to work with the FIA and FOM [editor’s note: Formula One Management of Bernie Ecclestone] to agree on regulations and commercial conditions that will provide the foundations for a dynamic and robust sport. The objective was then to renegotiate, with a single and unified voice, the Concorde Agreements primarily governing the commercial aspects of Formula One. A few months later, FOTA entered into open conflict with the FIA over the cost-cutting project through a budget cap. An echo of history, some might say, recalling the FISA-FOCA war era in the early 1980s, which pitted the governing bodies against the Formula One Constructors Association, led by a certain… Bernie Ecclestone.
To know all too well the power that an association between stables can hold, Bernie Ecclestone has always been reluctant towards a FOTA that has never missed an opportunity to make its voice heard on the management of F1.
As part of a joint interview with Christian Horner on the official Formula One site, Bernie Ecclestone was asked what he thought of the FOTA: « I’m trying not to think about them. It’s a useless association of people who should only focus on putting competitive cars on the grid. It’s simply more than what they should be thinking about. I ensure that they have enough financial resources. »
No doubt that, in the context of the renegotiation of the Concorde Agreements which will expire in 2012, Bernie Ecclestone will seek to negotiate, in the best interest of the teams, the financial resources, and he would thus like to see the uselessness of FOTA proven by capitalizing on its internal divisions. Indeed, the Association of Teams is a giant with feet of clay, threatened by the respective interests of each team. HRT has already seceded many months ago, negotiating the Concorde Agreements on its own, and today there are doubts about the budget of the Red Bull team that threaten the – apparent – harmony within FOTA. In an interview with the Formula One website, Christian Horner even somewhat distances himself from FOTA, of which he is the head of the Sporting Working Group, by assuring, like Bernie Ecclestone, not to waste too much time looking in that direction.
