BURNOUT

Formula 1 has an ambition to run more than 25 grands prix a year. The business case is compelling – but it comes with a human cost which doesn’t show up on the balance sheet. And the teams are going to have to live with it. But how do they plan to achieve that?

WORDS MARK GALLAGHER

PICTURES WHEN BERNIE ECCLESTONE sat down for dinner with Liberty Media’s Chase Carey and Sean Bratches at the 2016 Monaco Grand Prix, they enjoyed a wide-ranging talk with host Donald Mackenzie, head of CVC Capital, at that time the ultimate owner of Formula 1. In Manish Pandey’s documentary Lucky!, chronicling the life and times of the man who built the business of F1, Ecclestone reflects upon that pivotal meeting on Mackenzie’s yacht. “Business wasn’t discussed there at all,” he recalls. “I think what they really thought in the end, the bottom line, was simple. ‘Here we’ve got an 80-year-old guy that’s been running this company for 40 years. Imagine us, proper American business people, if we had the company what we could do’.” What Liberty could do was take everything Ecclestone had already…

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GP Racing UK (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2023

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