Qualifying not changing for Bahrain
As mentioned above, the teams met yesterday and decided they wanted to go back to the 2015 style of qualifying, the FIA said no and proposed that Q1 and Q2 remain in the new elimination style format while Q3 goes back to the old format. They also said that returning to the 2015 format was not an option at this stage. The teams could not all agree to the FIA recommendation and as unanimity is needed to change the rules they will be kept as they were in Australia.
So why would they do that when the FIA said it was "embarrassing", the boss of FOM Bernie Ecclestone said it was "pretty crap" and the team bosses said "we can make it work". I'm at a loss for words......................................
Skys Billion pound F1 deal
NO! That isn't a typo, for the new 6 years deal to have formula 1 on Sky they have paid around 1 billion UK pounds. Formula 1 is a business, its business happens to be a sport but first and foremost it is a business. F1 Management and CVC have taken a purely business decision to prioritize income from broadcasters over mass audience numbers. It remains to be seen if in the long run that is a good decision or not. Since 2012 when Sky brought the rights to F1 the audience figures have been dropping, despite the success of Lewis Hamilton and many races still being shown on free-to-air channels, the viewing figures have been falling by just over 5% year on year in the UK and around 6% worldwide. When Bernie was asked about the drop in viewers he attributes the decline to the fact that F1 has moved towards Pay-TV in several markets over the last three seasons, so he is fully aware of the consequences.
While the deal is all about the money, one should not forget what has happened in recent history with the free-to-air deals in the UK over recent years. In 1997 ITV won the rights to screen F1 free-to-air, but decided to pull out of their contract early in 2008, the rights were then taken up by the BBC in 2009 who again decided to leave the deal in 2015 and now it is Channel 4 who have picked up the pieces, this was not good for FOM, the two biggest free-to-air TV companies in the country were unable to for-fill their side of the deal and I believe this is also part of the reason FOM decided to go pay-to-view. The BBC were paying £15m a year for 10 races, the Channel 4 deal is worth £24m a year, while Sky has been paying £45m a year for its rights, during this time of shared rights. So FOM income from the UK at the moment is around £69 million a year. Why have Sky paid so much for the rights now, well that is because BT sport and Sky have been in a bidding war which has pushed the price up by around 150%, could Delta Topco turn down such a deal?
People in favor of the deal are saying, look at the Premier League, it has gone from strength to strength while being on pay-to-view, but I think that it is a very big mistake to compare F1 to the Premier League. Formula 1 is not football (as Murray Walker once famously point out
) it should be compared with Tennis or Golf, as they and F1 are niche sports unlike football that has a mass following. If I am correct above and it is more like Golf, one only has to look at the viewing figures for something like the Ryder Cup, when that went pay-to-view the figures fell like a stone and dropped by around 90% (again time will tell).
There is a small window of hope and that is that Sky will see viewing figures take a massive dive and decide to license some races back to free-to-view TV in the hope it increases the popularity of the sport and gain them more viewers willing to pay for the other races behind their paywall. From reading much about this over the last few days it seems that many lifelong F1 fans are saying they will not pay to watch the sport in the future, so I think this may be the death nail of F1 in many European countries, I hope not.
My personal view is that CVC want to sell the sport and having added 1 billion pounds to their balance sheet they have increased the value of Delta Topco (the parent company of the Formula One Group) massively. It also must not be forgotten that they have also sold the rights to pay-to-view in France and Spain and are likely to do the same in other regions, so the value of the company today is probably at its most valuable. But I believe this is short sighted as they don't know how many viewers they will loose because they are not willing to pay the price or don't want anything to do with Murdoch, they are highly unlikely to attract new younger viewers as the show will be behind a paywall and the teams will have a much stronger hand when negotiating the new Concorde agreement in 2020 as they will be aware that FOM has at least one billion pound contract to keep the sport on TV well beyond that date. The value of Formula 1 for commercial TV is its massive viewing figures, so what will its value be if the viewing figures fall by tens of millions over the next 6 to 10 years?
He's patting them on the head saying "there there" while cackling in an evil manner
