MOTORSPORT: Why Ferrari can't lose

Ferrari has won three of the past 40 Formula 1 grands prix to Mercedes' 34 and nobody has won the F1 drivers’ world title in a Ferrari since 2007.

The last to do it was Kimi Raikkonen, before he was paid out to make way for Fernando Alonso and went off to the World Rally Championship for a couple of years, only to be re-hired by the Scuderia.

The Italian team has not won the F1 constructors’ title since 2008, when the combined efforts of Raikkonen and Felipe Massa were enough to put it ahead of Lewis Hamilton in the season of his first drivers’ title and the under-performing Finn Heikki Kovalainen at what was then McLaren-Mercedes.

Hamilton has added another two drivers’ crowns to his CV in the era of the V6 hybrids and Mercedes has won the constructors’ title in both the past two seasons.

Ferrari has been fourth and second in the constructors’ standings the past two years and has been beaten by Mercedes in both GPs so far this year, with only one of the red cars finishing each race – Sebastian Vettel’s in third place in Melbourne and Raikkonen’s second in Bahrain, between the Mercs of Nico Rosberg and Hamilton.

Yet already it is known that Ferrari will make more money out of F1 this year than Mercedes or any other team.

Distributions of the F1 financial 'pie' are based on previous seasons – not simply the one just gone, but the past three.

And then there are the side deals that have been done by aged F1 impresario Bernie Ecclestone with most of the top teams to keep them sweet.

It is a mega deal with Ferrari that acknowledges its historic place at the heart of F1 that ensures it still reaps more than the recently-much-more-successful Mercedes.

Britain’s Autosport has published figures that – while not officially released, clearly come from Ecclestone’s office – showing that, although Mercedes will receive a 36 per cent boost in F1 payouts this year at $US171 million, the sport’s top team on the track will still be runner-up to Ferrari’s $US192m.

Ferrari’s take is still 17 per cent up on what it was paid last year, while the overall distribution to the 10 teams that competed last season will be $US965m – more than $A1.28 billion at today’s exchange rate and up about 9.3 per cent from the 2015 distribution.

While F1 is in turmoil, and up to half its teams are always in financial strife, even tail-end team Manor, previously Marussia and which did not score a world championship point in 2015, will get $US47m – much of it thanks to the late Jules Bianchi’s two points from  the 2014 Monaco GP.

Autosport says the teams will get nine monthly payments from this month, with a final “check” payment early next year when the definitive revenues from last year have been calculated.

All 10 will get a base of $US33.5m, then another figure based on performance on the track in recent seasons.

On that score Mercedes will receive $US63.5m to Ferrari’s $US53.5m, with Williams – third last season – getting $US43.5m and Red Bull Racing $US36.5m.
Even Manor will receive $13.5m – the value of Bianchi’s ninth place at Monaco almost two years ago.

Then there are the whacks from the special Ecclestone deals.

Mercedes and Red Bull will each get $US39m as constructors’ championship bonuses – Red Bull won four titles in a row before Merc’s two – and Ferrari $US35m.

McLaren – the sport’s second most successful team after Ferrari, but without a constructors’ championship this century after it was stripped of one in 2007 in the ‘Spygate’ scandal – will receive a US$32m constructor bonus.

Yet Williams won’t get any constructor bonus, although it will receive a $US10m “heritage” payment.

Mercedes and Red Bull also will get another $US35m – Red Bull for having been the first team (after the threat of a big split) to sign up to the most recent Concorde Agreement that binds teams to the sport, Mercedes for meeting a target of two world titles.

But the payment that puts Ferrari on top of the pile is the $US70m it will get for its historical importance to the sport, having been in it from the first world championship in 1950.

Red Bull is the only other winning team in the hybrid era, courtesy of Australian Daniel Ricciardo’s three victories in 2014, yet its income from the sport this year will be seven per cent less than last at $US144m.

Williams will be down six per cent at $US87m, despite it having finished ahead of Red Bull last season.

And McLaren, without a title sponsor for quite a while now and only ninth in last year’s 10-team competition in its 're-marriage' to Honda power, is now only the fifth biggest recipient of the F1 payouts at $US82 million, down 16 per cent on what it got last year.

Renault will get $US64m, a 28 per cent increase on the amount the Lotus team it has bought back received last year. Next year’s numbers are expected to include a heritage payment the French manufacturer is thought to have negotiated with Ecclestone as a large part of its decision to return as a fully-fledged constructor this season.

Red Bull’s junior team Toro Rosso will get an extra eight per cent this year at $US57m, while Swiss team Sauber and Force India are to get increases of 23 and 12 per cent respectively to $US54m and $US67m.

Sauber and Force India may already have received advance payments from Ecclestone, even though they complained to the European Union’s competitions commission months ago about F1’s revenue distributions and the sport’s governance.

Force India’s controlling shareholder Vijay Mallya’s drinks and defunct airline businesses in India have massive debts, while German correspondent Michael Schmidt, arguably the best-informed journalist in the F1 paddock, has reported on Sauber’s latest “severe money trouble”.

While it was known that Sauber has had trouble paying its staff, Schmidt said that Banco do Brasil, whose sponsorship secures Felipe Nasr’s drive, was withholding money and that the Brazilian driver had only 70 per cent of its new C35 car – without the latest brakes, suspension and other parts.

Schmidt said that Fiat and Ferrari chief Sergio Marchionne now had his sights on making Sauber, which uses last year’s Ferrari power units, an Alfa Romeo team to fulfil his desire to revive that brand in F1.

Critics paint a dark picture of the future
Yet again it seems that F1’s controversial elimination-style qualifying format will be ditched for next week’s Chinese GP – but it’s not locked in yet.

Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) president Jean Todt and Bernie Ecclestone agreed last night – after a letter to them and F1’s biggest shareholder, private equity company CVC Capital Partners, from this year’s 11 teams – that it would be best to revert to last year’s format.

However, they said that decision was still subject to approval “by the F1 governing bodies” – the 26-member F1 Commission and the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council.

In the politics of F1, especially those of recent times, nothing is a foregone conclusion.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has said that the sport is now “90 per cent politics and 90 per cent off-track discussions around governance and qualifying formats and terrible ideas”.

The criticisms of some highly-respected paid observers of the sport are even harsher.

“The sport is in danger of disappearing up its own exhaust pipe,” Richard Williams has written in London’s Guardian.

Williams said CVC was “gobbling up a third of F1’s profits … without doing anything in the way of investing in its future”.

Ecclestone preferred to take money from Russia’s Vladmir Putin and Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev for new races rather than keep traditional GPs, and was “handing over” F1 telecasts in Britain exclusively to Rupert Murdoch’s Sky pay-TV from 2019.

“Practically everything Ecclestone does now can be seen as prejudicial to the long-term health of F1,” Williams said.

“His full-throttle pursuit of profit risks leaving the sport in the same state as Fernando Alonso’s crashed McLaren in Melbourne [on March 20]: an unrecognisable pile of junk, fit only for the breaker’s yard.”

The London Telegraph’s chief sports feature writer Oliver Brown said F1 had become an “ungovernable shambles” and that the power structures Ecclestone had designed “militate against anything resembling a decision”.

“Ecclestone should set up his own sideline in dictatorship tourism, so cravenly does he court the chequebooks of despots,” Brown said.

“In July Bernie’s ‘Tyranny Tours’ will touch down for the first time in Azerbaijan, a mafia state that toasted last [northern] summer’s European Games  by imprisoning non-compliant journalists.

“F1’s malaise [is that] the two constituencies it ought to care most about, the drivers and the fans, are the two it consistently disregards.
“Power has been devolved, apparently irrevocably, into the hands of faceless financiers.

“They neglect to note, or perhaps they simply do not care, that a sport existing purely for corporate gratification is no longer much of a sport at all.”