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Haas urges Liberty to be careful with F1 revenue distribution

Gene Haas thinks that Liberty Media should be careful when it comes to changing Formula 1's existing revenue distribution to teams, not wanting a "socialistic-type structure" to come in place.

Since completing its takeover of F1 in January, Liberty has begun to look into ways to growing the sport, with sustainability for teams being an important point for review.

The existing Concorde Agreement expires in 2020, and new F1 CEO and chairman Chase Carey has suggested that it could be replaced by more of a "long-term partnership" with teams.

Haas took his eponymous team into F1 last year, and while the team is currently paid the least given its infancy, he has still urged caution when it comes to changing the existing pay-out structure.

"Since we're the newcomers in this business, our revenue stream from Formula 1 is nothing so anything we get will be greatly appreciated," Haas said.

"But I think we just have to be very very careful in how you redistribute the wealth because there are some teams at the top that have spent fifty years doing this, that have earned some entitlement to how the costs are distributed.

"I'm not saying that the teams at the bottom don't deserve more but I'm still saying teams at the top deserve more. You can't just arbitrarily redistribute that because quite frankly winning races should come with rewards and it should not be a socialistic type structure.

"Other than that, everything else is open to negotiation but I think in racing, even in NASCAR we're having struggles with that. The team owners are typically on the bottom rung of the income stream and they're struggling - as viewership goes down, sponsors go down. It's been very very difficult in NASCAR.

"I think to some degree that teams that rely on sponsorship are starting to find it's very very difficult to attract a major sponsor. A $25m sponsor is a huge sponsor. Today, that is practically non-existent. Most of the sponsors - at least I know from NASCAR, they're more in the $5m to $10m range and you have to have multiple sponsors on your cars at different races.

"There's some adaptability to that but at the same time there's a lot of demand from media, so how that money gets redistributed seems to be the question but unfortunately the teams don't have a real strong position there to speak up about how it will get distributed because we don't own Formula 1."

Zdroj: crash.net