Team principals meetings 'pretty embarrassing at times' - Brown
McLaren CEO Zak Brown has described recent team principals meetings as "pretty embarrassing in times", with his counterparts...
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McLaren CEO Zak Brown has described recent team principals meetings as "pretty embarrassing in times", with his counterparts changing their minds according to their own team interests.
Brown says that attempts to overhaul some of Formula 1's complicated and at times contradictory rules have been thwarted by the sport's governance structure which gives team bosses the effective power to block changes.
Brown illustrated his points with the ongoing discussion about whether drivers who get a certain number of penalty points in a year should get an automatic mandatory one-race ban.
McLaren wanted to change the rules when Lando Norris came within two points of the threshold earlier in his career, but former Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer opposed any modifications.
Yet when Pierre Gasly was on the cusp of a one-race, Alpine changed its tune - much to Brown's evident exasperation.
“It can be pretty embarrassing at times in the team principal meetings,” Brown explained last week. “An example being when Lando was up on penalty points two years ago.
"We made our case that, actually, the majority of those penalty points weren’t ‘dangerous’. Otmar was totally against it, because obviously everyone wanted to give Lando a ban.
“Fast forward 12 months and Gasly’s up against it. Otmar brings forward the same exact case that we brought forward, and we were like: ‘Dude, you voted against that?’ He didn’t even know where he voted.
"That’s not healthy," Brown insisted. "It shows that one year it might work for you, the following year it might not work for you.
“To take this kind of ‘what’s good for me today’ vote out of the system, I think you’ve just got to stand back and let the FIA and Formula 1 regulate for the fairness of the sport.
"It means you’re going to win some, lose some," he acknowledged. "There could be some times that we lose in the short-term, because we would have liked to block something.
"But over the long haul, if we’re all in a sport that is about total fairness, and things are equal for everyone, I think that’s just a better sport. We all win.”
“I believe McLaren want to race in a fair and sporting and equitable way, which means sometimes it might go for you, sometimes it might go against you," he argued.
While the F1 Commission approves changes, when it comes to proposals after April for the following season it can only do so if they have 28 votes out of a total of 30 from the FIA, FOM and F1 principals meaning three principals can block it.
“I’d like to see the teams have less authority,” Brown stated. "I’d like to see us get rid of majority votes and get to a simple ‘50%, something gets through’, because we’re all conflicted in some way at some point.
“We do need to give more of the power back to Formula 1 and the FIA to do what they think is right for the sport,” he added. “I think we’re our own worst problem at times.
"The teams collectively are pretty guilty of creating a lot of these issues themselves by over-complicating what we want in race cars, what we want on regulations,” he said.
“Something will happen and then we’ll all spend an inordinate amount of time getting into so much detail, and we don’t necessarily think about the unintended consequences.”
Most recently, the decision to sanction Max Verstappen for his robust defence against Lando Norris in Austria has again raised the issue of consistency of how penalties are applied.
“If you take the incident in Austria – the 10-second penalty – that could have been nothing more than just tyre marks on each other’s sidepods," Brown explained.
"It happened to be that it cost two guys the race - and one any points - but you can’t dial up the penalty because that happened. You’ve got to penalise whatever the incident is.
“It does make me wonder how did we go racing without any of this stuff for as long as we did and not have any of these controversies," he concluded.
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