F1 Teams ready to sign Concorde deal

Thursday, 05 March 2009 17:27


FOTA president Luca di Montezemolo says all teams are prepared to commit to signing a new Concorde Agreement, locking them into Formula 1 until the end of 2012.
The sport has been operating without the document, which stipulates the commercial terms on which squads compete, since the end of 2007, having failed to reach agreement on a new deal with Bernie Ecclestone.
But Montezemolo said during his presentation of FOTA’s vision for the sport in Geneva on Thursday that “all the teams and car manufacturers are prepared and committed to enter into a new Concorde Agreement until the end of 2012".
Following the shock withdrawal of Japanese giant Honda last December due to plummeting road car sales, fears grew that more teams, either manufacturer-owned or independent, could follow suit in the troubled financial climate.
While substantial cost-cutting measures were agreed from 2009 to stabilise the sport’s future, with the prospect of major budget reductions for 2010 set to follow, the deepening global recession has ensured doubts have persisted about the longer-term F1 future of more carmakers given many of their parent companies’ common struggles.
But Montezemolo’s comments on Thursday appear to suggest that all teams are now ready to commit to signing a new Concorde Agreement.
However, a longer-term battle continues to loom over the future distribution of commercial revenues in the sport, with Montezemolo having previously made clear that the teams will push to increase the 50% share it currently receives to shore up their own finances.
During its Geneva presentation FOTA reiterated that one of its key aims was to ensure “an appropriate balance between revenue and costs” was struck in the coming years.
Leading team principals have conceded that a renegotiation of the current income split is unlikely to be achievable until 2013, but are nevertheless keen to discuss it with Ecclestone in the near future.
Toyota president and FOTA vice-chairman John Howett told reporters in Portugal in January: “Even if we don’t have immediate revisions to the existing agreements, I think the point then is what we do in 2013.
“I believe that all we are asking for is a sensible dialogue, and the main focus of FOTA is the future direction and evolution of Formula 1 as the number one, premier world motorsport – and that involves not just the teams but all the stakeholders.”