Brown slams F1 team meetings for frequent embarrassment and rampant contradictions disrupting vital discussions.
Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren F1, laments that meetings between team principals, intended to address certain issues, can sometimes be marred by bad faith by some participants, which hinders progress on critical problems.
“Team principal meetings can sometimes be very embarrassing,” Brown stated. “For example, when Lando was penalised two years ago, we argued that most of these penalty points were not dangerous, and Otmar completely opposed it, because obviously everyone wanted Lando banned.”
“Twelve months later, Gasly opposes it, and Otmar presents exactly the same case that we did, and we tell him ‘man, you voted against this?’ And it’s not healthy because it shows that one year, it may work for you, and the next year, it may not.”
Brown believes that teams should have less power within F1 and the FIA, with these bodies managing the sport’s regulatory aspects.
“To eliminate this kind of ‘what’s good for me today’ voting from the system, I think we simply need to step back and let the FIA and Formula 1 regulate for the fairness of the sport. That means there will be wins and losses. We might lose in the short term because we would have wanted to block something.”
“I believe McLaren wants to race in a fair, sporting, and equitable manner, which means that sometimes it may go in your favour, sometimes against. But in the long term, if we are all in a sport that is completely fair, and things are equal for everyone, I think it’s a better sport. We all win.”
“I would like teams to have less power”
The American also wants less stringent criteria than the 28 votes required out of 30 for decisions by the F1 Commission, which allocates 10 votes to the FIA, 10 to F1, and one to each team: “I would like teams to have less power. But I would like us to get rid of majority voting and get to a simple ‘50%, something passes.'”
“Because we are all in conflict in one way or another at one time or another. We need to give more power back to Formula 1 and the FIA to do what they think is right for the sport. I think we are sometimes our own worst enemy.”
“I think the teams are collectively guilty of creating many of these problems themselves by overly complicating what we want in race cars, what we want in the regulations. Something will happen and we all spend a tremendous amount of time getting into the details, without thinking about the unintended consequences.”
Furthermore, Brown dislikes that penalties take into account the consequences of incidents: “I think you have to be consistent in applying penalties, regardless of the outcome. If you take the incident in Austria – the 10-second penalty [for Verstappen] – it could have been nothing more than tyre marks on the pontoons of the other.”
“It happens to have cost two guys the race, and points to one of them, but you cannot increase the penalty because that happened – you must penalize the incident, whatever it is. It makes me wonder how we could have raced without any of this for so long and not experienced such controversies.”
Brown Critiques F1 Team Talks as ‘Embarrassing’ Brown Critiques F1 Team Talks as ‘Embarrassing’
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