Quote:
Originally Posted by bauble
Good point, it is the current attitude to F1 that is wrong I suppose, it is the be-all-and-end all of motor sport too many people. Having Bottas/Hamilton or Vettel/Raikkonen sharing sports cars and saloons in varies series would do the Manufacturers no harm at all.
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I'm guessing (and it is a pure guess), that the money has caused it. When sponsors start paying £50m a year to be on a car, they can make extra demands, and the teams have to obey.
So Mobil 1 say to McLaren "We're paying £50m to be on the car. With that £50m we want Lewis in the car, no excuses". So suddenly, McLaren aren't allowed to not have Lewis in the car. So if Lewis goes and hurts himself in a quad biking...sorry, tennis accident (looking at you JPM!), then they aren't fullfilling that contract.
Then take it a step further. Mobil 1 also specify that Lewis isn't to wear a Shell icon. Fair enough, but what if Shell are the official fuel supplier of the Race of Champions? Well he's not doing that now, because the expensive Mobil 1 contract said so. RoC contract with Shell says all drivers must have a Shell icon, so the driver can't do it.
But Mobil 1 do want him to do Mobil 1 things. So Lewis does a car swap with Tony Stewart because both have Mobil 1 stickers on them.
When the money goes up, the people paying the money get to make all sorts of demands. Some crazy, some not so crazy, and the result is it limits the driver as an employee. If budgets were smaller, the sponsors pay less, and thus get to have less say in things.
I do think a lot more F1 drivers would do more things (Hulk and Alonso certainly do, Stroll is, and Vettel did RoC), but they simply aren't allowed.
It gets more complicated when manufacturers are involved. With Alonso, the fact he was even allowed to test the Toyota TS050 at Bahrain last year was a minor miracle given he was a Honda driver. But it was clear from the off that he would not be allowed to do any interviews or press work during the test, and the only quotes would come directly from Toyota (and probably OK'd by Honda during the process). That caused a bit of a fuss in the WEC paddock when a couple of journalists spat dummies that Alonso refused to speak to them, and criticised him quite heavily for it. Obviously Fernando is just sticking to the Honda guide lines, and the journalists were so wrapped up in their own self importance that they couldn't see passed the potential hit rate on their website should they get an exclusive Alonso scoop. (disclaimer: most journos understood and knew what was going on. Only a small handful were arsy about it).
It's kinda sad, but that's the way it is. Ideally budgets will drop, and sponsors will have less say and we'll see drivers move about more again.
Edit: there was a funny one in NASCAR a few years back. Coke and Pepsi both sponsor a good chunk of NASCAR Drivers and races. In victory lane, if Coke sponsored the race, when the car pulled in they'd stick a coke sponsor board on top of the car. If a Pepsi driver won, they'd get out of the car and deliberately knock the coke sponsored board off the top. It'd look like an excited act where the driver got carried away, but someone did a montage video of them all and it was pretty obvious. Sponsors were dictating how a driver acts in victory lane.