[Casper]

Originally Posted by Teretonga

In all truth the future of F1 was probably in peril without them.

The commercial world was questioning the value of spending vast amounts of money in sponsorship for a sport that was just boring a money sucking hole to the centre of the earth where no one wanted to go.

The manufacturers were questioning the cost and value of the never ending climb to stratospheric rev limits in the quest for a few more horsepower and no end to the cost or fuel consumption in sight, so who would fund the teams in the future...

They wouldn't do it themselves so the sport would have been in dire straits if things had not changed

The model wasn't working too well.

Bernie could have funded much of it from Formula One Management but he had begun selling bits off to investors and building his own little nest egg so it wasn't as easy as that....

So really it had to change to something that would encourage people to participate (or in Bernie's eyes, fund things). The FIA didn't want to be responsible for it dying off so they gave the industry what they said they wanted.
Spectators had different ideas. The consuming desire for material excess had run its course and while it still motivates some people many are looking for something sustainable and providing them with a quality of life, more than a quantity of things. So material excess, which was in evidence in the public face of F1 was no longer 'de rigueur'.

Bernie probably didn't realise that his vision of Tilke designed colosseum's wasn't actually what people wanted or needed, but it still looked good, like F1 was doing well. The problem was he abandoned his traditional audience and took the sport to places with no tradition or motor racing history and the events became a caricature of what real F1 had been, and many tired of the excessive ticket prices and the loss of the traditional values of the sport. In some things less is more and the pursuit of more and more 'events' left the remaining audience over saturated and unsatisfied, which meant more of them turned their TV sets off...

So we have arrived at the present, a series of events in expensive colosseum's with cars that all look the same except for colour of the make up, and some very expensive engines, all fettled by a brigade of engineering commando's and run in cities or parks with little or no motor racing tradition. Only a minority of the traditional circuits remain and most of them have been emasculated.
The generation that saw the emergence of F1 has aged and most are now retired, from business or from life, or completely off the planet. The following generation doesn't seem to embrace F1 in quite the same way so is it what they want, or need, or has it simply outlived it's audience?

If it was in peril, it was in peril long before 2014, although I would concede that raising the price of engines by 200-250% ($8-9 million to $20-25million)was almost guaranteed to put all but the manufacturers and most well commercially supported teams at risk.

But the financial foundation F1 was built on was faulty long before 2014, and if it had been properly laid it wouldn't be coming home to roost.

A corporation of equivalent size will as a rule study the market they are in continually and test for new products or marketing angles to keep them in the black and if a public company their shareholders happy with returns. It astounds me that the corporation of F1 has done (apparently) none of this and has not detected the market moving away from it. BE for all his smarts has been too clever and relied on his instincts for a deal and somehow ignored the obvious. Now he has a problem and he is the meat in the sandwich, CVC will obviously given him a pep talk and told him to sort it out and the teams have basically told him they aren't parting with any money so he can find other ways to arrange things. I would pay good money to be a fly on the wall so to speak to see what is going on.