Current owners CVC Capital Partners are unlikely to hang around forever and
one possibility which has been mooted would see the teams themselves become
joint-owners of the sport, although McLaren team principal and FOTA chairman
Martin Whitmarsh denied the appointment of DC Advisory Partners was “an
aggressive manoeuvre” so much as an effort to explore all avenues both in
terms of the structure of the sport and how it should be run.
“We’ve appointed DC Advisory and IMG, and basically we’re just saying
‘let’s now come together and be a little bit more coherent as a group of
teams’,” Whitmarsh told industry magazine Autosport.
“I think we should just be professional enough, rather than [just] saying
what we could do here, or what we could do in the media.
“I’m not the expert; I’m an engineer who likes racing cars. Most of us are
racers more than businessmen – and some of us think we’re better businessmen
than others – but nonetheless we are racers. So I think our view is ‘ let’s
see if we can construct some alternative business models’.
“It is so that we’re able to say, with a bit of luck, ‘here is some
expert advice and a view about what we can do to actually make this sport
bigger and better than it is today’. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”
He added: “It’s not an aggressive manoeuvre, it’s not trying to do anything
secretly, I’m not trying to conceal it.
“These things leak out, such is the sport. But it’s a piece of work that
we’ve undertaken so that we can see together.
“We’ll review it in about eight weeks’ time, all of the teams… and from that
we’ll decide what we want to share with our partners.
“Then we will take a view and make some recommendations as to how we
think the sport should go forward.”