Thank Frankel it's Friday: Bernie Ecclestone leaves F1 – good or bad?

Ask if Formula 1 fared well under Bernie’s stewardship and the answers come more easily.

Bernie has been the most important man in F1 since he took over FOCA in 1978. That year there were 16 rounds in the championship, this year there will be 20, and more F1 now than then would seem to be a good thing.

Rather more importantly, when Bernie took over, F1 was still losing, on average, at least a driver per season. In the nearly 40 years since he took charge, just five have lost their lives during race weekends. That is astonishing. And yes, you can point to many others who were instrumental in this, none more so than Max Mosley, but Bernie played his part too, not least appointing Professor Sid Watkins as F1’s official doctor as one of his very first acts in charge.

In terms of coverage, I’m old enough to remember what F1 was like on the telly in 1978, and it was a joke. A few fixed camera positions, commentary often from someone not in the same country as the race, wonky satellite feeds and murky pictures. The spectacle may be less exciting today, but at least you get to see it.

On the other hand, in 1978, we had 3-litre V8, V12 and flat 12 engines, and V6 turbos, all sounding utterly different to each other and largely brilliant. The cars looked wonderful standing still and even better on the move because the ground effect technology that would stop F1 cars sliding remained in its infancy. And the drivers: in 1978 we had Ronnie Peterson, Gilles Villeneuve, Mario Andretti, Patrick Depailler, Jody Scheckter, Didier Pironi, John Watson, Alan Jones, James Hunt, Jochen Mass and many, many others. These people didn’t just have superhuman talent, they were true characters, mavericks, off-message daredevils who every time they climbed into an aluminium bathtub swimming in high octane fuel, genuinely risked their lives. They did knowingly, and they did so happily.

How did they become so sanitised? It’s down to teams who race no longer for the sake of racing, but because they have something to sell, be it energy drinks or motor cars. And where there’s something to sell, so too is there a message, and if you’re an employee you must be on it.

Of course, many of the tracks have gone too. In 1978 they raced at the original Kyalami, Long Beach, Paul Ricard, Brands Hatch and the Osterreichring, circuits the current crop would scarcely believe could be considered fit for top level racing, least of all with cars made out of nothing more than bent metal.

Of those still in use today, Monaco, Monza and Montreal are alone in surviving in anything close to original form. In their place, a succession of Tilke tracks in places with plenty of money but no history, playing out to often empty grandstands in countries whose people just don’t care about F1.

And that is where Bernie has let down the fans. Too often when faced with the choice of doing what was right for the sport and the fans who finance the whole operation, or chasing the money, Bernie chose the latter course. Switching from free-to-air to subscription TV coverage is just one obvious example. No surprises then that between 2008-2015 Formula 1 lost 200 million viewers, a third of its global audience. They will be hard to entice back.

So, in summary, Bernie left F1 a safer, more boring place than when he found it and you can say the same about the world as a whole. The challenge for the new administration is to make it interesting again. And the key to that is not making the cars faster, slower or more or less grippy. It is to make the more difficult to drive: much more difficult to drive. Mark Webber told me that compared to the stuff he drove at the start of his F1 career, modern F1 cars are like taking a holiday. And he noted that the teenage Max Verstappen in his rookie year was mentally ahead of his car almost as soon as he got into it. ‘Make no mistake, he’s bloody good, but it just shouldn’t be that easy.’

Will the new administration deliver the changes required? With Ross Brawn in such a pivotal role, hopes must be high, but until we’ve actually seen what difference is made if any, the question is simply impossible to answer.

Photographs courtesy of LAT