After Liberty Media took over Formula 1 at the end of 2016 it installed former team principal Ross Brawn in charge of the series. Reinvigorating what had become an increasingly uncompetitive championship ranked highly among his priorities.
The new owners ousted Bernie Ecclestone, whose favourable commercial deals with F1’s top teams ensured the richest outfits received the greatest financial rewards, which in turn guaranteed their continued success and gradually eliminated competition for the top places.
Changing that deeply entrenched advantage would prove an enormous challenge. After Liberty Media’s first two seasons in charge, Brawn reflected that the domination of F1’s podium positions by Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari had only been broken on two occasions in that time.
“Two podiums from a total of 123 is unacceptable,” he said. “Especially when it comes with an ever-increasing technical and financial divide.
“It’s a problem we are tackling together with the FIA and the teams, because the future of F1 depends on it.”
Brawn devised a twin-pronged solution which would prevent the richest teams spending their way to success and help those which had fallen behind to catch up. One much-vaunted element of this was F1’s first budget cap, introduced in 2021. Now all teams had the same spending limit covering much of their car development, it would force the richest competitors to rein in their spending.
F1 also introduced a new handicap system for 2021 under which the most successful teams in one season faced tighter development restrictions than their rivals the following year.
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The new rules could not be introduced immediately after Liberty Media’s takeover as they had to be agreed in line with F1’s regulatory system. In the meantime, Brawn urged fans to be patient. For a while, he penned a column for the official F1 website after every race, the gist of which could often be summarised as ‘well, that wasn’t very exciting, but once we’re done levelling the playing field everything will be better’.
Brawn stepped down from his role last year having initially proclaimed his overhaul of the regulations a success. But what must he have made of the first two races of 2023?
Red Bull locked out the front row of the grid for the opening round in Bahrain and would surely…
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