Questions from the floor
Q: (Joe Saward –
Grand Prix Special)
Three of the four of you are involved in
Formula One to sell cars. At the moment there's a bit of a financial crisis around the world; what do you think the real impact of that will be on Formula One and as a secondary question, how do you feel about not being in North America at all, the world's biggest car market?
Mario Theissen:
The second question first: obviously we are not happy about not being in North America. The US is the most important and biggest car market for
BMW and I think for the industry as a whole. It has always been difficult to set foot into the US but Canada has always been a very strong Formula One supporter and the race in Montreal. I have seen the race in Montreal as an operational base to get a second race up and running in the US, and so we would, rather than drop the Canada race, use it or expand the operations in North America to have a Canadian plus at least one US race.
The other question? Financial crisis, economical crisis world-wide. Well, the answer is simple. Formula One is of this world and so Formula One will be affected as other industries are affected, as all the sponsors are affected. Basically every stakeholder in Formula One is affected and so we have to deal with it like any other operation.
John Howett:
I think we need to put things in context really. The first is if you look at some of the figures released for the British premier league in terms of teams' liquidity, the issues being faced by
F1 teams are relatively minor. If you look at the advertising budgets of large corporations excluding car manufacturers, they are over $2-3bn a year, so I think one of the issues is to continue… because Formula One is so powerful and so strong, to actually work with the commercial rights holder to actually demonstrate the value of utilising Formula One as a marketing tool and I think we need to use more effort on that. Clearly as a car manufacturer we will come under pressure because a number of markets are depressed, others are fairly buoyant like Russia and China, but I think the strong companies who continue to invest in marketing, who continue to invest in technology, will become the winners. We should also look at the opportunity that this sort of situation presents, not only the pressure, so you can paint a very black picture or you can say there is a lot of upside here for Formula One and also for those well-managed Formula One teams and well-managed manufacturers. So yes, we will go through a hard time, I'm sure that we will all survive, we will probably come out with a strong sport.
