GreenBkk.com Formula 1 | FOTA appoints corporate group to assist with Concorde negotiations

FOTA appoints corporate group to assist with Concorde negotiations

By Jonathan Noble and Dieter Rencken
Thursday, September 15th 2011, 13:42 GMT

The Formula One Teams' Association (FOTA) is hoping that it will be able to approach the looming Concorde Agreement negotiations from a stronger position following the appointment of corporate group DC Advisory Partners to help guide it.

With talks to frame the last Concorde Agreement in 2009 nearly collapsing as teams came close to forming a breakaway, it is expected that sorting out the next document that binds the teams, the FIA and Formula 1's commercial rights holder together will be just as fraught.

As a result, FOTA has appointed DC Advisory Partners and IMG (International Management Group) to help provide the teams with a better insight into what they should be pushing for to help benefit their cause from 2013.

FOTA chairman Martin Whitmarsh told AUTOSPORT: "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'.

"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. That's what I am, and I can handle being a team principal.

"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."

Although some have viewed the appointment of DC Advisory Partners as the first step of a move by teams to takeover the sport, Whitmarsh insists that the motivating factor is simply in trying to find ways to improve the sport.

"It's not an aggressive manoeuvre, it's not trying to do anything secretly, I'm not trying to conceal it," he said.

"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."

Credit: AUTOSPORT.COM (www.autosport.com)