McLaren-Honda CEO Jonathan Neale has called on the FIA and Formula One Management (FOM) to come up with a stable long-term plan for F1 and put an end to its "spin-the-bottle" approach to decision making.
F1's Strategy Group is due to meet at FOM headquarters on Wednesday in the hope of finalising a proposal to make the sport more exciting from 2017 onwards. There is a push for faster, more aggressive cars, but Neale is concerned that a long-term strategy for the promotion and sustainability of the sport is missing from the plans.
"McLaren stands behind the belief that Formula One should be the pinnacle of motorsport and therefore it has to differentiate itself on both the speed and the technology from other formula," Neale told ESPN at Esso's Fuel Your Senses event in London. "But there are a number of challenges in the mix, one of which is that we can't have the pinnacle of motorsport at that level of technology for £2.50.
"At the same time, what we also can't have is the 'free bar' as [former FIA president] Max Mosley once referred to it as. You have to have some level of prudence and governance, and for me personally, rather than from a McLaren point of view in general, what we are missing at the moment is a strategy.
"What we have is two parts of the organisation that have been opportunistic. I think the FIA were very well intentioned in trying to bring in the V6 technology and hybrid KERS - there's a great story about energy efficiency that is worth telling - but what we didn't think through is whether we would be able to explain this through the channels that we have to the audience. Do the audience really get it?
"One problem is that we don't do any promotion through the sport in the centre, promotion is done through the teams. Today we are here at a promotional event with ExxonMobil and McLaren talking about fuel efficiency increases by 30%, the development of synthetic oils, being able to clean-up the environment and us being a carbon-neutral Formula One team. We're happy to play our part, but the governance and governing body have to play their part as well. We need constancy of purpose, some sense of direction and less of a spin-the-bottle approach to regulation making.
"It will require vision and it will require leadership and it will require somebody who is looking at it more than for what we will do this year or next year. We can't lurch in and out of technologies and turn up to meetings where there are eight to ten ideas that we knew about two days ago and are then expected to debate them in a meaningful way."
Red Bull boss Christian Horner recently called for the teams to be taken out of the decision-making process, but Neale believes they are a crucial part of it and need to be listened to in order to ensure long-term stability.
"Bear in mind that every time there is a big regulation change the guys who spend the money are the teams," Neale added. "You've got to look at your stakeholder community and decide: What are the business models that we are going to run here?
"A massive example for me, and I don't want to speak on behalf of Toyota, but they built two full-sized wind tunnels [when they were in F1], which I'm guessing was a $100 million investment, and in 12 months the FIA banned [full-scale wind tunnels]. You can't wipe out shareholder value like that. What that means is that the teams don't know how to invest or what to invest in for it to be a regular market.
"There is nothing different about running Formula One and running a company. You need a great chairman; a good executive board who understand their responsibility and are prepared to do the work; constancy of purpose; you need to be alert to your customer market and know where the channels are; you need to work with the regulators; you need to work with the fans; you need to be cohesive and build a team. The factional divide and conquer stuff [in F1] is for the birds.
"The other side of that sword is what we all love, the plotting and all of that - it wasn't called the piranha club for no reason. It's a tough business and it's not for the faint-hearted, but I think in the fullness of time and if I was sitting with the investors in Formula One, I would be looking at this thing and saying, 'Okay, I've got the $3 billion brand here. If I compare what it gets for TV sponsorship relative to the Turkish football league it's poor'. So we're not really punching at our weight here and we better start thinking about what is required to make it a $5 billion enterprise and then use the distribution of prize money to float the teams appropriately and balance the risk for the teams."