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Brawn: F1 putting 'fans first' under Liberty

Ross Brawn says that Formula 1's new management team has changed the outlook of the sport to puts fans' interests first.

Since Liberty Media took over, the former Benetton, Ferrari and Mercedes technical chief has been appointed director of motorsports. He says that a lot had changed in the last year since Bernie Ecclestone was ousted as CEO.

"I think what has changed is the philosophy," Brawn told British Airways' Business Life magazine this week. "The philosophy now is that the fan comes first.

"We want to produce the greatest spectacle in sport in the world," he added.

Liberty took a cautious approach to introducing changes in 2017. Brawn says that further changes will also take some time to implement.

"It will take time to establish all the information we need," he explained. "To do all the analysis and then start to complement changes that we believe will make the sport greater.

"That's a two-, three-, even five-year cycle."

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Brawn said that he hoped any changes would be carried out in a calm and considered manner, rather than as a knee-jerk response to crisis situations arising.

"There was a tendency for there to be a very reactive style," he said. "There'd be a drama or a problem and everyone would get together to try and solve it.

"But that's not how you'd run a [Formula 1] team," he pointed out. "You'd run a team by trying to forward plan, trying to evolve, trying to develop, making evidence-based decisions.

"F1 had never really evolved or developed around those principles," Brawn added. "I sat there at home watching F1 thinking that there was a better way of the sport evolving."

Now Brawn has the chance to carry out his best practice theories of how to run Formula 1.

Among Brawn's plans are better on-track racing, and an end to the need for the DRS system which promotes overtaking.

Brawn has also suggested a league table of races to identify which venues provide the best racing - and which need improving.

"If there's any race that is not working well, you relegate that and put a strong race in," he added.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.