Liberty Media's Maffei: 'No hard deadline on 2021 regulations!'

Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei has pushed back on the idea that Formula 1 should finalise its future regulation platform by the summer of 2018.

As the sport's managers continue to devise the framework which shall govern F1 from 2021, several teams have urged Liberty to have everything done and dusted by mid-year.

Haas' Guenther Steiner has been outspoken on the subject, insisting an early reveal of a given set of rules is necessary for teams to formulate their plans and decide on their own future direction.

The prospect of a cost cap in particular requires more details, contends the US outfit's team principal.

"Why would we grow a team for one or two years then to dismantle it again?" remarked Steiner at the end of last year.

“With the cost cap coming in we don’t really know where to go. At the moment I don’t want to grow any bigger after our next step.

"Once we know where the sport is going then we can react but there is no point to react now and then counter-react a year later."

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However, Liberty's Maffei, speaking this week at a Deutsche Bank business conference, has suggested that teams could be made to wait until 2020 before future regulations are set in stone!

"It doesn't really have to get fixed until 2020," said the American executive.

"Everybody would like it, and there is a lead time where you need to have some of this fixed, but as we sit here in early 2018 there is not a hard deadline yet that gets everybody there.

"There is a lot of people who want to get there sooner, and there are other people who see it as perhaps in their interest to play out the old hand."

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McLaren's Zak Brown has predicted upcoming fireworks when teams sit down at the table later this year with Liberty and the FIA to finalise the rules, with Ferrari likely to erupt once again.

Red Bull's Christian Horner is advocating for Formula 1 to force the issue however, to nail down its proposal and for teams to put up, shut up or leave.

Maffei favors a more conciliatory approach however, at least initially.

"There are several teams which have stated publicly Liberty should put the terms on the table, we should get signed up and we should stare down the other guys who don't want to sign up," he said, referring to Horner's comments.

"We have tried to take a more of 'let's see if we can get everybody in the boat and row together' rather than draw a hard line.

"I think that is Chase's demeanour, that is Chase's general operating procedure but I totally agree.

"You'd first like to see if you can come up with a compromise that works for all ten teams, even though the ten teams don't necessarily have similar interests on every level."

Regarding the introduction of a potential budget cap, and on the subject of prize money, Maffei targets a balanced and equitable outcome, but tensions are brewing he admitted.

"We are trying to build more balance by things like trying to build cost caps in, trying to level some of the payments out so they are not so favourable to the winners," he said.

"We want to create the NFL perspective where on any given Sunday somebody can win.

"There is some tension around that and that is probably noisier than we thought it would be, and there will be more as we go through the period when we move up to renewing the Concorde Agreement in 2020 and looking for a new or different relationship going forward.

"Most of us are used to conducting business like that in private," he added.

"But anything around F1 gets blared out across the headlines of the world, whether you like it or not."

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