Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFormula 1

F1 lacks direction - Kaltenborn

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Sauber team principal Monisha Kaltenborn says Formula One lacks a clear direction in order to be able to implement change.

There are often discussions about changes in F1, with Bernie Ecclestone describing the sport as “an old house” which he’s always trying to repair. While Kaltenborn is happy with an ongoing dialogue between Ecclestone at the teams, she says F1 needs to identify a clear future direction to understand what fans want and whether it can be successfully implemented.

“I think there are areas where you have to look at again, completely new, for example the distribution of money which I think we definitely have to look at again!” Kaltenborn told F1i. “That’s something that you really need to look at because that doesn't fit anymore in to the time we are in today here.

“I think other areas we should first try to find out - and it’s high time we did it - what is it that fans want from us? And to what extent can we cater to it? We bring up things and we talk about social media, we talk about the format of the race weekend, we talk about where the races are, we talk about customer cars or not customer cars … we all have our views on that but nothing really gets done on it.

“And what are we doing all this for? Because we’ve realised there is an issue. Now, we can solve all issues but you need to know your issue and you need to know where you’re going, and that’s what I think we don’t know.

“When have we really said ‘Let’s find out from the group we are targeting, and why are we doing all this?’ We are here as a sporting platform and a marketing platform to reach out to fans and customers, so maybe that’s the most important aspect about it and we should find out what they want done differently.”

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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.