OK, I’ll be honest with you. I could have driven out to Galactic Core Bay, but I did not have the energy – and I did not rent a 4×4, so getting there might have been a bit of a challenge, as it would have involved driving on dirt roads. You see, out there in the west of Qatar there is a whole lot of desert. Still, they say if you get to Galactic Core Bay, you are in the perfect place to view the galactic core of the Milky Way.
I am not sure why people want to gaze at galactic cores, but I guess that it is probably quite pretty and that it makes one feel rather small and insignificant. This may be uncomfortable for egomaniacs but I feel that it is quite useful because it puts our worldly problems into perspective. Feeling small and insignificant, reminds us that we’re not the centre of the world. The wonder and amazement we feel at seeing the enormous, beautiful universe we inhabit makes us better people, at least that was what was claimed not long ago by a study of the psychology of awe by the University of California at Irvine. This found that awe quantifiably improved compassion and ethical decision-making.
A visit would have reminded me that Mohammed Ben Sulayem, Sergio Perez and a spat between George and Max really do not matter that much. However, I also figured that I wasn’t going to see any spectacular scenery on the way because Qatar makes the Netherlands look hilly. It is a flat desert which gets three inches of rain a year, which means that nothing of value will grow.
The truth was that after the Qatar GP weekend I did not have the energy to get beyond the gift shop at the hotel in Doha.
Everyone who has been at all the recent F1 races will understand this. We were all struggling in Qatar, even if some were pretending not to.
The gift shop had nothing of interest for the folks back home. The best thing they had was a picture frame with some sand in it. But what kind of lunatic pays money for sand in Doha?
The two primary resources of Qatar are sand and money. Oddly, there is a long history of the different clans warring over the sand. This is why the Qataris and Bahrainis have the same flag with different colour because they were basically one tribe that split in two. The weird thing is that all these fights took place long before anyone knew that there was oil beneath the surface. Qatar was horribly poor until 1940 when a test drilling rig belonging to Petroleum Concessions Ltd hit oil at a place called Dukhan. World War II did not help but gradually the oil industry developed, with Qatar ceasing to be a British protectorate and becoming independent in 1971. Money flowed in more and more.
Galactic Core Bay is about 50 miles north of Dukhan and close to a sand and coral fort called Al Zubara. Nearly 20 years ago Qatar and Bahrain agreed that they would build a link between the two countries, across the sea, with 18 miles of causeway and 14 miles of bridges, arriving in Qatar at Zubara. There would be a road and a railway and it would cut the journey between Doha and Manama from five hours to 30 minutes. This would boost both economies and link up with Bahrain’s causeway to Saudi Arabia. It has not yet happened because between 2017 and 2021 there was a fight between Qatar and its neighbours and a blockade, to dissuade the Qataris from supporting troublesome groups in the Middle East. Things are better now but it is only 18 months since diplomatic ties were re-established. If they ever build the link, Galactic Core Bay may become more of an attraction.
The fact is that Qatar does not really need tourist attractions. It could do a lot better with tourism, but buying the world is probably a wiser course of action. For the folks of Qatar, money keeps on coming out of the ground, and based on current consumption and production figures, Qatar has oil that will last for another 400 years. Obviously the country exports most of its oil and gas and piles up the cash. It then reinvests in fancy developments, soft power projects and so on. They have their share of futuristic skyscrapers and F1 circuits – baubles of the modern rich – but most of the money goes overseas to acquire assets. The Qataris want people to pay attention to them and thus have invested not only to make money, but also to acquire international influence. If you dig into it, it is very impressive. They own shares in companies such as Barclays Bank, Sainsbury’s supermarkets, Royal Dutch Shell, airports and airlines and even stock exchanges. There is the media group Lagardere, TotalEnergies, the aerospace giant EADS, utility firm Veolia, nuclear power producer Areva, hotel chain Accor, assorted fashion brands, sports clubs and retail businesses. There is also Volkswagen, technology company Siemens, Deutsche Bank, shipping firm Hapag-Lloyd and construction giant Hochtief.
So these folk have clout. There are only about 3.1 million people living in Qatar, with Doha being the home to 2.38 million of them. It is a strange country because 88 percent of the population are expatriates. The immigrants are led by the Indians, who make up 22 percent, followed by the twin 12.5 percents of Bangladesh and Nepal. Qatari nationals represent only 10.5 percent of the population, of which about 20,000 are members of the ruling al-Thani clan.
Thus the fact that the Qatar Investment Authority has bought into Sauber – to support its much bigger investment in Volkswagen AG, Audi’s parent, is no big surprise. Audi, you may recall, set out to acquire Sauber for its Formula 1 plans, although since all that happened the world has changed, the leadership at Audi is different and the F1 programme looks like an expensive train set that Audi does not really need. However, pulling out without even trying in F1 is not really an option for the Audi/Volkswagen corporate ego and so the new boss Gernot Dollner has been looking for ways to reduce the F1 burden, so that he does not get into hot water with investors/unions and so on.
I wrote about the QIA deal some time ago in the JSBM newsletter and the QIA keeps trying to find out how I knew – which is quite fun as I am not about to give away my sources. Anyway, it is all rather complicated because Audi does not actually own Sauber yet. So they have sold something that they don’t even own. Having said that the deal is in place and eventually Swedish billionaire Finn Rausing will get the money agreed upon and he will fade out. As I understand it, QIA will get about 25 percent of the team, in exchange for $250 million, but in the longer term there will be more and I hear that the ultimate goal is to (shh! don’t tell anyone) copy the Mercedes F1 business model, which has Mercedes-Benz Group AG owning 33 percent, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, owner of a chemical firm called INEOS (short for the unglamorous original name Inspec Ethylene Oxide and Specialities), owning 33 percent and Toto Wolff with 33 percent.
The team has been very successful on and off the track. I am told that these days Mercedes AMG Petronas is a profit centre and pays a dividend to Mercedes, which partially offsets the engine costs (along with the revenue that flows in from the four teams who use the engines). This means that all the publicity Mercedes get in F1 costs next to nothing…
Clever, huh?
As to who will own what at Sauber in the future, it is not yet clear, but the team will probably still be called Sauber (and can take the blame for all failures) until it gets up to speed (if that ever actually happens).
Ironically, if one scrolls back through history you find that Mercedes did much the same with Sauber back in the early 1990s, funding the Sauber F1 project and the Ilmor V10 engines before slipping Mercedes into the team name in 1994. This was not a great success and so Mercedes switched allegiance to supporting McLaren, leaving Sauber to go it alone. The team provided Red Bull with publicity before the Austrian drinks firm set up its own team. Sauber then sold shares to BMW but more recently it has pretended to be Alfa Romeo, based only on a sponsorship, rather than an equity deal.
Anyway, there was an amusing aside in Doha in the fancy Four Seasons Hotel where Toto Wolff and Netflix were doing a little extra-paddock fly-on-the-wall filming, during which Toto spotted a sign which said “QIA Signing Ceremony”. Recognising what this meant, the cheeky Wolff opened the door and walked in to find Audi boss Gernot Döllner signing a contract with QIA officials. You could not make this stuff up… Small wonder information gets out if you signpost secret signing ceremonies.
Still, I am big fan of transparency in F1 as the secrets are really of little importance (when compared to the cosmos) and often serve only to make those involved feel superior to the people who do not know the secrets. Transparency (and all the other box-ticking activities that go on in Formula 1) are little more than things that are useful for those selling shares to investors and for those who have to get elected. Claims of transparency vanish into thin air when there are things that people want covered up.
I can explain all these FIA firings from what I have learned, but a man has to make a living (unless you’re an FIA President) and so I have only put that stuff into the JSBM newsletter. Readers may not like not being given everything for free, but at the very least I am being fully transparent about what I am doing and I am able to pay the ever-increasing costs of covering F1 as a freelance journalist.
The nice thing about my role is that I don’t answer to anyone (except the missus, of course). There is no electorate I have to suck up to and no bosses to tell me what to write and while in theory one might be thrown out of a sport if one writes bad things about those involved, the reality is that the smart people in F1 understand what President Lyndon B. Johnson said about critics. It is better to have them “inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in”. If the FIA does not like the word pissing I am not sure what to do, because I am just quoting a US President, which generally trumps an FIA President on the chessboard of world power.
The current FIA leadership has been stumbling into more troubles of late and there is little logic in any of it. Firing good people left, right and centre is not something that inspires confidence and the FIA needs to enjoy the confidence of the Formula 1 group because it is the organisation which pays the FIA bills. When F1 says “Jump!” the federation should really be saying: “How high?” rather than trying to bite the hand that pays for the canapés, the drinks parties and the tailored blazers. The current management of the federation does not seem to have heard of the fable of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. According to the myth, a piper was hired to play music to lure out the rats in the town of Hamelin. Alas, he was not paid for his work and so returned and played music to lure away all the children instead. The moral of the story (as the President is apparently very inspired by morals) is that he who pays the piper, decides on the music.
The FIA seems to see conspiracies everywhere. It says the press are biased (which is in effect insulting the media) and tries to play politics with folk who are far better qualified to play the game than they are. It isn’t going to end well. An FIA President needs to be popular with his electorate. If he annoys too many of them, he will fall from power. However, the FIA is skewed by having far more small insignificant clubs that need pleasing than big clubs who want things run well. Balancing these two elements is not easy although in the end the numbers count for more than the logic and the leadership feels the need to do things that the Motor Club of Cloudcuckooland wants, rather than what the biggest clubs think. It is a fundamental flaw in the system and it means that the federation is not really ruled by the majority, but rather by the majority of club presidents – which is very definitely not the same thing.
One can see why the FIA President ends up like Kenneth Williams (playing Julius Caesar) in the ancient movie Carry-On Cleo, when he rushes in shouting: “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me.”
Being an FIA President is a job best done quietly, without making waves, because if you stir up trouble, trouble comes back at you. It is a bit like sitting on an ants’ nest and expecting that your bottom will not be bitten. Ben Sulayem is now being chased around by the likes of the BBC, which is far bigger and more powerful than my annoying voice. To see what is going on in this respect, click here.
The ideal leader might respect and listen to their staff and communicate in an honest way. They might adjust their opinions when challenged. They might always look to strengthen the organisation, rather than the individual.
The problem with the FIA is that the members tend to be ambitious and will modify their opinions depending on what suits them best. Having climbed the greasy pole in this environment, a President should know that you cannot trust anyone. Getting to the top requires a certain arrogance that one is better than the others, but the higher you climb, the more afraid you can become because unless you really are smarter than the others, you are worried that they will see everything that goes wrong and will blame it on you. The inherent arrogance and the constant fear combine to create paranoia, which in turn creates isolation, particularly if you surround yourself with people who only say what they think you want them to say, and so you lose track of reality. It all becomes a downward spiral in which bad decisions add to the belief that one is not capable of doing the job. This is followed by moves towards undemocratic rule, the purging of all but the most obsequious flunkies and then a messy ending for all parties.
I think that this is where we are now heading and I sense that the FIA membership is questioning what to do next. The small fry are clinging to the big fish, until a bigger one comes along, but this will not help when the harpoons come. The small clubs will desert the President in the blink of an eye. I did hear in Doha that some of the European clubs who are unhappy are now looking at setting up a new federation, in much the same way as UEFA exists alongside FIFA. At the same time, the FIA knows that without F1 money it will go bankrupt very quickly and so the only way to save itself if there is a break-up is to take what is given in exchange for use of the “World Championship” title. It is a bit like the Premier League and the Football Association.
These are just opinions, of course, but history has always been about taking heed of the past to improve the future… or not, as the case may be.
Anyway, we are getting to the end of the season. We have had the excitement of GM being given an entry and all of that must yet be sorted out, because what we have heard so far does not seem to be in line with the established rules of the sport. The GM announcements were a festival of vagueness. The name for the team does not match the entry agreed by the FIA, while GM President Mark Reuss said that the team will be powered by a GM power unit, but he did NOT say that for at least two years the Cadillac team will use Ferrari engines and gearboxes. The team has 14 months to get a car on the ground and with a staff about a quarter of the size of its rivals, it will be a challenge to get everything done. The team has very limited production capacity at the moment and so will have to subcontract the manufacture of the chassis. There were whispers in Doha that Cadillac will do a deal to use Dallara-built chassis. This makes sense as the Italian firm builds the LMDh cars in IMSA that are branded as Cadillacs.
This would obviously impact on Haas, which still has a manufacturing deal with Dallara, but the signs are that Haas is already moving towards a closer collaboration with Toyota in Cologne, where the Japanese firm has much of what is required for developing and building F1 cars. Ironically, Andretti tests its wind tunnel models at Toyota – and will probably continue to do so. Haas will keep working in the Ferrari wind tunnel.
I guess that until we have a new Concorde Agreement to cover 2026 to 2030, things will remain in a state of flux. The sport is better off when there are solid agreements so that is now a priority.
One of the things I have heard in recent days is that we might see Chase Carey come back to F1 in some sort of executive chairman role. I think most of the F1 community will be pleased to hear this because Chase did brilliant things for the sport and I’ve yet to meet an enemy he made. He did it by being practical, logical, sensible and never feeling the need to take the glory – unlike so many of the mountebanks who pass through the alleyways of the F1 souk.
Bernie Ecclestone was once asked by someone if he had seen Flavio Briatore and replied that if you look for a TV camera, the Italian would not be far from it. Briatore has always enjoyed being in the spotlight and was in it again in Doha when he decided that Alpine and Esteban Ocon should go their separate ways before the end of the deal. Esteban has raced for the Renault-owned team for the last five seasons and won in Hungary in 2021. He also finished second recently in Brazil. The two results are the best achieved by the team and so to push him out was graceless at best. It was agreed some time ago that Esteban would be released after the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to test for Haas, but it seems that Briatore decided to change the arrangements and told Ocon that if he wanted to test for Haas, he would need to stand down for the race in Abu Dhabi – and allow Jack Doohan to take over this seat. For Ocon the choice was simple enough: Alpine is his past, Haas his future.
Given the late call, it is going to be very difficult for Doohan to impress on his debut and there is a level of mystery about what Briatore thinks he is going to achieve with such a move. Alpine is currently sixth the Constructors’ Championship with 59 points. Its nearest challenger is Haas with 54. It is possible therefore that if the American team has a good weekend in Abu Dhabi that Alpine could lose the place (and a hefty sum of prize money). It is unlikely, but not impossible, that the Visa Cash App RB team could also have a great weekend – as Alpine did in Brazil – and jump ahead of both Alpine and Haas.
In the light of these possibilities putting a rookie in place of a winner is a strange thing to do. One of the reasons that Ocon left Alpine was that he was not keen on being in team overseen by the Italian… who will long be remembered in F1 circles for the Singapore scandal in 2008 when he ordered Nelson Piquet Jr. to deliberately crash to create a situation in which Fernando Alonso was able to win the race.
When it was announced that Renault boss Luca de Meo had decided to take Briatore on as an executive advisor for Alpine, there was astonishment in the F1 Paddock, but it was also seen as a sign that de Meo was giving up and that Briatore was only there to sell the team at the end of 2026.
Red Bull seems to be retreating from the idea of buying Franco Colapinto and looking instead to promote from within. I guess that means Liam Lawson or Yuki Tsunoda replacing Perez and Isack Hadjar getting the available VCARB in 2025.
I have to confess that in recent days my two middle fingers have been rather itchy and keep wanting to be held high for the benefit of one particular group of “fans” away to the west.
But, in the end, I’m not much bothered by them.
Small and insignificant will do me fine…
