F1: Bernie Ecclestone backs Red Bull call to rein in Mercedes after Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg dominate Australian Grand Prix
A repeat of last year's one-team two-horse race for the drivers' world champion looks likely
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Your support makes all the difference.Bernie Ecclestone has backed Red Bull’s call for action to rein in Mercedes’ engine advantage and make races more competitive after a one-sided start to the Formula One season.
The sport’s commercial director praised Mercedes after their easy one-two win in Sunday’s season-opening Australian Grand Prix, but agreed with the team’s critics that something needed to be done to prevent this campaign becoming dominated by a single manufacturer.
Renault-powered Red Bull have been frustrated by their inability to keep up with Mercedes, who dominated F1 last year and occupied the top two places on the podium in Melbourne thanks to Lewis Hamilton’s win and Nico Rosberg’s second place.
Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko suggested his team, who won four championships in a row before being left in the Mercedes slipstream, might pull out if the team’s billionaire owner, Dietrich Mateschitz, lost interest.
“[Red Bull] are absolutely 100 per cent right,” Ecclestone said on Monday when asked about team principal Christian Horner’s statement that the governing body, the FIA, should apply an “equalisation mechanism” to narrow the gap.
“There is a rule that I think [former FIA president] Max [Mosley] put in when he was there that in the event... of a particular team or engine supplier doing something magic – which Mercedes have done – the FIA can level up things. They [Mercedes] have done a first-class job which everybody acknowledges. We need to change things a little bit now and try and level things up a little bit.”
Ecclestone said it was not a case of doing everything possible to stop Mercedes but simply allowing other manufacturers more flexibility. “What we should have done was frozen the Mercedes engine and leave everybody else to do what they want so they could have caught up,” he suggested. “We should support the FIA to make changes.”
Under a complicated system of tokens, manufacturers can make limited changes to their engines during a season but not wholesale revisions.
“We will evaluate the situation again as every year and look into costs and revenues. If we are totally dissatisfied we could contemplate an F1 exit,” Red Bull’s Marko said. “Yes, the danger is there that Mr Mateschitz loses his passion for F1.”
Ecclestone pointed out that Red Bull had committed until at least 2020 but recognised the risk. “Whether they will, who knows?” he said. “Dieter is a sporting guy and I don’t think he’ll stop because he’s being beaten. He’s more likely to stop if he was winning.”
Red Bull made a dismal start to the season with Daniel Ricciardo finishing sixth and lapped in his home race. New Russian team-mate Daniil Kvyat withdrew before the start with a gearbox failure.
Ecclestone also said that Manor Marussia will be forced to pay for their failure to race in Australia, adding that he felt they had no intention of competing at Albert Park.
The struggling team, who emerged from the remains of the failed Marussia outfit after going into administration and missing the last three races of last year, failed to turn a wheel on the track in Melbourne.
They missed all three practice sessions and Saturday qualifying, blaming software problems, which ruled them out of the race. However, they escaped sanction with stewards deciding the team had made “all reasonable endeavours” to get the cars ready.
“We should have never, ever, ever allowed Manor to do what they’ve done. It’s our fault. I predicted this would happen,” Ecclestone said. “They had no intention of racing in Australia. Zero. They couldn’t have raced if someone had gone there with a machine gun and put it to their head.
“It was impossible. So they had no intention. We’ll have to see now. And they will have to pay their way to get there and get out of there,” he added.
Marussia, who were ninth overall last season thanks to a ninth-place finish by Frenchman Jules Bianchi in Monaco, won a race against time to get their cars through crash tests and on to the air charter for Australia. Ecclestone said there had been no charge for the freight because they were entitled to that providing they were competing. “They are not competing so they have to pay for that,” he added.
The team are in line for some $50m (£34m) of revenues from last season but would have forfeited the right to that if they had not turned up to compete in Australia with cars that satisfied the regulations.
“We knew we had the possibility of unknown problems and we haven’t had the benefit of sorting some of those problems out in pre-season testing,” sporting director Graeme Lowdon told Sky Sports.
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