Today was the deadline for teams to sign up for the 2010 Formula 1 season and all 10 existing teams have signed on the dotted line. But the remaining nine FOTA teams have added some provisos; the teams are to be entered as a block and the FIA needs to agree to new proposals as outlined in below in my “compromise reached” article below. These proposals need to be accepted by the FIA and a new Concorde agreement needs to be signed reflecting these proposals by the 12th of June. Now it comes down to Max Mosley and the FIA agreeing to these proposals or else we’ll be back to square one. Personally I hope that Max Mosley calls their bluff again; see if FOTA remain united come the 12th of June if the FIA don’t agree to these submitted terms and conditions. In my opinion I believe that agreeing to these conditions will signal to di Montezemolo and Howett that FOTA can dictate the sport and I am willing to bet that FOTA will be demanding that the €45m cap for 2011 be postponed again; at what point do the FIA make a stand and stick to it; no team or group of teams should have this much power over a sport; in other sports this is called match fixing! Another reason I believe that the FIA should stick to their guns is the fact that all existing teams with the exception of Brawn GP have a contract that keeps them in the sport until the end of the 2012 season. If the teams refuse to compete in the next three seasons then they are in breach of contract and should be sued to within an inch of their lives. I have never know any sport to have such disregard for legally binding contracts as Formula 1; the sport needs one body in charge; no teams associations except for safety groups. Keep the action on the track and out of the courtroom; F1 has become a joke in recent years, more attention has been on the courthouse than what should count; the action on the track!
I was reading another article about piracy on the BBC News website last night and it seems that governments and record/movie executives don’t get it. Apparently seven million people “use” illegal files in the UK and it’s costing the UK economy billions. I’ll spell it out for you; people who download music and movies illegally do so because of the ridiculously high cost of buying the product in stores. Let’s face how many people would actually buy these albums not knowing whether they would like it or not; one single isn’t representative of the quality of the album. New albums cost between £12 and £18 in UK shops; that’s a lot of money to pay out for unknown quality tracks. And of course; many people that download; have never bought or intend to buy any music or movies simply because they can get it for free. If you had two identical products on a shelf; one costs £15 and the other free; which would you choose? ISP’s also have to take some of the blame for people downloading; these ISP’s use downloading music tracks in X amount of seconds as major marketing tactics. Yes they will tell you that they mean legal downloads but that is highly ambiguous at best! So Minister and Mr. Chairman; if the Internet didn’t exist; many of these people wouldn’t buy your product anyway; they’d be taping your music off the radio, the Internet is simply an evolution of home taping. It was the failure of the record and movie industries to move with the technology that has meant they are losing out now!