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Strategic planning review

Only six teams have representatives on the F1 Strategy Group © Sutton Images

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The end of the first full season featuring the influence of the F1 Strategy Group is fast approaching. Given that the body has been tasked with making decisions with a long-term view of Formula One, its future, and its health, I thought it appropriate to make a note of some of the group's achievements in 2014.

In no particular order…

Double points at the season finale

Aimed at ensuring the championship went down to the wire (objective achieved, although it would have done anyway…), the introduction of double points for the season finale was a concept roughly as popular as a bucket of cold sick.

Fans hated it, drivers hated it, and everyone who voted for it now professes to have hated it. Double points will be dropped for 2015, although there is no reason to suspect that it won't be replaced with an equally unpopular idea aimed at attracting fans and instead alienating the masses and drawing ridicule.

Radio blah-blah, radio silence

Carrying on in the tradition of coming up with ideas and then rejecting them, it was the Strategy Group who first came up with the concept of clamping down on team radio communications so that fans would once again see drivers as automotive superheroes, rather than conduits through which their race engineers ran the ever more complex cars.

Having made the announcement of a forthcoming crackdown, the teams (including the disenfranchised smaller outfits not tasked with plotting strategy) then realised that half of what they wanted to ban - coded messages, say - would be impossible to police, while others - such as information relating to tyre life or brake temperatures, for example - could have a detrimental effect on driver safety.

So in the course of a single race weekend, the much-vaunted radio ban was in, out, and shaken all about before being dropped entirely.

Unfreezing the engines

Agreed, disagreed. Agreed, disagreed. Agreed, disagreed, and absolutely nothing achieved. Again.

Cost controls

While this list was supposed to be in no particular order, there is no denying that the early-season overthrowing of the FIA's plans to control costs in Formula One was the absolute coup de grace of the Strategy Group's achievements in 2014.

In one fell swoop the group not only established that they had ultimate control over the sport - greater even than that exercised by the World Motor Sport Council, which had approved the introduction of cost controls in January of this year - but also that they had no interest in safeguarding the interests of those smaller teams left out in the cold by the formation of the Strategy Group.

It was just as Sauber, Force India, et al had feared when the creation of the F1 Strategy Group was announced in late 2013, and just the opposite of what its members had promised ad infinitum and on the record when asked about the fairness of a regulatory body comprised of the privileged few. We have since seen two teams collapse (despite the presence of an undead zombie Caterham in Abu Dhabi) under the weight of their heavy debts.

Three cheers for the Strategy Group and its astute long-term planning! What a record of achievement they have to be proud of...

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.

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