Liberty struggling to 'keep up' with F1 vision

Sean Bratches admits Liberty Media is struggling to "keep up" with the multitude of plans it has for the future of Formula 1. Liberty have taken F1 into the 21st century in terms of commercial success and visibility, but the American company's ownership has not come without struggles.

Although greater social media exposure and the advent of live events has helped bring fans closer to F1, the removal of grid girls, and declining on-track action has seen opposition to Liberty.

Bratches admits that Liberty's plans for the sport may be too vast to manage at this moment, but he remains optimistic.

"We still have limited bandwidth," he told Racefans. "We don't have the resources – both human or economic – at this point in time to put our shoulder behind our full vision.

"I think that one of the challenges that we're having as an entity is struggling to keep up with our vision, and prioritise where we deploy people, where we deploy economic resources and our time.

"As we manage through that, I think we're putting the fan in the middle of every conversation that we're having. We're making a tonne of progress in what we're doing."

New front-wing regulations for 2019 have been introduced in an attempt to boost on-track action and Bratches suggested that the engine regulations – currently slated for a 2021 introduction – will focus on a similar theme.

"We're encouraged by the future of this sport, both from an on-track standpoint and also from a business standpoint," Bratches said.

"Every day is a school day and we all learn, and one of the things I've learned is that Formula 1 fans, they're about speed, speed, speed.

"One of the things that we've found in this global research study we did was that fans' expectation of racing, of Formula 1, is that these cars go really fast.

"But what they're really interested in is racing. And there's a difference between speed and racing.

"They want wheel-to-wheel, livery-to-livery racing. And we've got one of the greatest architects of racing in the world as my co-pilot in Ross Brawn here, who's working on that aspect of the business."

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