Ben Ainslie’s Thought on Olympic Classes

Do you really believe that Ferrari's road cars share "a lot" - or even any - of technology with F1??

Originally posted by AdrianM Originally posted by JimC Originally posted by AdrianM Which is why F1 gp in the UK pulls in over 100,000 spectators paying way over £100 a ticket Participation numbers my friend. Who cares about spectators? Popularity was the word used by Chris not participation and if something ain't popular there aren't that many folk who will pay a few hundred quid for the privilege of camping in a wet field to go and watch it.  Who cares about spectators?  To continue with Chris' line of thought all the car makers, tyre suppliers et al who pump millions into the sport to get some precious air time for their brand name.  They don't do it to get more people into motorsport but to more people to buy their common garden average tin box saloon. With the possible exception of Ferrari who do it the other way round, sell lots of tin boxes to make enough cash to let them go racing...

The motorsport spend is huge in absolute terms to our eyes, but tiny as a
proportion of the parent industry's spend. Toyota's bloated F1 team
seems to cost it .0024 of its after-tax profit, and about .0002 of its
turnover. That's $44 bucks, approximately, per car sold, as far as I can
see.

To put it in context, as far as I can see if Beneteau spent the same sort of
proportion of their turnover on a "Grand Prix" campaign, they'd be able
to afford just 2 months of a Figaro II campaign, or buy about 10 Lasers.

GM's sponsorship of the US Olympic team was 1 billion (so why do the
Yanks complain about British funding???), their advertising budget is 1.9
bill p.a., and they spend less than 100 mill p.a. on motorsport.

So (and I'm not claiming to have any expertise on this), it seems that

1- Motorsport gets the vast majority of its funding from the motor
industry.
2- It gets a tiny percentage of the motor industry's promotional funds,
but because cars are such a massive industry it adds up to an enormous
chunk of cash.
3- All that cash going into motorsport still doesn't generate any more
players than sports that get a tiny fraction as many bucks.

4- Who cares about people watching? I've done events with something
like 100,000 live spectators (Sydney Hobart starts) and did windsurfing in
the pro era when we had 4-7 choppers over the fleet, and IMHO the
racing generally isn't as good, sponsorship
may not help the overall scene, and it makes you feel like a goldfish in a
bowl.

IMHO it IS related to the sailing classes in the Games, because there is an
assumption that more spectacular boats will make Olympic sailing and
sailing better, and IMHO it may have the opposite effect.





Edited by Chris 249

don't Smart cars have paddle shifters? Taking it back off topic again. But yes, Motorsport is much more of a "spectating" sport than a "participation" sport- very much the opposite of the sailing situation.