New owners seek ‘a perfect world’ in F1

Ross Brawn says Liberty Media is targeting "a perfect world" in Formula 1 as the first season under its new ownership gets underway.

Liberty completed its acquisition of the sport in January and immediately moved to replace Bernie Ecclestone with a three-man leadership team of Chase Carey, Ross Brawn and Sean Bratches. The latter two faced the media in Melbourne ahead of the start of FP1 on Friday and Brawn – who is the managing director of motorsports for Liberty – says his aim is to deliver better racing.

"We are a team, but while we are not a racing team per se, we are a team, and the fact there are three of us now carrying out a role that used to be handled by Bernie, I think is making a statement about where we want to go," Brawn said. "Certainly the role that I'm going to perform hasn't been done by FOM before and my role will be to be proactive to work with the teams, work with the FIA to find the right solutions to make our sport as great as possible in the future.

"By great, I mean close racing, healthy teams, true meritocracy of drivers and all the things we know we'd have in a perfect world. We want to try and build that perfect world, certainly from a racing side."

And one of Brawn's aims is to make it possible for more teams to win a race by producing a great performance rather than relying on extraordinary circumstances.

"I think there's the pure physics of cars racing each other – tire characteristics, aerodynamic characteristics, so on and so forth – you've got to look at the detail. Then there's the conceptual or broader approach which is that we need as many teams to be as competitive as possible.

"We need to flatten off the variation between the front and the back of the grid so that on a good day, with a following wind and a great driver, Force India – or a team of that ilk that is really competent but a private smaller team – can still win a race. At the moment that's highly unlikely.

"So we've got to flatten off the field and that means finding ways of limiting the potential of the regulations or limiting the resources that teams have available. The fact is that however good a small team is, it won't beat a good big team and we need to have all very good teams in Formula 1. Teams in a similar band and with all the same potential to win a race."