It’s hard to feel sorry for Bernie Ecclestone because, well, just because it is. But you have to feel a little sorry for him this week, since things aren’t going so well for his organization. As you well know by now, the Bahrain Grand Prix, which was supposed to kick off the 2011 Formula 1 racing season on March 13, has been cancelled because of civil unrest in the country. The rioting in the streets prompted some to fear that the dissidents may sabotage the race. It might make a great movie plot, but it is something even Ecclestone was unwilling to risk. Now, the Grand Prix season is set to open March 27 in Australia, and word has been filtering back from Down Under that Australia isn’t all that excited about the whole thing.
The Australian event is a street race, and while the street race in Monaco seems to energize the whole principality, the race in Melbourne seems to irritate the citizenry more than it excites it. As with many such races, the Melbourne race was initially met with much enthusiasm and reasonably large crowds -- but 15 years later, the bloom seems to be well off the rose.
The lord mayor of Melbourne, Robert Doyle, recently lashed out at the F1 organizers, bitter over the rapid cost-escalation of the event. When it first began, the race weekend only cost Australia taxpayers about $1.7 million (Australian) -- but this time around, Doyle expects the final bill to be around $70 million. He does see economic benefits in hosting the race, but he has been quoted as doubting that it is a value for his city or his country at $70 million a year.
“I know of no city that has voluntarily walked away from a Grand Prix, but could Melbourne be the first?” he said to the Australian newspaper The Sun-Herald. “The final possibility is that we decide that it has been 20 fantastic years; the benefits to the city and the state have been enormous, but the cycle has run its course.”
Bernie seems pretty sanguine about the Australian situation, offering to let the Melbourne city fathers discuss canceling the contract with him, and he is also sanguine about the potential rescheduling of the ill-starred race in Bahrain. At first, it was proposed that the race take place this summer -- but then cooler heads realized that the racecourse temperature during Formula 1’s summer break would be somewhere around 120 F. Now it looks as if the race might be squeezed into the schedule at the end of November … if the current government is successful in putting down the rebels, that is.
