The last time that South Africa hosted a Formula 1 championship at Kyalami was in 1993 before democracy dawned in the country. In the years up to then, it hosted legends like Damon Hill, Stirling Moss, James Hunt, Niki Lauda, and off course our own world champion, Jody Scheckter with the 9-hour races attracting top endurance riders and teams. In the last year talks have been going on in the background to re-instate the South African Grand Prix. And now, Motorsport SA Chairman Anton Roux, a well-known board room veteran’s appointment to the senate of the international body overseeing motorsport, the FIA or Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile has given new hope that a South African Grand Prix could be on the calendar by 2023. Roux spoke to BizNews about the drive to get Formula 1 back in South Africa, the Hamilton-Verstappen controversy, how a new generation of younger, female, and non-white participants and spectators are emerging and where spinning cars, which have become popular in townships, fit in. – Linda van Tilburg
New leadership at world body
We had an election for a new president in December last year and Mohammed Ben Sulayem from the UAE was elected as the president of the FIA. Mohammed is an esteemed motorsport fanatic, also a competitor in cross-country events around the world. And I think, as one would expect, there are obviously some changes in the FIA with the new leader, where I think he wants to focus definitely a lot more on making motor racing more affordable and more accessible, and also expand motorsports in some of the parts of the world, such as the East, as well as bringing the USA closer to the FIA. The FIA consists basically of two legs, the one is motorsport, which is 85% of the business and the other 15% is mobility and mobility in South African terms is entities like the Automobile Association focused on road safety. There are three governing bodies within the FIA; the one focuses on motorsport. The other one on mobility. And then there is the Senate. And the Senate consist of 16 members, which is the overall body looking after governance and finance within the FIA. And I’ve been appointed as a Senate member to the FIA last week.
Motorsport alive and well in SA; 67 competitors internationally
We’ve had two horrible years, ‘20 and ‘21 with Covid-19. But if I go back to 2019, we’ve hosted round about 450 events a year in South Africa. It then dropped down in ’20. Last, year with were just short of 300 events and this year again, we aim to host another 450 events. So, motorsport is certainly active, very alive. Every person focuses, obviously, on the area of motorsport that they’re familiar with, whether its track racing, you’ll be [focused] on track racing or if it’s motorbikes, you’ll look at motorbikes or karting at karting, but all in all, there are 12 different categories of motorsport taking place. And if I look at our general license renewals, we have seen a 26% increase in the number of competitors versus last year, which is actually quite significant, which is not yet taking us back to the 2019 level but I’m confident that we are going to get there. So, motorsport is alive and very well. It’s one of the sporting bodies that has never in its history had a qualified audit report. The governance is good, and you know, South Africa is sitting with 67 competitors at the moment that’s competing internationally.
New measures to stop a repeat of the 2021 F1 Final Verstappen/Hamilton controversy
Having sat in race control in a number of events in my life, never in a in Formula One event though, I think one, first of all, one must understand the pressure that there is in race control at an event and that sometimes you’re going to have things that occur, which is not in any rulebook. I’ll give you an example. In January of this year, we had a nine hour event at Kyalami, which was international event on the Saturday and on the Friday afternoon before that, we had a one hour race of South African cars. And… we had a ginormous thunderstorm on the Friday afternoon, 10 minutes into this race, we lost radio communication with all the marshals and the safety car. We then lost our backup WhatsApp group communication with all the callers and then even telephone calls couldn’t be made. We eventually decided to red flag a race, even though there was no incident on the circuit. So, your rule book is also not going to deal with a situation like this, but it’s fairly tense because the competitors, the participants obviously came off and said, ‘Well, it was raining, but what went on? Why did you stop the race; we couldn’t see anything.’ We didn’t stop it with the safety car because we couldn’t communicate with the safety car..
So, coming back to the last event [2021 Formula 1 final]; I think the solution that’s being proposed right now is the correct one where we will have more than one race director that will alternate one another. So, hopefully there is a bit of separation of duties, but at the same time, the accusation that one of them was favoring a specific team will be removed. Plus, then, what we are doing, and we’ve learnt a lot from how FIFA does it; we are building a back-up control room where if I can call it as such, your television referee would be based, and they won’t be at the circuit. It’s a permanent location that will be permanently staffed by the same people handling all the Formula One events, and then obviously during a race, it gives the race director who’s still in charge, the opportunity to refer certain items back to your television race directors who then have the ability to fast forward, rewind, going slow motion and have a little bit more of what’s happening. So, I think we’re going to end up with a better result. I certainly hope so.
The mission to bring back Formula 1 to Kyalami
Kyalami was bought a couple of years ago, by Toby Venter who is also the owner of Porsche South Africa. He spent over R200 million in acquiring the circuit, and then he spent over R300 million rand upgrading the facility. So, we really have an absolute world class facility on our doorstep between Johannesburg and Pretoria that is ready to host a Formula One event. There’s a little bit of minor changes that need to be made to the circuits, but obviously those changes will only be made if there’s a definite secure date for the event.
One of the things that I’ve always been saying is, ‘Guys, you can’t have a world championship and then just skip an entire continent.” So, I think if you look at it, where in Africa can you have an event? The one which has circuit that is ready and can host it with the infrastructure around it and is hosting international events, is Kyalami. I think from time to time, there’s movements of people saying, ‘Well, let’s do a street circuit in Cape Town.” That’s a possibility, but it’s incredibly expensive; also very, very disruptive to the people of Cape Town. But there will be a Formula E event in Cape Town, which will be a street circuit event. And it’s obviously much smaller than Formula One, but just for that one, the cost of the putting up a circuit for, let’s say, a week is in excess of R40 million. So, it’s really, really large sums of money.
I think we can certainly hope so. We are certainly working hard. You obviously got to get government buy-in to be able to do this… I think it’s also important to note that there’s a whole number of people involved in organizing events. You’ve got the Formula One events holder worldwide, Liberty, owning the rights to host the event. Then there’s the FIA, you then have Motorsport SA who is affiliated to the FIA, then your global promoter will need to appoint a South African promoter to host an event; and then you’ve got the government. So, it’s not just that you can make a call to one entity, and you’ve got an event arranged. You’ve got to coordinate it between five different institutions. Then there’s obviously the financial impact study, and then it’s obviously the time to secure a date and to find an appropriate date. The only definitive answer is, South Africa won’t have a Formula One event in 2022, but the soonest that we can hope for, to get onto the calendar might be in 2023.
Formula 1 as way of promoting the country because “South Africa really needs a new PR agency!”
We’ve seen with World Cups in rugby and football what does to the psyche of the country, what it can do to promote South Africa. And you know me, I’ve always maintained that South Africa needs a new PR agency, we really need one. If I look at some of the stuff that we are known for, it’s really all the bad stuff. And if I go back to a feasibility study that was done in the 90s, even at that time, just the VAT paid by the tourists and the teams coming to South Africa was bigger than the guarantee that’s required from government. So, it’s certainly financially beneficial. And if you look at Formula One spectator numbers around the world, 60% of all the people going to Formula One event is always a foreigner. So, if you look at Silverstone in the UK, 60% of the people are not from the UK and that’s sort of what you see all around the world. We also see massive traction in the US beginning to follow Formula One with the Formula One event in Texas, as well as one scheduled for this year in Miami. But you know, the Texas Grand Prix last year had more spectators than the Olympic Games. There were 380 000 spectators over the three days at the circuit of the Americas, which is just unbelievable, and that’s why there’s a second event in Miami. I think what’s contributed massively to the Formula One following, as well, is Netflix and the Drive to Survive series.
SA holds head high on high on female participation and diversity is increasing
In 2019, at the FIA conference, we did a bit of a study to see how many female participants around the world are females, and eight percent of license holders in South Africa, are females. And that’s one of the highest numbers in the world. So, that was really very encouraging. Motorsport is one sport where males and females can compete on an equal footing.
If I look at what’s happening in karting at the moment, around about half of our participants in karting events of the young kids under the age of 12, are non-white. So certainly, I’m going to struggle if you talk about historic racing cars or cars that race in the 70s and the 80s to find black people to participate in that because they never participated during those times. So, the appeal to them is not necessarily there. However, the appeal is certainly there in the younger classes, you know, looking at karting and then classes like the VW Polo Cup where we have more younger competitors…
From the limited numbers that I’ve seen, it would seem that we’re picking up new spectators, people who didn’t watch the sport beforehand with growth amongst teenage girls. Now, they’re not necessarily watching because of support for Ferrari, McLaren, or Red Bull. They support it because they think Lando Norris is cute or they like George Russell. But I certainly think there are local females following the sport as a consequence of the Drive to Survive series and on the 11th of March, Netflix is launching the next series of Drive to Survive.
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