BUDAPEST: Formula One has been shaped too heavily by business decisions and needs to remember it is a sport, according to McLaren’s world champion Lando Norris.
With drivers frustrated by new regulations that have curbed their speed, particularly at last weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix, the Briton told reporters ahead of Sunday’s Hungarian round that the sport could do better. “It’s a business,” he said. “Everyone wants to make money, so in order for Audi and other teams to come in we had to change these things. It’s a shame. It should never have been like that. But that’s how businesses work.”
Audi entered the sport this season after taking over the Swiss-based Sauber team, encouraged by new rules that have raised the electrical element of the power unit to near-parity with the internal combustion engine. Those rules have already been tweaked for 2027 to reduce the electrical contribution.
“Formula One will always be great,” said Norris, whose car runs a Mercedes engine. “It can just be better. Us as drivers just know it better than everyone else. The thing that’s a shame is that Formula One is too heavily led by the fact it’s a business nowadays and not how can you make the sport the best possible? It’s ‘how can you just make the most money as a business?’ And that’s just not what it should simply be. That’s not how a sport should be run. The fact we have hybrids, 50-50 and all that, that’s just because more teams wanted to come in it and because you make more money.”
A Divided Sport
Norris said the Liberty Media-owned series was also split between fans who followed Formula One before the arrival of the popular Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive” and those drawn to it since.
“I think the fans you have nowadays, because they’re a lot more personality-based, and not simply of Formula One as a whole sport, I think there’s less interest in basically how the actual race goes, and more just ‘has the driver done well or not?'” he said. “I think that’s just how the fans have changed over time, and that’s completely fine. But the biggest voice should always be ours as drivers. We have the best idea of how racing should be, how it can be, what’s possible, what’s not.”
He added: “We would just want the best for everything, the best for the fans, the best viewing, the best racing for us, the most fun to drive. And at the minute, we don’t. We have very, very little say, and a lot more of it’s done because if you can have Audi and other teams in it, it’s a bigger win than the drivers being happy.”
