F1 digest: Liberty Media to unveil ‘future blueprint’ in Bahrain

Liberty Media to unveil future vision for F1

Liberty Media, the owners of Formula 1, will present its “blueprint for the future” to teams and manufacturers at next month’s Bahrain Grand Prix.

Motorsport.com reports that Liberty is set to unveil full details of its future plans at the 8 April race. Proposed changes include new engine regulations for 2021 and team budgets “to address spiralling costs and restrict spending”.

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Liberty’s ambition for a “new direction” in F1 has not been well received by everyone in the sport, with tension building between the organisation and teams such as Ferrari.

Just last week Mercedes boss Toto Wolff warned Liberty and F1’s stakeholders not to “mess” with Ferrari. The Italian team’s contract with F1 expires in 2020 and president Sergio Marchionne said in November that he wouldn’t “want to play any more” if proposed changes meant the sport “becomes unrecognisable”.

With no teams committed to the sport beyond 2020, Motorsport.com says it’s “not known” if the Bahrain presentation will outline Liberty’s plans for the 2021 commercial arrangements.

Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner told the website: “I think it’s important to have an overview of where the sport’s going for the future. I think everybody’s keen to understand what Liberty’s plans are, and hopefully we’ll see that in the coming weeks.”

Vettel ‘lacks confidence’ in the new Ferrari

He may have started the season with victory at the Australian GP, but Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel admits that he still lacks confidence in the new SF71H car.

Vettel told Sky Sports F1: “We lack a little bit of pace. I lack a little bit of confidence in the car so it’s not yet where we want to be and there’s a lot of work still to do. When the balance is changing between stints, I’m not yet completely captain on-board.”

New era of the ‘grid kids’ - but were they diverse enough?

While the ten teams raced their new cars for the first time at the season-opening grand prix in Melbourne, the event down under also heralded the start of F1’s “grid kids”.

Replacing grid girls, F1’s initiative was launched in Melbourne last weekend, but not everyone was happy with the “new politically correct post-grid girl world”.

World champion Lewis Hamilton said last week that F1 “lacked diversity” and MailOnline also called out the sport for its selection of grid kids.

The publication said: “The ‘girls’ were replaced by ‘grid kids’, in this case young karters drawn from Australia. Both sexes, naturally. But the selection was hardly ethnically diverse, with just one of the youngsters of mixed race.”

MailOnline warned F1 that it might “still be getting a memo” from Hamilton.