Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…And you know what? They're worth every penny. The stats that I've seen is that even today in the Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton, well, I guess Lewis is now with Ferrari. But thinking back to when he was with, I think it's Mercedes. Even today, 30% of all F1 fans, their favorite team is Ferrari. Wow. When you blend those three factors together, the participation, which is equal, the Constructors' Championship allocation, and the historical length in sport, the estimates are that the top team gets around 14% of the pool, and the bottom team gets around 6%. To keep the math simple, imagine] it as the top team getting 140 million-ish in prize money, and the bottom getting 60 million-ish. This is a lot closer than it used to be, that the Constructors used to wildly skew the distribution, and the Ferrari premium was even higher. But this is holding the sport back. In my opinion, you get a positive feedback loop and a negative feedback loop at the top and the bottom. And so we're sort of stuck in this world right now where the teams on the front four or five of the grid stay there, and the back stay there. And you could make the argument that, hey, making another 20, 30, 40 million dollars from the back of the grid is not going to make you magically competitive. But every little bit helps, and I think these things are non-linear. They sort of spiral up or spiral down is maybe another way to think about it. And for every $10 million you get out of the Constructors Championship, you probably can go find 20 or 30 more million in sponsor dollars. A few people have tried to tell me, hey, I actually don't think money is really the answer here. It's certainly not helping to keep the back of the pack penalized with less dollars per year. Yep. People want to see the stars win.…

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