News that the Belgian GP will most likely be scrapped in 2003 will have many journalists, commentators and spectators reaching for the tissues as they bid farewell to the last great F1 track, Spa-Francorchamps. After the surgery performed on Hockenheim, Spa is arguably the last F1 track that offers a true spectacle and challenge, and its loss will be tremendous.
The expectation is that Spa will be dropped as a result of the tough anti-tobacco stance taken by the Belgian government. F1 bosses have portrayed themselves as champions of the Spa circuit, fighting the Belgian government to keep the track by allowing F1 special dispensation from tobacco bans. This however, is really just a cynical ploy to avoid the real issue, which is that they have failed to deal with the high level of tobacco sponsorship in F1.
Formula 1 has known for a several years now that the EU and individual EU nations were moving towards stronger restrictions on tobacco sponsorship. The imminent introduction of legislation banning tobacco advertising in sports is therefore not a new issue. But despite this, in the intervening period F1 has focused its efforts on getting a stay of execution for tobacco involvement, as opposed to tackling the real issue of how to fill the void when tobacco firms are inevitably forced to leave the sport.
Ideally F1 should have been using this period of preferential treatment to get its house in order. After all, the special dispensation for the sport only came about because politicians recognised that F1 has abnormally high levels of tobacco sponsorship. It would have been unfair for them to ban tobacco sponsorship overnight and leave a major sport and industry crippled. However, instead of trying to increase the sponsorship involvement of non-tobacco firms (or even reducing costs to make vast sponsorship deals less of a prerequisite), F1 has elected to push for this period of special treatment to be continued indefinitely.
F1's bosses are not heroes or champions of the sport. They are not working tirelessly to safeguard classic venues like Spa by claiming that politicians do not care for F1 since they failed to give tobacco sponsorship another reprieve. To really help the sport, the last few seasons should have been spent devising plans to help encourage a broader spectrum of companies to get involved in F1. This potentially could have diluted the degree of tobacco involvement in F1. Perhaps if the sport had started working back then on proposals to decrease costs or actively working with other big companies to secure their involvement, F1 would not be a position to lose it's last great track.
F1 survives at present on tobacco cash but if the sport is to survive, and to remain a truly global sport, it must accept that in the very near future no teams will have a major tobacco sponsor. As a result they must understand that their role is to help F1 through this transitional phase. Once they accept that, they can truly begin to safeguard the future of F1 and perhaps save tracks like Spa from extinction.
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