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F1 struggling after poor attendance at Turkish GP

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-09 09:14

ISTANBUL: With all of the talk of cost-cutting in Formula One, somebody forgot to slash ticket prices for the Turkish Grand Prix.

F1 is in crisis over controversial team budget caps for 2010 yet empty stands were an unwanted backdrop at the Istanbul Park Circuit, with only 36,000 tickets sold for the three-day event.

"I am looking forward to Silverstone for many reasons because I think it will be a great atmosphere unlike here. There was no one here," Red Bull driver Mark Webber said on Sunday after finishing runner-up to race winner Jenson Button.

With tickets ranging from 95 to 700 Turkish Liras (euro44; $62 to euro326; $455), drivers thought that organizers should have just opened up the gates to the public.

"We should have let them in for free at the end," Webber said. "Jenson and I spoke about this on the parade lap, that on the day maybe we should have made an announcement yesterday or even this morning to get some more people in here to let them experience our sport and that's a shame that it didn't happen."

The issue will be high on the Formula One Teams Association's priority list.

"We have concentrated too much about other things and it looks like we don't care about the public, about the show," Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali said. "It's like to be at a football stadium that is totally empty."

Empty seats have become normal at F1 tracks in China, Bahrain and Malaysia with F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone branching out to find countries ready to agree to lucrative contracts.

Both the Canadian and French GP were dropped this season after organizers failed to meet Ecclestone's money demands.

"It's not nice to not race in Silverstone or Imola or this type of circuit that has been in the history of Formula One. When we arrive in this category we all want to race in the best circuits that we saw on TV when we were kids and they are disappearing, one-by-one," two-time world champion Fernando Alonso said.

Another regulation bites the dust?

The Formula One Teams Association appears ready to make one more demand of FIA president Max Mosley next year - drop KERS.

The hybrid technology, championed by Mosley and being discussed as a mandatory regulation from 2011, was used by only Ferrari and McLaren at the Turkish Grand Prix.

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The majority of the eight FOTA members - Williams and Force India are suspended - voted Sunday to drop the overtaking technology, which conserves energy from braking in corners.

"We invested a lot," Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali said. "We think that - as we always said - that is difficult for the supporters to understand why there are some cars with KERS and some cars without KERS."

BMW Sauber has championed the idea but neither of its drivers used it at the Istanbul Park Circuit.

Still, the German team still backed it.

"We have voted in favor of KERS but, as in all the FOTA decisions before, we will go with the majority," motor sport director Mario Theissen said.

Felipe Massa's sixth-place finish for Ferrari was the best of the KERS-boosted cars, although McLaren's Heikki Kovalainen used the technology to hold off Brawn GP's Rubens Barrichello during an early overtaking duel between the two drivers.

AP