silverstone

listening to deep purple machine head –
another of those sports stories where you have to wonder at what point are these people in touch with reality. i am not a fan of grand prix racing – not sure what is so exciting about watching cars go round and round and round.
it transpires that bernie eclestone the head man in formula 1 (also donated £1 million to the new labour party and caused one of the first stinks of tony blair’s leadership – was the money donated in order to stop/ delay the cigarette advertising ban in motorsport ?) has decided that silverstone (the british grand prix has not stumped up enough money to get included into the 2005 calendar.
jackie stewart, who is involved with silverstone’s management, wants the government to get involved to protect the race or to make up the shortfall of the bid. the reason he gives is that without silverstone the uk would lose it’s leading edge in sports car engineering, and that jobs would be lost.
now a couple of things jump out at me from this.
grand prix racing seems to be a very rich sport – so why should governments step in to prop up races?
if you are a going to be running a sporting commercial business and you can’t make it work why should you expect the government to step in and underwrite you?
if you are a centre of technological excellence (as is partly claimed by silverstone) why aren’t those people contributing to your upkeep.
or is it more that you just expect people to come and bail you out when you discover you can’t run the business properly.
all this when ford are closing down car manufacturing plants in coventry.
there was a comment about the shang hai grand prix where one pundit said that the chinese government was just going ahead and building a train line to the venue from the city and that there was no delay over the planning permissions. i am sure that has something to do with the fact that it is a totalitarian government.
these are the people who keep saying that politics should stay out of sports but always seem to be the first people to want the state to prop them up when it is going wrong for them, with grants and handouts.