No deadline for teams to sign new Concorde, says Carey

Carey's comments come as FIA's World Motor Sport Council votes on Thursday to accept or reject the proposed technical, sporting and financial regulations for 2021.

The teams received a draft of the new document, which covers the 2021-’25 seasons, last week, and are now studying its implications.

Among the key changes compared to the current version are a new streamlined one-layer governance structure, with 10 votes for Liberty, 10 for the FIA and 10 for the teams, and a revised income distribution, with greater rewards for the teams further down the constructors’ championship table.

“Realistically what we put out is the structure of the business starting in 2021,” Carey told Wall Street analysts. “Our goal would be to get things signed off as soon as possible with the teams, just to remove the uncertainty around it.

“Essentially come 2021 we can say this is the way the sport is governed, and this is the way the sport operates. We obviously have the capability to create deadlines inside that. But the regulations had an approval process that they have to go through.

“These are more bilateral agreements that you can obviously create deadlines to, but the reality ends up being they are agreements about how the sport will be run and operate for the 2021 season.”

Carey believes that spreading the sport’s income more evenly between the 10 teams will work with cost cap to create a closer field.

“The cost cap is certainly we think critical to making it a more competitive sport, but we are also looking to address the revenue side of it to make it less skewed than it is today," he said.

"We still want to reward success on the track, respect an element of long-term success in the sport, but make it a more balanced distribution than it is today.

“So we will take steps on that. I think to me cost has a much more direct correlation to the competitive balance than revenue, although they both clearly are a part of it.

"The revenue is important to getting to a place where we have not just competition but healthier teams and a business model that is more inviting to new teams coming into it.

“Today we have a three-team competition at the front, and seven teams competing at the back. Those three teams at the front spend significantly more than the other teams – that’s clear.

“Are they spending that money because they get more revenue, a bigger share of the profit fund, or are they spending that money because their competitive spirit drives them to spend what they want to spend to win? Fact is those teams do get a larger share of the prize fund profit sharing.”

Carey said that the new governance structure will make the sport easier to manage.

“I don’t want to get into specifics of what we put in place and proposed to the teams, but I think the primary goal is to simplify the governance structure.

"I think today we feel we have a very cumbersome governance structure. There are two layers of approval, it’s a very complicated vote, a lot of different parties get involved.

"If there was one goal overall overriding in all this, it’s a complicated sport with enough complicated issues already, it’s to simplify the decision making structure so we can move forward, and not have the complicated dynamics we’ve had to some degree in the past.”