Moose wrote:I'm actually kinda stunned that Spa makes a loss, and any circuit makes a profit.
The track is one of the largest (in terms of area covered, and hence area to sit and stand). It's generally packed absolutely full (I know we ended up a long way from the track when we went, despite being there pretty early in the morning), and it's not like the tickets are on the low end of the scale.
The only thing going against them is that they don't have huge amounts of formal grandstands which make the largest ticket money.
If Spa can't make a profit on their race, then that implies to me that it's basically impossible to make a profit by hosting an F1 race - you need a subsidy from somewhere.
Essentially you're right. Race fees have been inflated by all the cash rich nations that have arrived and been willing to throw money at hosting a race, either to try and improve their image on the global stage, attract tourism / business or a show of strength to their populations. Those races won't make profit, but their patrons won't care.
Of all the races I'd suspect Singapore might make a profit, because it seems to be up there with Monaco in terms of corporate guests, but yeah, the rest will be floating between terrifying loses to struggling to break even (Monaco excepted, since it doesn't pay, presumably).
If you could start the whole thing over from scratch, and stop pouring vast quantities of the sports income out of the sport to CVC, you could easily have a situation were the teams and the tracks are able to make a reasonable living for themselves. Football is often thrown around in discussions about F1 finance, could you imagine the English Premiership sides being happy to give away something like 40% of their income? Madness! But then those teams seem able to come together without backstabbing each other when it's time to negotiate commercial deals and the like.
