Motorsport is a complex and highly technical discipline, whose players are professionals in their respective fields (manufacturers, teams, suppliers, circuits, etc.). However, it has not always been managed as professionally as one would expect. Many sports have been better organized than motorsports precisely because of their simplicity.
In motor sport, sometimes the management was borderline aberrant.
For example, do you know of a sport where it is the participants who vote or even sometimes impose the rules? blackmail participation if their rule requirements are not met? This is unfortunately a constant in motor sports. The reason ? it is more difficult to find participants in a car race than athletes for a meeting or football teams for a tournament. Because motor sports are expensive, complicated to manage, and involve a lot of technical constraints, whether for the organizers or the competitors. Bringing together a field for a race, especially since it is at a professional level, is always complicated. So to attract competitors, you sometimes have to make concessions, and often it is the balance of power that prevails at that moment. Hence regulations sometimes drawn up to suit the manufacturer which attracts the most the public or enters the most cars to fill a field which is fading, or to please new manufacturers in order to save a championship which is sinking into single-make monotony or suffers from the domination of a single competitor...
One of the most famous cases of participant influence in rule-making is that of the Concorde Agreements in F1. Without a majority vote, it was impossible to introduce major changes to the regulations. This was the culmination of a long standoff between FISA and FOCA, where F1 financial master Bernie Ecclestone, who defended the interests of the teams against the organizers, media and FISA (the sport wing of FIA at the time), played a central role and gave weight to FOCA thanks to his talents as an efficient businessman and outstanding negotiator.
It's hard to imagine this in a sport other than motor sport. The constraints are not the same.
It must be recognized that the participants in a motor competition, especially since it is highly mediatized, have some significant assets in their hands to influence the federations and organizers:
* Firstly the difficulty for the latter to find competitors and fill their starting grids in order to guarantee a minimum of spectacle and therefore return on investment, since motorsport is expensive, competitors do not jostle at the gate; the cost of the organization which depends on media coverage, and in fact relies on the notoriety of the participants.
It is true that this aspect is common to all sports, except that in motor sports the costs are out of proportion with other sports, and consequently the weight of the prestigious entrants weighs even more in the balance.
Beyond certain requirements, a boxer could be told "No thank you, you are too expensive" by an organizer. But a manufacturer would be more likely to see the organizer rewrite the regulations to accept or favor its own cars if it is in a position of strength and in particular to supply a substantial part of the starting grid with cars. The choice in terms of championships, including at world level, is also more open in motor sports for drivers, teams & manufacturers, whereas in football for example there is only one World Cup that all countries dream of to participate.
* Another particularity, specific to motorsports, is the constant changing of the rules. New categories and disciplines are also being created while others are disappearing. It is a sport in constant evolution, unlike other sports that are almost frozen in time. This is explained by the very nature of the automobile industry and technology which by definition never stops evolving. The rules of sport linked to this industry can only follow this evolution, that goes without saying. This trivializes the rewriting of the rules, and doing so according to the interests of a particular specific competitor or competitors who align with the interests of the organizers is therefore predictable and understandable in certain cases.
But this unfortunately sometimes leads to extreme cases where participants were clearly favored by a federation or by the organizer, although sometimes there were only suspicions in this sense. Situations favored by the complexity of the rules which is specific to motorsport, the possibilities of their interpretation and the difficulty of their application.
When big interests are involved, including the interest of the federation in terms of spectacle and popularity, abuses are always possible.
There is no shortage of famous examples, particularly in Formula 1: the withdrawal of the Brabham BT46 fan-car by Bernie Ecclestone to prevent FOCA from breaking up; the repeated banning of the Lotus 88 in 1981 while the Brabham BT49 which had started the season by "interpreting" poorly written regulations had benefited from federal indulgence, to the point of becoming a trend; the controversial end of the 2021 Abu-Dhabi GP...
Other sports also experience controversies and suspicions of favoritism, even corruption, but the possibilities of playing on the subtleties of the rules and their complexity to bring about the desired result are infinitely more abundant in motor sports than elsewhere.
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