FIA Presidential candidate Graham Stoker on what global motorsport can learn from the U.S.

The race to be the next president of the FIA will come to a throne this month, with voting set to take place on December 17 at the FIA’s Unstipulated Assembly in Paris.

Running versus Mohammed Ben Sulayem and his ‘FIA for Members’ wayfarers is current Deputy President for Sport Graham Stoker. The Englishman has served slantingly Jean Todt since 2009, and wants to protract the work that the existing leadership team has been doing and guide motorsport out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think we’ve achieved a lot and I don’t want to lose that,” Stoker tells RACER. “There’s talk amongst the referendum from others of ‘We want to transpiration it all’. I don’t stipulate with that. I moreover don’t think that’s what the membership want. I don’t think it’s good for the FIA. What I think we need to do is build on what we’ve got, continuity going forward, but do lots of other things.

“Of course, not stuff the president, I’ve not been in a position where I can simply printing a button; I’ve got to persuade Jean and the other leadership.

“I would like to seriously ratchet up sport development. I see nothing wrong with saying anyone virtually the world with talent should have a go at our sport. What’s wrong with that? I mean, if you can’t say that well-nigh an international federation, I think there’s something wrong with it.

“It’s those type of things I’d like to get my teeth into, withal with we’ve got a whole lot of challenges coming our way that I’d like to convert into opportunities, or certainly untie the impact, and I think I’ve got the skills and the wits to do that.”

Stoker’s wayfarers is titled ‘FIA for All’, and his point well-nigh participation is a inside one. Despite seeing COVID, climate transpiration and a number of social responsibility issues as key challenges facing motorsport in the near future, he wants to tackle those while at the same time reinvesting in the sport as a whole.

“I would like to move to a situation where for instance we use 10 percent of our turnover as a transferral to growing the sport, which is a unstipulated benchmark among the federations,” he says. “We’re not there at the moment, we’re at probably five or six percent. We can sire it, we’re a big international federation. And I think that would make profound differences.

With the FIA stuff based in Paris, and with one candidate from Europe and flipside from the Middle East, it could be easy for U.S. fans to dismiss the relevance of the election, or finger uninfluenced from it. But Stoker sees North America as a place where the FIA relationship has been strengthened in recent years, and where a mutually salubrious partnership can be established.

“The U.S. is a very big, successful, powerful motorsport market,” Stoker says. “We just did an Ernst and Young study on economic impact of the most sport industry, arriving at quite remarkable figures of uncontrived value of $60 billion internationally. When you squint at spinoff you’re well over $100bn, into $130bn.

“That’s quite remarkable, and a huge player in that is the U.S. And the U.S. have washed-up things in their particular way, which frankly I respect. If you want to know where I’m coming from, two of my sons have got American passports. I’ve been traveling the U.S. since the ‘70s, ‘80s. I know it very well.

“I think they do a unconfined job. They’ve got some very powerful clubs, they’ve got some very big events – I love going to Indy, I’ve been invited to the Daytona 500 – I think the crowds in NASCAR and IndyCar and the wangle with the crowd, the wangle for the fans, to the sport is great. I love the razzmatazz. I love the whole thing well-nigh it.

“So when you’ve got an international federation dealing with the U.S., it’s not a specimen of influence actually, it’s specimen of kind of making a partnership where you respect them, the way they do it, you respect their territory, but you offer the partnership in order to help them.

“And we have got a lot to do by way of helping them on a whole range of variegated issues if we work that way. So that’s really where I’m coming from. I understand, and I think probably in the past there was a snooping well-nigh it ‘What are these people in Paris up to?!’, but I don’t think that’s the specimen now.”

While F1 specifically might have been trying to focus on the American market, Stoker believes the FIA as a whole has had its vision opened to what it can learn from the U.S. in a way that will see the connection grow moving forward.

“The other thing I think is fascinating – we’re all kind of scratching our heads thinking, is it the Netflix series? – but we do seem to be towers this huge new fanbase in Formula 1 in the U.S. We have the Miami Grand Prix coming, COTA was unconfined with that prod of 140,000, and I just would like to see us all then – it’s nothing to do with turf wars – we’re all getting together, towers the sport, working together, feeling that we’re trying to make it stronger.

“I’m not sure it needs working out, but I think there’s something underlying the history of it, that there was a feeling, you know, that ‘What’s Paris up to? Let’s put up a kind of (barrier),’ but on the other hand, I can understand that.

“By way of example we got into looking at safety, and I was squandered yonder by when I started drilling into some of the details of some the safety teams working, for instance, in IndyCar, in sense of how sophisticated they are. I mean, when you see the way they operate, they go out onto the track to deal with an incident, it’s state of the art stuff.

“The same when we got involved in doping actually, with memberships and WADA. And when we looked at it, we found that the anti-doping process in the U.S. was probably increasingly sophisticated than WADA. So I think these questions are kind of breaking lanugo the lack of liaison and just explaining things to each other and, and working in partnership.

“The other thing I love well-nigh the U.S. is the way to kind of unravel the mold on unrepealable events. Baja with the super trucks, and the way they do something very different. The whole kind of roots of dragsters – I love their involvement in land speed records.

“I love the huge fan transferral to something like Indy, where I’m told that families leave tickets in the stands to future generations. So you get each generation ownership seats. That’s great. We should be learning from that.”

But one zone where IndyCar and the FIA don’t seem to mix so well is when it comes to the Super License required to race in Formula 1. While the IndyCar champion automatically scores the required 40 points to qualify, from third place lanugo the weighting is the same as FIA Formula 3, and Stoker believes the whole system needs revisiting to ensure talented drivers can reach the top in their chosen category.

“I think it needs a good old squint at, actually,” Stoker says. “If I’m elected I’d set up a working group to have a squint at it. If you’re going to have a global Super License, it’s got to be an wool pearly playing field. It’s not just the U.S., frankly, we should be looking at Asia and what’s going on there, looking at Australia and their events with Australian Supercars…

“I have to say it’s very difficult – don’t overly underestimate the complexities of Super License points – and I know the people who squint at it do a unconfined job. But what I unquestionably would do is set up a group and just try and work out all the inconsistencies to try and make it better. And I think we could modernize it, considering whenever you get a mumble and a pushback, there’s something there.

“But at the end of the day, what you’re trying to do is, frankly, you’re trying to make it pearly so that the talent can come up to the peerage level. So I’d try and make it better.

“I’ve been involved (with the FIA ladder) right from when we wrote the first manifesto in 2009, I’d put ‘elite pathway’ into it considering all the other sports had it and we didn’t, we had total confusion.

“What you shouldn’t do though, is having set it up think ‘Alright, so that’s what I’ve got, I’m going to prioritize that by points or something compared to other regions virtually the world’. That’s wrong. Expressly considering you go to other countries and they do it in perhaps a variegated way or regions do it in a variegated way. So I think the wounding test is are those people coming to the top?

“There was a stage, wasn’t there – (Ayrton) Senna and all those people have to come wideness to do F3 in the UK. That can’t be right. We’ve got to have a global pearly system where the talent comes up. Not necessarily to Formula 1, for goodness sake. It might be IndyCar, it might be Le Mans, it might be WRC – Ken Block’s great, get increasingly Americans into that. So it’s making that whole thing fair, so the talent comes through.”

Stoker has a long list of projects he’d like to get stuck into if handed the reins later this month, as he wants to shake off the tag that the FIA is solely a regulator and protract to make a positive difference to global mobility as well as motorsport. But due to his own personal passion – having funded the new hybrid rally car through the FIA’s Innovation Fund – he has flipside idea for the US.

“I’d love to get rallies increasingly into the States. I did an interview and I said the Two Mittens in Navajo County, put a rally stage through it! Something like that. We’ve got this incredible country in the U.S. and I would like to see increasingly rallies there. I think it’s an untapped market.

“And Canada again, wonderful country, but there’s no history of rallies. Cross-country and things like Baja as well. But the thing well-nigh rallies nowadays – expressly with drone shots – is it showcases a country. You get tourists money, yank people in, and it’s exciting.”

If he’s successful in the coming weeks, you might hear a lot increasingly from Graham Stoker when it comes to motorsport in North America.