When the members of the Formula One drivers’ association issue a statement criticising the way their sport is run, things must be in a bad way. In times of discord the drivers generally like to keep their heads down and leave the arguments to the politicians. Now even they cannot avoid peering over their shoulders and noticing the sport is in danger of disappearing up its own exhaust pipe.

Last week’s open letter had apparently been drafted long before the farce surrounding the qualifying session for the first race of the season in Melbourne brought F1 into further disrepute. But their eloquent and evidently sincere call for a “restructuring” of the sport’s governance could hardly have been better timed.

As usual there is only one man who stands in the way of such reform, and his response to their plea was as scornful and patronising as might have been expected. In the mind of Bernie Ecclestone, racing drivers exist only half a step above women – who, it might be remembered, he once advised to dress in white, like other kitchen appliances.

Fattening Frogs for Snakes is the title of a song by the great bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson, and it seems a good way of describing Ecclestone’s recent behaviour as he taps new sources of revenue in order to increase the monetary value of the sport over which he has presided for three and a half decades.

The frog in this story is the sport itself, fattened on a diet of deals made by Ecclestone with circuits and broadcasters. This year the championship series is adding an extra race in Baku, for which the government of Azerbaijan seems likely to be stumping up a fee close to the present top tariff of £40m. And last week it was suddenly announced that from 2019 the rights to live broadcasting of the series in the UK will belong exclusively to Sky Sports, in a six-year deal reckoned to be worth around £600m.

The snakes are the investors who arrived on the scene in 2006, when Ecclestone negotiated the sale of 75% of F1’s Jersey-registered holding company, Delta Topco, to CVC Capital Partners, a private equity firm, for £1.4bn. Very much like the Glazers at Manchester United, CVC borrowed the money to finance the deal before becoming the predators gobbling up a third of F1’s profits – £347m on a turnover of £1.25bn in 2014, the last year for which figures are available – without doing anything in the way of investing in its future.

This is a very profitable business indeed. CVC sold half its shareholding to other investors a couple of years ago but has hung on to the other half for double the length of the time it normally stays engaged with a project before cashing in.

The inducement to prolong its involvement is a reported 350% return on its investment. Its remaining 31% would be worth around £2bn were it to sell that, too, as Ecclestone says might happen soon. Even for a snake, that represents a pretty decent banquet.

Ecclestone likes to keep his tactics opaque but the Sky deal – which removes the live broadcast of all the races, with the sole exception of the British Grand Prix, from free-to-air television – bears the hallmarks of his modus operandi.

No warning, a sudden announcement, yelps of dismay from the victims contrasted with silence from the F1 teams who know on which side their bread is buttered.

Practically everything Ecclestone does now can be seen as prejudicial to the long-term health of Formula One. Over the first 20 years of the world championship, the number of grands prix held each season doubled from the original half-dozen, and barely rose beyond that dozen for the next decade and a half. Then Ecclestone took a hand and began adding races in new markets whose governments were keen on the prestige and publicity: Malaysia in 1999, Bahrain and China in 2004, Turkey in 2005, Singapore in 2008, Abu Dhabi in 2009, South Korea in 2010, India in 2011, Russia in 2015. When some of those races proved to be commercially unviable, Ecclestone simply shrugged and took a call from the next ambitious head of state.

The addition of the Baku race takes the total number of rounds in the championship to 21, the highest ever. He admitted this week the current schedule leaves the teams “shattered” but when he says something like that it is usually wise to look for a hidden motive. Perhaps he is simply preparing the way for further threats to long-established European races organised by motor clubs rather than governments and which do not provide him with the sort of income guaranteed by Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev.

Ecclestone does not seem to care the tracks that give the championship its flavour are places with history. Places like Monza, Monaco and Spa, with features that are individually recognisable, unlike the new tracks designed by Ecclestone’s tame circuit architect, which turn large chunks of the season into an undifferentiated blur.

It is not hard to make the case on behalf of his strategy. Having written off Europe as an economic force many years ago, he believes in exploiting new markets. By handing the TV rights over to Murdoch, he is only following the example set by cricket, football and golf. While choosing to ignore the sport’s historic fan base, he fails to recognise the danger of gluttony. The organisers of golf’s majors and tennis’s grand slams recognise the essence of what they have and will not allow its value to be diluted even as they search for other sources of revenue.

Ecclestone is no ignorant newcomer to the sport but he has always treated traditional fans with contempt. Now so many of them are fed up with the squalid political shenanigans and bare-faced cynicism, with the endless rows and constant changes to the contrived and artificial regulations, and with the spectacle of obscene and meaningless waste, that the sport’s declining reputation is in danger of reaching critical mass.

For many, the switch to Sky could be the last straw. As Ecclestone parades with President Aliyev on the grid in Baku in June, his CVC bosses will count the money and feel that his methods are justified.

Others – and now they even include the heroes of the spectacle – fear that his full-throttle pursuit of profit risks leaving the sport in the same state as Fernando Alonso’s crashed McLaren in Melbourne a fortnight ago: an unrecognisable pile of junk, fit only for the breaker’s yard.