Let’s face it: anything is better than Bernie Ecclestone, who used to say that money didn’t matter but was “just a way of keeping score”. Nobody believed him. The cash he extracted from Formula One over four decades of close involvement paid for the vast ski chalet in Gstaad, the villa on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda, the ranch in Brazil, the executive jet, the lifestyles of his remarkable daughters – one living in a £75m house in Kensington Palace Gardens, the other in a $85m mansion in the hills above Los Angeles – and a £740m divorce from their mother. Not to mention the €100m paid into a German court in 2014 to avoid a trial on a charge of bribery, which still left him with a fortune estimated at more than £2bn.

So money mattered, just a bit, and Ecclestone became the living symbol of a sport that seemed to have more than it knew what to do with. The first time I interviewed him, on the eve of the 1982 season, he was inhabiting a London penthouse with double-height rooms across the river from Tate Britain. He told me that the sport would bankrupt itself within two years if a cap were not put on its expenditure. As would become increasingly apparent, Ecclestone’s motive for telling other people to spend less money was the belief it would mean more of the stuff for him.

Still, it was largely thanks to him many people within Formula One ended up living in mansions and travelling in private jets, some of them becoming willing accomplices in the divide-and-conquer tactics he employed whenever his power seemed threatened. Ferrari, for instance, cheerfully accepted an annual “participation bonus” of about £90m at a time when Ecclestone wanted to break up the teams’ attempt at collective bargaining.

F1 is the empire Bernie Ecclestone built but can it thrive without him? Read more

His recognition that TV rights held the key to prosperity soon influenced those in charge of other sports, notably the Premier League’s Richard Scudamore. But even Scudamore allows the BBC to maintain its traditional weekly Match of the Day. One of Ecclestone’s last significant deals was to sign a contract with Sky to ensure F1 disappears altogether from terrestrial TV from 2019, although the broadcaster claims the British Grand Prix will be screened on a special free-to-air channel.

Liberty Media, which took control of F1 last week and promptly removed Ecclestone from his active role, has been making positive noises about correcting some of the former chief executive’s strategic errors. Its idea of strengthening the brand involves using social media to engage the interest of a young demographic wilfully ignored by Ecclestone, who once remarked 17-year-olds don’t buy the products of Rolex, one of the sport’s major sponsors. He was right but those who fall in love with a sport in adolescence usually stick with it for life, and might one day be in the market for an expensive wristwatch.

Ecclestone despised the fans and was happy to use them as pawns. Seventeen years ago he moved the British GP from July to April simply in order to teach Silverstone a lesson during negotiations, thus forcing spectators to watch their cars being towed out of waterlogged car parks. The seasonal weather cut attendance at the qualifying days by three-quarters, significantly reducing the organisers’ only permitted source of income. Inevitably, Silverstone came to heel.

Chase Carey, F1’s new chairman and chief executive, plans to improve the circuit promoters’ chances of staying in business not by reducing the exorbitant fees or giving them access to more revenue streams – he has Liberty Media’s shareholders to think of – but by expanding each meeting into a week-long festival and increasing the fans’ “interaction”. If by that he means getting the spectators closer to the cars and the men who drive them, then good. If he means something like Formula E’s fan-boost gimmick, not so good.

Ecclestone often complained that most of today’s drivers lack personality, but his regime made them more remote, visible at close quarters only to those corporate guests drinking champagne in his Paddock Club. MotoGP does a far better job of making its riders seem less precious and more human. Sean Bratches, F1’s new commercial head, talks about using social media to draw attention to individual rivalries.

What is most urgently needed, however, is an improvement in the actual racing. Ross Brawn, a serial championship winner with Benetton, Ferrari and his eponymous team, appears to be a fine choice as F1’s first sporting director and has said promising things about making races easier for trackside spectators to follow, about removing gimmicks such as DRS, and about scaling down the costs so the equivalent of a Leicester City can come out of nowhere to disrupt the big teams’ hegemony.

Abbreviating the races to pander to a younger generation’s supposedly shorter attention spans is no remedy. At Le Mans, cars race for 24 hours in front of a quarter of a million people. At Indianapolis, 350,000 pack the grandstands for a race lasting almost twice as long as a grand prix. On the day in 2008 that Lewis Hamilton won the British Grand Prix in less than 100 minutes, finishing the best part of a lap ahead of his nearest pursuer, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer spent almost five hours over an enthralling five-set battle for supremacy in the Wimbledon men’s singles final.

Bernie Ecclestone, Sir Martin Sorrell and executives to reap $40m in F1 selloff Read more

There is no quick fix. The new technical rules for 2017, like others before them, may make the racing more boring and it will take time to devise a return to circuits that offer more challenging features than lines painted on acres of asphalt. The contracts defining the teams’ grossly unequal annual payments do not expire until the end of 2020.

Where others saw blatant conflicts of interests, Ecclestone saw only opportunities. The danger is that Liberty Media will follow his example. Late last year the company acquired a group of important British motor sport publications, including Autosport and F1 Racing. As for Carey, he spent 25 years working for Rupert Murdoch and is still a consultant to 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox Sports, giving him a potential conflict of interest as the seller of F1’s content with links to the purchaser.

The key task will be to devise a simpler and cheaper form of racing without sacrificing the technological sophistication that makes it the pinnacle of motor sport, while responding honestly and creatively to the different conditions imposed by such factors as climate change and evolving attitudes to transportation. And if Brawn can’t fix that, then Formula One is probably beyond repair.

Manor team folds

The Manor Formula One team have ceased trading and a formal redundancy process for all 212 staff will start next week. The British-based team, last in the 2016 championship, were placed in administration earlier in January.

“It is deeply regrettable that the team has had to cease trading and close its doors,” said the joint administrator Geoff Rowley. “We shall initiate a formal redundancy process for all staff on Tuesday, once they have been paid for the full month of January.” Reuters