Formula One's teams have hired DC Advisory Partners, a corporate consultancy, to explore the possibility of acquiring a stake in the championship.

Martin Whitmarsh, the chairman of the Formula One Teams Association (FOTA), confirmed to The Independent that DC Advisory Partners had been recruited ahead of talks over a new ‘Concorde Agreement’, which divides up the commercial revenues of the sport. Earlier this year Williams team chairman Adam Parr revealed that the teams were considering purchasing an equity stake in F1, which is currently owned by private equity firm CVC Capital Partners.

“At the end of the day, Formula One is owned by venture capitalists and one would suspect that they can't hold the sport in their funds ad infinitum,” Whitmarsh told The Independent. CVC bought a 63.3% stake in the sport's commercial rights in 2006, but there has been increasing speculation of a possible sale. A consortium backed by News International was linked with a possible approach earlier this year.

Whitmarsh added to Autosport: “We've appointed DC Advisory and IMG, and basically we're just saying 'let's now come together and be a little bit more coherent as a group of teams'. I think we should just be professional enough, rather than (just) saying what we could do here, or what we could do in the media. I'm not the expert; I'm an engineer who likes racing cars. That's what I am, and I can handle being a team principal.”

Whitmarsh continued: “Most of us are racers, more than businessmen – and some of us think we're better businessmen than others – but nonetheless we are racers. So I think our view is ' let's see if we can construct some alternative business models'. It is so that we're able to say, with a bit of luck, 'here is some expert advice and a view about what we can do to actually make this sport bigger and better than it is today'. And that's what we're trying to do."

Source: Sport Business