Concorde Agreement

The Concorde Agreement is a contract between the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), the Formula One teams and the Formula One Group which dictates the terms by which the teams compete in races and how the television revenues and prize money is divided. There have in fact been seven separate Concorde Agreements, all of whose terms were kept strictly secret: The first in 1981, others in 1987, 1992, 1997, 1998, 2009 and the current agreement in 2013. However, the secrecy was broken by noted racing journalist Forrest Bond when the 120+ page 1997 Concorde Agreement was published at the end of 2005 by RaceFax.

The effect of the agreements is to encourage professionalism and to increase the commercial success of Formula One. The most important factor in achieving this was the obligation of the teams to participate in every race, hence making the sport more reliable for broadcasters who were expected to invest heavily to acquire television broadcast rights. In return the teams were guaranteed a percentage of the sport's commercial revenue.

In 1979, the Commission Sportive Internationale, an organization subordinate to the FIA which was at that time the rule-making body for Formula One, was dissolved and replaced by the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile, or FISA, which would serve the same function. FISA clashed repeatedly with the Formula One Constructors Association (FOCA), which represented the teams' interests. FOCA's chief executive at the time was Bernie Ecclestone and his legal advisor was Max Mosley, while the president of FISA was Jean Marie Balestre.

The two organizations' disagreements, which came to be known as the FISA-FOCA war, resulted in several races being cancelled. Goodyear threatened to withdraw entirely from Formula One, an event which would have been commercially disastrous for the sport, so Ecclestone organized a meeting of team managers, Balestre, and other FISA representatives at the offices of the FIA in the Place de la Concorde, Paris, France. On January 19, 1981, after thirteen straight hours of negotiation, all parties present signed the first Concorde Agreement, named after the plaza in Paris where the discussions took place.

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