Major changes to Formula 1 will only take place over a long period of time as Liberty Media focuses on investing in the sport’s future, according to chairman Chase Carey.

Liberty completed its takeover of F1 in January, with Carey replacing Bernie Ecclestone and then recruiting Ross Brawn and Sean Bratches to create a three-man management team. With further additions being made over the past months, Carey says it has been a big undertaking to invest in a structure that will help improve the sport in future.

“One of the most tangible things we’ve done is put an organization in place that can support the sport,” Carey said at the FIA Sport Conference in Geneva. “And we’ll have the key people – not everybody, but the key people to be able to operate the sport and organize the sport. We hope probably by August to have most of the key people in – we’re moving to an office because we don’t have the space right now. So we’ll move next month into an office that enables us to house the people we’re bringing in.

“The sport didn’t have an organization before. Bernie [Ecclestone], to his credit, was a one-man show with financial and legal support. We’re going to put support in place that if we’ve got to do 100 things, I’m not going to get 100 things done, so we need expertise.

“Ross is going to have a team that enables him to deal with [the sporting regs] – whether it’s the engine or the rules, or the competition. Sean is going to have people that enable us to, at the same time, be developing digital strategies, marketing capabilities. We’ve got our first research studies back – there was no research before. We had to get that in place and now we’re starting to get the research and information that will help us make judgments. But thoughtful judgments as opposed to just seat-of-the-pants judgments for the sake of saying, ‘We did something.'”

Carey (pictured) says he is comfortable with not prioritizing quick changes because he feels F1 has not focused on its long-term aims enough in the past.

“I’m not really interested in just doing things so we can say we did things, as opposed to doing things right and doing things thoughtfully. Everything may not be right, and to some degree you need tools like research to help you make sure you’re making educated judgments, you’re making thoughtful judgments to get people in place to enable you to move forward.

“So we’ve got a sponsorship group, we’ve got television group, we’ve got a digital group, we’ve got a marketing group, we’ve got a PR group, we’ve got a research group – we’ve got people that are able to support and move the business forward in the way it needs to be moved forward.

“I think this sport has been underserved by a perpetual short-term deals-a-day focus and one that has lacked a strategy, vision and longer-term plan and a will to invest, to build it to what it can be. We think there is tremendous, right now, untapped potential in the sport.

“I think we can make the sport much more engaging for fans in every way possible. Whether it’s the sport on the track or the experience at an event or the experience on video screens and whatever ways they want to access it. I think we can make all of those things much better for fans and make it better for our partners, our sponsors, our promoters, our broadcasters in terms of how they then engage with those fans, given the initiatives we’ve got in place.”