Although still nine weeks away from its start, the 2003 season promises to be a crucial year for Formula One and its integrity. After a dismal 2002, the sport will have to cope with the difficult financial situation while it tries to bring back the missing excitement with the introduction of new rules. How F1 handles all the challenges threatening it this year is likely to determine the future of its continued success. Atlas F1's Richard Barnes analyses those challenges and how Formula One is to cope with them

If FIA President Max Mosley, F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, the team owners and other major Formula One stakeholders were given to New Year's resolutions, their 2003 commitment may well be to 'grit our teeth and get through it, come what may'. Although the start of the season is still a full nine weeks away, 2003 dawns as a watershed year that may well decide the future success or failure of motorsport's most glamorous series.

Some of the current conundrums have been forced upon the sport by external factors, but most are self-induced. The combination of stresses upon Formula One's integrity, and how the major players deal with them in 2003, will mark this as 'the year of living dangerously' for F1. Paradoxically, in a sport noted for its physical risks, the cockpit could be one of the safest places in F1 during this season.

Whether we view F1 as a sport, business or showbusiness, the bottom line is constant - huge dollops of cash are necessary to simply maintain the sport's current status, let alone ensure growth. That, in turn, necessitates millions of contented and enthusiastic followers, profitable media coverage, willing sponsors and sources for team funding.

2002 was marred by bad news on all fronts. The demise of Prost, layoffs at Jordan, and the Arrows debacle were symptomatic that the sport's glamour and high international profile are no longer enough to ensure continuity, funding and survival. With the continuing world recession, how many more teams may succumb financially before the end of 2003?

It's a dilemma that is largely self-inflicted. In the early years, F1 was accessible to the entrepreneur, with privateers successfully going up against the works teams. The pushing of the technological envelope, and today's exotic materials and exorbitant R&D needs, have pushed the sport into the exclusive domain of the corporations.

While the cash cow of corporate involvement was welcomed openly by F1's organisers, it was always a financial cul-de-sac. Corporate investment is not driven by sporting interests, but by image and profit. And unfortunately there can only be one winner in F1. A closely-fought season would have given Ferrari's rivals incentive to commit even more to the sport. The 2002 blowout had, if anything, the opposite effect. Another Ferrari whitewash in 2003 may cause some of the competing manufacturers to rethink their investment priorities. Even though today's F1 cars (and even production racing cars) have absolutely nothing in common with the build quality and performance of the mass-manufactured saloon cars that share their name, it's the marketing image that counts. No major manufacturer continues to invest millions, only to be routinely humiliated on the world racing stage.

Ferrari themselves are not in the clear, with ongoing debt woes driving Fiat to consider Ferrari flotation, although this appears to be an internal Fiat issue rather than a genuine survival concern for the legions of Ferrari fans. Whatever Fiat or Ferrari's future, it is unthinkable that any future owners or stakeholders would willingly abandon the publicity value of the F1 project.

Talk of the much-vaunted 'breakaway series', threatened by Fiat, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, BMW and Renault in 2008, is routinely dismissed by Bernie Ecclestone as 'premature'. As such, we cannot expect much progress on this issue during 2003 - F1 has far more pressing immediate concerns. Foremost among those is whether the formula can reinvent itself as a genuinely close-fought and thrilling sporting spectacle.

The FIA's new rules for 2003 didn't go as far as many expected to introduce parity. The new points system, for example, will only reward the perennial 'nearly rans' by awarding Championship points down to eighth position instead of the traditional sixth. Halving the victory bonus gap from four points (10-6) to two (10-8) will not help in an era when the most dominant driver, Michael Schumacher, is also the most consistent finisher.

However, the new qualifying system shows promise. The theory is laudable - the Championship leader goes out first on a green track on Friday, with the slowest drivers going out last when the track is well rubbered and theoretically faster. The single flying-lap Friday times will be used to determine the running order for Saturday's qualifying, which will again be a single-run effort on a clear track. While the new system encourages conservative driving and punishes mistakes severely, it should (again in theory) result in much closer grid times and a greater variety of pole-sitters throughout the season. That in turn will force the fastest cars into overtaking to win, rather than leading comfortably from the front.

At tracks where overtaking is possible, this could lead to exciting wheel to wheel racing. Kimi Raikkonen and Juan Pablo Montoya showed during 2002 that the art of genuine racing has not been totally lost to technological advances. However, the potential for race disaster is high at tracks like Monaco and Hungaroring - at least until the first pitstops. Still, it will be fascinating to see how the drivers approach the single-lap format - putting it all on the line and suffering the consequences of a mistake, or playing it conservatively and having pole snatched away by a go-for-broke gambler in a slightly slower car.

If Ferrari's domination of 2002 was bad news for their corporate rivals, it was even worse for F1's prospects as a spectator sport and media event. The more Schumacher and Ferrari won, the more fans voted with their remote controls and switched to sports that offer genuinely close and thrilling competition. The dire free-to-air television coverage didn't help either. Formula One is the only enterprise in the world that featured better, more professional and more informative TV coverage in the mid-1980s than it did early in the 21st Century.

It wasn't simply a question of quality coverage, though, as race fans even shunned Bernie Ecclestone's digital TV pay-per-view alternative. Ecclestone's decision to terminate the service had been a boon to the global viewership. Ecclestone promised to use the facilities to improve the broadcasting, and if the digitally-enhanced Indianapolis 2002 coverage was anything to go by, free-to-air coverage would have been vastly improved during 2003. In the end, however, Ecclestone decided to cancel the whole digital operation and the fans are again likely to suffer from the same kind of poor coverage they have been forced to accustom to.

In what many see as a portent of the EU's looming anti-tobacco stance, the 2003 season will also see the scrapping of the Belgian Grand Prix and, more significantly, the removal of Spa-Francorchamps from the calendar. Even in its truncated modern form, Spa was a firm favourite with fans and a cherished historical link to the sport's early heydays. With the British GP also threatened, and the EU anti-tobacco legislation moved forward from end 2006 to mid-2005, the sport faces another dilemma - ditch the hundreds of millions of dollars sponsored by tobacco companies prematurely, or move the circus away from the restrictive legislation of the EU.

The tobacco issue could, in corporate-speak, prove more of an opportunity than a problem. F1 pitches itself as a global phenomenon and, although the sport is followed passionately around the world and has produced champions from almost all continents, the power base remains firmly rooted in Europe. All the teams are based in Europe, and approximately half of the GP are run there. Retaining the tobacco millions for as long as possible, while broadening the geographical horizons to include China, Russia and other venues for Grands Prix, could be the most pragmatic option.

F1 will face stiff competition from other sports for global viewership ratings during 2003, with both the cricket and rugby World Cups being held during the GP season. While the Cricket World Cup in March is unlikely to diminish the enthusiasm and uncertainty of the new F1 season, another Ferrari whitewash could see viewers desert the final GP of the year in Japan for the opening weekend of Rugby World Cup fixtures.

On a more ominous note, the threat of simultaneous wars fought in Iraq and North Korea could relegate all sports to television obscurity in 2003. If the worst fears are realised and war does break out, many GP venues and events could become terror targets and face cancellation. At best, the ever-present reminders of terror and war will reinforce the universal truth that, however seriously we may view the threats facing F1, these are trivial problems on the global stage.

What this 2003 season needs most is a return to parity and close racing, which means putting Michael Schumacher in a car that is either underpowered, handles like a pig, is unreliable, or a combination of all three. He's the best driver of his era, and one of the best of all time. Seeing him effortlessly guiding a car on rails and flattening the opposition is not what made F1 great. We need to see him work for his records and accolades, and only an inferior machine will coax that out of him. It's hugely optimistic to think that Rory Byrne's 2003 design will be anything but unstoppable. However, it's the season of good cheer, so wild optimism goes with the territory.

Whatever happens on track, the 2003 season may not be remembered for any heroic deeds inside the cockpit. Instead, it may well be remembered as the year that F1 faced the plethora of challenges that threatened its continued success. And, hopefully, succeeded in overcoming those challenges to secure its future as a global sporting phenomenon.