Eric Boullier fears Formula 1 is doing itself no favours by those in the inner circle constantly criticising the show.

“We are shooting ourselves in the foot at the moment, with everyone criticising, but we have great racing almost every weekend,” Boullier, McLaren’s Racind Director, told Autosport.

“We have more countries interested in hosting grands prix and we should be pushing and supporting these changes because it’s great to see F1 going to new countries. F1 should be engaging more with the fans and engaging more with new technologies.”

Sauber team boss Monisha Kaltenborn backs Boullier over fan engagement, saying Formula 1 has become too “sterile” in recent years and needs to do more to reach the fans.

“We are becoming so secluded in our world we can no longer create emotion in the fan,” she told the publication. We’re going in that direction where we’re going so sterile we cannot reach out. The fan is losing interest to understand why someone is out [of a race] because they pressed the wrong knob, or this part of this unit didn’t work. People cannot equate to it anymore. It’s not exciting. If you simplify things you can create that emotion.”

“We’re not connecting. It has to be achieved by making the rules much more simple.”

However, Mercedes non-executive chairman Niki Lauda believes it is up to the individual race promoters to do more to sell their event.

He said: “Promoters need to look at Spielberg. Red Bull is a professional organisation and sold 80,000 tickets in three days over radio advertising and through [the] internet.

“There are new ways of selling tickets and promoters have to think [about] what they can offer to the fans over the weekend. Why was [the British GP at] Silverstone successful? There were legend parades, there was more racing, the whole weekend was a different thing. This has to happen in some places where the promotion is not good enough.”