MOTORSNEWS FORMULA ONE:A faint breeze in a teacup has escalated into the perfect storm, taking the focus off the racing, writes JUSTIN HYNES
IT SHOULD have been on the year’s great sports stories. A team given up for dead not only manages to survive but comes back strong enough to, after two weeks, lead a title race.
Its leading driver is a forgotten man, who would have been king had not he squandered his talents on a playboy lifestyle and poor career choices. As a storyline, redemption of that kind – both of team and driver – is powerfully compelling.
All those things were available to Formula One in the opening weeks of the season but somehow, once again, top-flight motor racing has conspired to load both barrels with shot made from a mixture of bleating, whining, legal posturing and inflated moral outrage, and point the gun with unwavering accuracy at its own feet.
Just to put it into perspective: Jenson Button is leading the Formula One world championship – in a Honda. If you had offered this to anybody even eight months ago, they would have done everything in their power to have you sectioned.
Honda was limping to a season-ending total of just 14 points, to leave it 9th of 10 teams finishing the year. The previous season it had finished 8th of 10 classified teams. Things were getting worse, though it was hard to imagine how.
Button, too, was peripheral, better known for a string of minor celebrity girlfriends than for any racing achievements.
Thus the potential for romance, for crowd-pleasing underdog-bites-the-man headlines was obvious. If Lewis Hamilton becoming the sport’s youngest champion and the first black man to win the title provided last year’s story, the rehabilitation of playboy Button and the triumph of little guy Brawn GP was a worthy sequel.
Little of that has filtered through, however. Brawn’s triumphs have become, if anything, an amusing little subtext. The plot has been taken over by legal wrangling and the type of self-righteous bleating normally reserved for more elevated political arenas than the F1 paddock.
The diffuser row is just another example of how vested interests get in the way of the greater good in F1 – how narrow agendas derail a wider one.
In a climate where victory means not just marketing exposure but the only real guarantee of survival beyond 2009, to be bypassed by an apparent minnow is unthinkable. Protests by Ferrari, Renault, Red Bull and, latterly, BMW-Sauber, are the reactions of teams fearful of shareholder backlash.
While the reaction is understandable, what is less so is why the FIA did not step in sooner to clear up the matter. According to Brawn, regulators were aware of the exploitation of the loophole a year ago and received tacit approval for the measure.
Williams also insists that the matter was raised at the Technical Working Group, the teams-led group that liaises with the FIA on regulations.
Then the loophole was not closed for fear of making the rules too restrictive. Yet when “junior” teams gain the advantage, the major players suddenly cry wolf.
Clarity on the issue should have been delivered in the immediate aftermath of Brawn’s alarmingly quick times in testing. If the FIA had then decreed the technology valid, the protests would never have disrupted the opening weekend of the season and the greater good – a box-office friendly championship that rewards all via increased audience figures – would have been delivered.
But while the diffusers provided, perhaps, some melodrama at the start of the season, the furore surrounding Hamilton, McLaren and “lie-gate” is potentially much more damaging.
That the original transgression – in which a team manager and driver were economical with the truth in a bid to secure a better race finish – is the sort of thing that goes on in race stewards’ offices at every circuit from Mondello to Monaco will be forgotten. The agenda now is one of righteous indignation, judicial piety and the delivery of swift and unequivocal justice, even though a driver as respected as David Coulthard admitted last week that actions such as those of Ryan and Hamilton are commonplace.
“What the public has to try to understand is that when you go into a stewards’ meeting, you try to present yourself in the best possible light to get the result you want: not being penalised,” he said. “It’s part of the sport, whether people like it or not.”
In that circumstance, the matter could have been swiftly ruled upon in Melbourne, if video and audio transcripts had been consulted then, and not a week later. Trulli would not have been needlessly penalised, Hamilton and McLaren could have been penalised in Melbourne and the whole business could have been wrapped up in a few hours.
Instead, backed by the howls of a frothing British tabloid media, F1 will decamp to Paris on the 29th for another exercise in melodramatics that could, if the FIA is sufficiently whipped into frenzy, result in McLaren being banned from the championship, Hamilton exiting the team, Mercedes considering its position within the sport and inevitably, more appeals and court hearings. All for a faint breeze in a small teacup, which has somehow escalated into the perfect storm of hysteria.
You could go on: Malaysia’s monsoon-hit twilight race and the battle between increased TV ratings and track safety; the latest possibility that Brawn GP’s exhausts may be the subject of future protest; Williams’ aborted appeal in Australia over rivals’ wing mirrors, that could resurface depending on the team’s state of mind in the wake of the diffuser row.
All of these rows will entirely eclipse events in Shanghai and Bahrain, where cars will race around a track and drivers will try to go faster than one another in a bid to score points that lead to a championship.
Somewhere in all the ceaseless wrangling F1 seems to so enjoy, the fact that the FIA has, for once, drawn up a set of rules that are making for a genuinely thrilling championship has gone by the wayside.
But that’s the nature of Formula One. Having long ago fenced itself into its paddock, protected from the contamination of the wider world, it has only itself to contend with. And like the smallest rural village, it is insular, inward-focused, parochial, and often utterly unaware that it is perceived as such by the public peering through the chicken wire.
The result is that, while F1 busies itself eating its own tail and picking over the bones of disputes between Ecclestone and the teams, between the banks and Ecclestone, between teams and the FIA, the fans, who came to see a motor race, will swiftly move on to a place where that might actually take precedence.