Cheap tricks which point to fact that Formula One has lost its nerve
Richard Williams
If Sebastian Vettel sees it as a bad idea, perhaps it's time to think again. This week's announcement that Formula One will be awarding double championship points for the final race of the season, due to take place in Abu Dhabi next November, has not pleased the four-times winner of the world title. Perhaps even he regards it as yet another sign of a sport in big trouble, desperate to ward off the threats to its existence, almost all of which are of its own creation.
Suddenly all sorts of gimmicks are being imposed on the sport of Juan Manuel Fangio and Jim Clark. In addition to the double-points wheeze, some genius has decided that individual drivers will carry the same racing number, between 2 and 99, throughout their careers, to be emblazoned for the first time on their helmets, with No1, as has long been the case, reserved for the reigning champion. The driver who claims the fastest lap in practice for each race will also be awarded points towards a new pole-position championship. And those who commit behavioural offences on the track will receive penalty points leading, when they reach a total of 12, to a one-race suspension.
These are supposed to be the solutions to the problems faced by a sport whose ringmaster, Bernie Ecclestone, is fighting accusations in the high court of handing a $44m bribe to a now-jailed German banker in order to facilitate the sale of a majority share in the sport's commercial rights to a private equity firm, CVC Capital Partners; this firm continues to employ him as its CEO while spending the past seven years creaming off half of the sport's huge profits. Ecclestone claims the $44m was intended to prevent the German tipping off Britain's tax authorities to his alleged control of the offshore trust, which holds much of the estimated personal fortune of £3bn he has accrued from his Formula One deals, something he also denies.
Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney general, told Newsnight on Thursday that she has long felt Ecclestone's financial affairs deserve scrutiny. "What is the Serious Fraud Office for," she said, "if not for investigating cases like this?"
In a better ordered world, more of CVC's profits would have been distributed between the teams and the race promoters, without whom the sport would not exist. Instead, more than half the teams are in some sort of financial distress and gifted young drivers are forced to stand aside in favour of those with personal sponsors. Many of the circuits – forced to pay vast fees to Ecclestone, who also keeps all the sponsorship, trackside advertising and corporate-hospitality revenue – are in a constant battle for survival.
And as the foundations decay, the sport fiddles with gimmicks that, while intended to attract new audiences, continue to alienate those loyal to the principles that sustained it for more than a century.
Who let the drivers' behaviour deteriorate to the point where a disciplinary system is required in a sport that could once lay claim to a measure of dignity, even nobility? In a sport that is supposed to be dangerous – although perhaps not dangerous enough these days – any kind of offence ought to be punished by an instant ban. The penalty-point system effectively legitimises the kind of offences it is ostensibly being created to reduce.
In recent years Formula One has been tarted up and weighed down with all sorts of nonsense. New circuits look as though they were laid out in vast shopping-mall car parks, with painted lines indicating the track boundaries. Devices such as DRS zones and Kers buttons are intended to disguise the sport's competitive shortcomings. A perfectly respectable tyre manufacturer finds itself being instructed to manufacture products with a limited life, to spice up the contest. Designers, hemmed in by technical regulations, waste their time on arcane wind-tunnel research with negligible relevance to the real world. And now here comes another bunch of cheap tricks, led by the double-points notion.
The teams, who must have endorsed the decision, are concerned only with their own short-term interests. Clearly they are happy to distort the basis of their own championship, presumably glimpsing an antidote to Vettel's steamroller supremacy. In the longer perspective, however, Formula One has a good recent record of championships going down to the wire under the present scoring system – think of Kimi Raikkonen's last-gasp victory at Interlagos in 2007, or Lewis Hamilton snatching the title on the final corner at the same track in 2008, or Vettel dashing the hopes of Fernando Alonso and Mark Webber under the floodlights in Abu Dhabi two years later.
To feel the need for a mechanism intended to ensure that every season reaches a cliff-hanging climax is to severely underrate the audience's intelligence. It's like expecting every Premier League season to be decided by a penalty shoot-out. When Chelsea won the Premier League in 2004-05 with a 12-point margin, or when Manchester United took the title three seasons in a row between 2007 and 2009, no one lost their nerve and demanded changes to the format.
It's hard not to be cynical when looking at the sport's introduction of the double-points award in Abu Dhabi, newly reinstalled as the climactic race of the season. The UAE is where the money is, as golf decided when it created the Race to Dubai.
As for the numbering idea, presumably this is an attempt to raise the income from the sales of merchandising, under the guise of making it easier to identify the drivers. But if that were a serious consideration, they would simply clear some of the space currently devoted to sponsors' logos on the wings and bodywork.
What Formula One needs is not the enforcing of reliability rules for engines and gearboxes, created to reduce costs. It needs more uncertainty, more surprises, more bad luck on the track. As a writer in Autosport magazine suggested this week, it could make a start by banning the pits-to-car radio transmissions that do nothing but infantilise the drivers. Get them making their own in-race decisions again, gambling on experience and intuition rather than relying on drive-by-numbers instructions from their engineers.
The problem is that the sport's management is in the hands of a bunch of very clever people with a penchant for making stupid decisions based either on greed or an inability to see beyond their own front wheels. They haven't yet announced that the Formula One championship will henceforth be known as the Race to Abu Dhabi, but it's surely just a matter of time.
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2013/dec/13/cheap-trick-double-points-f1-nerveGreat article by Richard Williams. I've loved this sport since I was a kid but the last year or so, and particularly these new farcical rules that have been introduced, is seriously testing my devotion to the sport. I definitely am falling out of love with the sport that gripped me as a kid where Michael Schumacher and Mika Hakkinen were my idols. Simply put the sport is dying.
