Don’t write the script for misery
Martin Whitmarsh addresses the media. Picture by Darren Heath
Back in the dog days of F1, Mrs Codling would take a nap on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon. Roused only by Bob Constanduros’s strident cry of “Champaaaaaaaaaagne,” she would open a weary eye and enquire as to the identity of the winning driver; usually it was Michael Schumacher, and, thus apprised, her only comment would be, “Borrrrrrrring!”
She’s taken more interest over the past couple of years, but about 10 laps into the 2010 F1 season opener my wife decided that her time might be more productively deployed in the manufacture of some carrot and orange soup. Should we now, like many of the sport’s luminaries, be pressing the panic button?
I ask only because there has been an unseemly, tawdry and tedious rush to screech from upon high that F1 is broken and must be fixed NOW, NOW, NOW. You could understand if this noise issued forth solely from journalists who’d been left without much to write about by such an uneventful grand prix; but no, we’re getting it from those team principals who are never knowingly last to reach an open microphone.
Saint Martin of Whitmarsh beat the Frystarter to it on this occasion (maybe we should assign points and turn it into a championship). Before the engines were even cold he was assuring the BBC that the tyre situation needed a ground-up rethink:
We were one of three teams that said we should have two mandatory pitstops because we were worried about one-stopping. I think we have to re-examine that. But I think if we can now push on Bridgestone to have ‘racier’ tyres, we need a super-soft tyre that is really going to hurt if you take it to 20 laps.
Sounds good enough, but a man in Martin’s position would know that it’s unworkable. The tyre allocation for the season has already been determined. Melbourne’s allocation is already on the boat. Bridgestone can’t simply torch a load of tyres it’s already produced and come up with an entirely new set of compounds overnight; that would be asking a lot, even if the company hadn’t already decided to pull out of F1 at the end of the year. Such talk is shamelessly populist.
Speaking of shameless populism, enter the Frystarter:
I think it would be bad if we didn’t react. I think we have all seen a race that was far from the most exciting that we have ever seen, and what we now need to do is between us have a look at it and establish what we do need to do.
I know what we need to do: declare a moratorium on outright guff.
Perhaps Bahrain was the wrong venue for the season opener. I don’t wish to demean it as a location; no other nation to have joined the F1 calendar in the past decade has shown such unswerving commitment to getting it right. The royal family takes a personal interest in the running of the circuit (compare and contrast with China and Turkey, who host grands prix to the ever increasing indifference of the authorities and the local populace). But it isn’t used enough, it’s dusty (an absolute deterrent to overtaking), and the fiddly additional section had no meaningful effect on the racing.
We’re one race into a season. One race that has overpromised and underdelivered. There have been boring races in the past and there will be again. We shouldn’t extrapolate one set of circumstances to arrive at a storyline for the whole season. Could we at least see what happens at Melbourne and Sepang before we decide that F1 is heading off to hell in a handcart?
Less reactionary heads may prevail. Stefano Domenicali of Ferrari has it right:
Let’s wait and see how the other races will develop. It may be a different situation in different conditions, so I would like to tell you my opinion after a couple of races so we can at least have a different scenario that we can say, this is the real situation or not.
Ah well, we can’t moan about the weather this week!
An excellent take on the situation, coupled of course with some amusing anecdotes, Ah I feel better just to have read that
i think the issue is, the circumstances that unfolded in bahrain were entirely predictable by anyone with half a brain, 2 years ago, when the FIA said “we’re banning refuelling, but we aren’t changing nothing else”. or words to that effect.
the outcry appears to me, to be a “we frickin’ told you this would happen and now it has. so what are you going to do about it?”
the fans didn’t bugger up the racing in bahrain, why shouldn’t there be an outpouring of disgust at those who did?
out of interest, where does c. horner fit in to the order? he said:
red bull at least had a shot of winning the race.
the natural cynic in me says stefano, rather than being “less reactionary”, rather likes the idea of a season chock full of 1-2′s.
Seems to me the biggest issue was the track configuration. Even if we’d shown up this year, still re-fueling as per ’09, we’d only have seen a couple more changes of positions in the pits. I can guarantee there wouldn’t have been any more on track overtaking, after all how could there be? The cars are as they were aerodynamically, they simply can’t get past when stuck in another cars wake.
Don’t tell anyone but I thought the race was amusing, not terribly interesting but a normal F1 race. I mean even with the most popular tracks among the fans you can sometimes end up with a race that’s best described as boring.
I think the way to go is to copy all Japanese tracks and build replicas in various countries around the world. Look at WTCC at Okayama – total blockbuster. Of course they can bang wheels and all in the WTCC; you don’t want to see F1 cars banging wheels and flying around like flies but the craziness that exists in Japan could do F1 good.
There’s the question of Fuji which wasn’t a firm favourite among fans but I actually quite liked the track. 2007 and 2008 races were weird and packed with monster stunts from the drivers.
I’d say give the new rules more time and let’s see what happens.
@mr. c.
Mr Horner certainly has no fear of the microphone, but he usually has less of an agenda. While I welcome and applaud McLaren’s new-found fan-friendliness, I wonder if sometimes Martin wheels out what he thinks fans want to hear…
i’m absolutely sure you are correct.
the weight of paddock opinion does seem to be leaning in a particular direction though, and if that direction happens to agree with fans general consensus, so be it.
whitmarsh may be wrong, but horner, fry, schumacher, alonso and vettel are all saying similar things. kovi and webber today too.
i think formula one has itself a genuine problem on its hands, and by race five, i doubt anyone will be in a position to disagree. time will tell.
Excellent perspective, Mr. C. And that’s very nice that Mrs. C spends her Sunday afternoons with you despite that infernal racket coming from the telly. It’s true, Bahrain has yet to produce a cracker (at least that I’ve seen). The most dramatic moment of the race’s seven-year history appears to have been during the 2006 event when Alonso emerged from the pits ahead of Schumi by a whisker and then proceeded to maintain his lead to the end. Scintillating stuff!
Surely the racing will get better as the season goes on. Indeed, Montreal, Suzuka, Spa, and Interlagos usually produce good races… Er… So that’s four Grands Prix…erm…out of 19. Um. Uh. Did I miss any?
Then again, I’m very much in agreement with mr. c’s take that everyone saw this coming when they announced a ban on refueling. After all, wasn’t refueling brought back in 1994 to “spice up the show?” Yet the teams agreed to it in order to save some cash. And NOW they’re concerned about the fans? It’s almost as if FOTA’s grand claims about making the sport more fan-friendly were just a bunch of…
Add to the boring racing the fact that the cars are EVEN UGLIER than last year’s models (a remarkable achievement when you think about it. BTW: Is Renault so hard up for cash that they couldn’t hire a professional graphic designer to do their liveries? Sacre bleu! C’est une monstrositie!) , and you’ve got a lot of reasons to make soup instead of watch Formula 1.
For the first time in many years I lost concentration during the race and missed 15 minutes of it. I had no idea what was going on or who was leading. No, not this race the last race of last year when we didn’t have the current rules in place.
I think whoever decided to add 8 field spread inducing corners to this track should be taken out into the desert and not allowed near F1 until they have carried every grain of sand out of the desert in their pockets and dumped it in the sea. Regardless of the rules in place no F1 race on that track would have been more interesting or entertaining.
I am in favour of a ban on re-fuelling and it is certainly a step in the right direction.
I am surprised no-one in the FIA is claiming the moral highground for the contribution they have made to the environment by not shipping two dozen fuel rigs round the world. It seems odd in a sport that paints green stripes on tyres and generated untold tons of CO2 developing KERS which was never even fitted to the vast majority of cars that something has been done which has genuinely made a positive environmental impact has been totally ignored. Anyone would think they were only playing at being green only claim an environmental benefit from things that were dreamt up for that purpose.
Glad to hear another voice of reason. Some of the knee-jerk stuff that’s been written in reaction to Bahrain (and not just in the newspapers) has been embarrassing to read.
A truly bizarre decision which we haven’t heard a good explanation (or apology) for.
I’m in two minds. Sometimes people in charge of a project decide that they have to ‘move the game on’ – jazz it up a bit. There has been a change in the administration of the circuit recently – it was a KHP deal, with some members of the Bahraini royal family involved, but now Martin Whittaker has been moved on (to V8 Supercars, I think) and the royal family has taken complete control. When new people come in they like to put their own stamp on things.
Or maybe, since it was among the shorter circuits, they decided a longer lap would mean it would take slightly longer for the leaders to catch the backmarkers…
@mr. c.
If he wanted more than one stop, why didn’t he call Webber in for soft tyres?
australia will likely be good, so i make it… five!
i need to learn to make soup.
Wait and see indeed we shall…