Technocrats Killing F1 Aesthetics
It must be my age. When I first became fascinated by motor racing, it must have been around 1950-51. It was an entirely remote, academic interest if such an adjective can be applied to the musings of a five- or six-year-old kid. My family didn’t own a car. Neither of my parents drove, so within my mind the motor car as such was a remote, exotic, phantom beast…
I adopted my big brother Rod’s “Observers’ Book of Motor Cars” – and committed all the makes and models to budding memory. Then one day he introduced me to a slender weekly magazine named ‘Autosport’. On the front cover was a black-and-white photograph of – nnnhhh! – A Racing Car. Oh bliss, oh joy…oh poop-poop! And that’s how the fight started, your honour.
I’ve been a dyed-in-the-wool racing fan ever since. But for me, as I recall, it wasn’t just the racing car, that shapely, swooping, darting, omnipotent, weapon of war that intrigued and gripped me. The car in that photo was bounding over a hump, dynamic, in near-flight, evidently on a knife-edge of control, yet the guy in its cockpit looked totally relaxed, in command, utterly competent…and his name, as I recall, was Juan Manuel Fangio.
And then there was still more. Other photographs showed such cars racing in wonderfully exotic foreign parts. I had never been more than – say – two miles from my home – my father had never been more than – say – 100 miles from home, and would never ever extend his range any further, despite living way into his 80s. So “foreign parts” became an exotic laminate upon the exotic racing car itself, and its exotic racing driver.
And there was even more. As my voracious appetite for racing photographs expanded, and I saw more and more published in magazines and newspapers and books, so the form of the ’50s race circuit imprinted deep into my young and inquisitively receptive mind. Race circuits flanked by banks, and walls, and trees, and ditches, set in hills, or by super-exotic Mediterranean harbours, or reaching out around a thousand miles – no less – of the Italian leg, extending way south into the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, and the Appenines. Coo-err – it all just gripped my total, rapt, attention, and soon I was deep into those wonderful fold-out ‘National Geographic’ maps that my dear Mum bought for me, but what I was doing was checking out, and marking in, where the great motor racing circuits of the world were located…
So I kind of grew up with a real aesthetic sense of motor racing at its highest level, a challenge to man and engineer, but one set in many ways by the dictates of combined geography, and ancient history – by the tenets which had governed the often centuries-old layout of public roads, mainly (of course) in Continental Europe.
And when I began – from the age of 18 – viewing motor racing from the active side of the fence, reporting races for ‘Motor Racing’ magazine, and then for ‘Motoring News’ and ‘Motor Sport’ and then so many others – it was always the aesthetics of the piece which really “did it for me”.
To stand amongst the tough, tall, marram grass, up a seaside sand-dune at Zandvoort, looking down into the cockpit of Jim Clark’s works Lotus flashing by below, was just a mere hors d’ouevre.
For the starter course, go to the forested sheer majesty of Spa-Francorchamps – stand amongst the spring pasture on the farmland hillock about a half-mile infield from Masta hamlet, and watch competing cars howl by unrelentingly from end to end of the Masta Straight, beyond and below you. Then there was the Nurburgring in its old, full-fat form – bounded each side with more race track actually within sight than two or three home-bound British artificial circuits joined end to end. Stand out there in the Eifel hills, dark, shaggy trees overhead, roasting under a piercing sun one moment, coughing in the chilling fog the very next – my, what a life unfolded before me…
And then, just to fill one’s aesthetic sense absolutely full to bursting…the Targa Florio in Sicily. Oh my, oh my… sun, sensational cars, spectacular road racing, the supremely scenic Madonie Mountains, agaves and gaping drops amongst far-distant coastal vistas, the sheer aural sex of racing engine exhausts racketing back from village-street buildings … this was real motor racing at its most sensory; unbelievably imposing, an absolute feast for the eye, the ear, the brain…and the heart. Yessir – that’s what made me a lifelong, starry-eyed fan.
But as the decades have passed, inevitably, things have changed. I couldn’t help thinking this as I sprawled on the sofa at home, 6am start – to watch the 2017 Chinese Grand Prix on the TV. Much of the old buzz remains the same. Will in this case Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes-Benz fight back against Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari? Will the enigmatic and now veteran Finn, Kimi Raikkonen, shine on a circuit he likes and which suits him? Will those two cars driven by Danny Ricciardo and Max Verstappen, who pays for them again…oh yes, that horrible energy drink that merely made me feel sick… come good…?
All the old questions were there, all the old buzz in that respect, but now we are talking 2017 and every one of these drivers has cut his teeth on kart racing. Kart tracks seem mostly to be painted-on or marked out upon a mere acre or so of tarmac – and the old racing aesthetic has long-since been submerged by FIA safety requirements, by the march of ‘civilization’, and by the cold, dull, logic of Ecclestone-era Germanic architects…effectively set-building, with precious little imagination, for a TV-driven era, for TV audiences, and not for the relative few real live paying spectators actually there, on the day.
One senses that few, if any, of the powers-that-be have ever stood beside the apex barrier at Spa’s Stavelot Curve to see the Porsche 917s being pitched-in there by world-class drivers, nine-tenths or more committed, approaching at 180mph-plus – their slipstreams making one’s trouser legs flutter as they slammed past within a yard of unprotected toes…
One senses that few, if any, of the powers-that-be have ever crouched in a trackside ditch at the Nurburgring Nordschleife, head at track level, to get the best view of Graham Hill’s Lotus 49 or Jackie Stewart’s Matra MS80 aviating over the approach crest – thumping back to earth by your ear, with a shower of sparks and sometimes gravel, slattering through the grass fronds… Without such aesthetic, motor sport has become a grievous loser…
So I followed the Chinese GP on the telly – and squinted with a million more through the Shanghai smog to see the covered-in empty grandstands in the background there, red with some obscure sponsor’s logo blazoned large. The pictorial composition was wide-screen landscape, with the dullest of dull horizontal greys completely unrelieved. Onboard cockpit view – wow, part of me still loves ’em – but what do we see, zero hazard, zero threat, more wide-screen landscape horizontal grey…
Ho hum – so Hamilton won (hurrah!) and Vettel finished second (equally hurrah!) – the pair subsequently showed one another perfectly amicable due respect (doubly-hurrah!) – and F1 owner Liberty’s suspected scriptwriters could relax after a job well done, setting up this F1 season very nicely – thought the cynic within…
But the previous day for practice I’d been there gazing at the TV again, and immediately the Chinese F1 coverage had failed to please me, I clicked idly through the satellite channels. Now here on our Atlantic island we find that about the only good thing to come out of Europe lately is a TV channel named Eurosport. And Eurosport TV covers professional bicycle road racing. And they cover it fantastically well, with motor-cycle-borne cameras amongst the racers on the road, and with multiple helicopter-borne cameras in the skies above. And a day-Stage in a major bike race like this can extend to 170-miles or more, and they battle away, pedal to pedal, handlebar to handlebar, in a game of three-dimensional tactical chess which is mind-bogglingly admirable in sheer terms of physical capability, fitness and commitment. I am lost in awe, and really couldn’t care less what rocket fuel the occasional over-driven rider might be burning…
And the aesthetic of that sport is just stupendous. Of course, to my eye one bike is like another, but to see the sportsmen so plainly in combat mano a mano, on fabulously scenic roads, highways and byways, compares the Shanghai horizontal grey against the Basque country forested-mountain vertical green, the colour-bursts of springtime meadow plants, a true visual and sporting feast.
And there’s real, tangible, cultural history too. After watching Hamilton and Vettel fight their grey, horizontal fight for the Mercedes and Ferrari marketing men’s satisfaction – it was over to Eurosport TV’s coverage of the 115th – no less – annual running of the Paris-Roubaix cycling classic – some 230kms overall, in this single day, with 55kms – no less – over cobblestone pavée roads. No wonder the great race’s nickname is ‘The Hell of the North’.
And the coverage was great, the aesthetic was painted-in by bright-yellow fields of rapeseed blossom, many, many thousands of fans lining the confined, cobbled, countryside course – and the most dynamic wheel-to-wheel, competitive, lung-busting racing which was just brilliant. This nethers-battering race ended with five athletes in an ultimate nerve-tingling mass charge to the timing line, and a win by about one-tenth of a second…
Against such competition – such visual, aesthetic and sporting comparison – Formula 1, 2017, upon the modern Tilkedrome courses is unattractive – despite the good and partially-effective efforts of the Bahrein GP set-dressers to paint their tarmac run-offs in tasteful pastel shades it looked even more like my grandson’s playmat. Aesthetically this is all thin gruel indeed…a ghastly loss to this once so multi-majestic sport.
Unless you’re a totally absorbed, wholly uncritical fan who has never seen, known or experienced better.
And yet – much as I regret the way these modern venues look – I’m happy to have my memories, and happier still to find I’m still, unashamedly, A Fan. It’s just that Formula 1’s new owners really could benefit from a new set designer – a real lateral thinker – with imagination, and at least some aesthetic sense of majesty.