When I gave up on Formula One

As far back as I can remember I was a Formula One fan. When I was growing up, names like Hunt and Fittipaldi meant something magical, as did Lotus and John Player Special. Someone else’s Scalextric set was the closest I ever got to an actual F1 car though, being a poor kid from the north of England.

I remember how revolutionary the Tyrrell 6-wheeler was, and how it was going to Change Everything for everyone for ever. Back in the 1970s people still believed shit like that, probably thanks to shows like Tomorrow’s World. Yeah, back then we still believed that the year 2000 was the future we were moving towards. School uniform was shiny tracksuits and involved a crash helmet or something. Cars would almost certainly be flying. People would live to 150 and most diseases would exist in history books only.

I don’t know if it was just me or the whole world that suddenly started to grow up in the early 80s, but it must have been then that it started to become apparent that the dream wasn’t going to happen. Britain had Thatcher, US had Reagan; both would go through drastic changes that decade and money would be the single driving force.

From out of nowhere the future looked boring, somehow industrial and Victorian. I guess that’s where steam-punk comes from, and why Metropolis came back into favour. But it’s also quite ironic considering the British Government were closing down all British Industry except for the bits it could sell off to the people who already owned it.

This was reflected in Formula One at the time. You start with Gilleneuve and end with Senna, both great, but you have to remember Nigel Mansell for the entire decade. Nigel was to the passion of racing and technological advancement what King Herod was to childcare in Judea. Aids was invented and there was no immediate cure for cancer. Africa was at war with its mortal enemies the Africans.

So Formula One during the 1980s started with a great, ended with a great but was mostly just a massive brawl for the entire decade over where the money was going to go, and how much it could accumulate in the meantime. Bernie and Max cleaned up. You know them: the little Napoleonic one and the actual Nazi.

It has been argued that Formula One started to lose its sparkle when: aero was introduced, drivers expected to be paid, advertising and seatbelts started appearing on the cars. Yeah, it was all down hill from 1968. But what of ground effects and turbo engines? Did that not briefly turn Formula One into the hero-killing lunatic spectacle that it was meant to be in 1979? By giving the cars all the power they could be given, so much more than the brakes could stop; and with the random grip levels the ground effects gave without causing drag, those cars were FAST in a straight line, but you could only hold the road in a corner if you were going fast enough. Yeah, not slow enough, fast enough. Oh, and your suspension had to be really really stiff or your ramp angle would drop if you hit a bump and it would break the suck under the car. Utterly psychotic handling, you had to be mad to race one.

So they did away with both opting for the safer naturally aspirated engines and heavier reliance on the more predictable wings that killed both Roland Ratzenburger and Ayrton Senna in one weekend.

By the mid 1990s safety was the big deal. Enter the Schumacher, another terminally boring man but at least he could drive. And how! The big rivalry was between him and the son of a racing legend, and another son of a racing legend neither of whom were really all that great and well, bleached hair aside, they were pretty boring too.

In 1999 I started watching World Superbikes.

This was the golden age of the motorcycle. There was tyre choice, there were big twins against smaller fours, traction control was in the right wrist. There was Carl Foggarty, Noriyuki Haga, Colin Edwards, and there was danger. Bikes don’t crash slow. This was 1967 Formula One on two wheels.

My brothers were into the whole thing, they were living close to each other for the first time in ten years and were meeting up on Sundays to watch the races on a channel I didn’t get. A couple of times I was visiting and we’d all watch them, it was magnificent. We even went to a few races in 1999 and 2000. And there were your school children wearing tracksuits and crash helmets in the R6 cup and British 125s.

For lunacy there were the sidecars. If you’ve never stood trackside and watched a couple of nutters scream by, one guy doing the driving and the other with his head an inch off the ground then I strongly recommend doing so. It has to be the maddest motorsport ever devised.

I was still watching the Formula One every race, and watching it live at whatever hour it was on.

In 2000 I got cable TV and was watching all the MotoGP and Superbike races that I could.

In 2001 I moved to France, where my brother Jared had moved previously. One Sunday he came round and we were watching the Formula One on TV. At the same time we had live timings from the World Superbikes up on the internet – it was just numbers, but that was actually more exciting than the Formula One race on TV.

Since that day I have not followed Formula One. I have seen a couple of races here and there and have mostly been unimpressed. Bored, even.

Ten years on and the 21^st century is nothing special. OK, so there is technology and it’s wonderful, medical advances have been astounding over the past 25 years, computers have happened and the mobile phone took over the world. But what of the motor car? They do not fly. They have not become significantly faster. We are told they are safer and greener but a lot of people are still dying in RTAs and you can still smell the pollution. The only thing that has really advanced in the car is the number of them on the roads.

Formula One was always man and machine vs the world. You got your car, you did everything you could to make it go faster, and some rich playboy lemming came and drove it for you. There was your glamour, the here-today-gone-tomorrow you-can’t-take-it-with-you thrill-seekers battling it out to a background of some serious engineers inventing new stuff that in a couple of years would find itself on every street car made from then on until the technology was superseded. That’s gone from Formula One, is more in the realm of Le Mans prototype endurance racing where the turbo diesel engine dominates, and glamorous rich international playboys bring their own teams, and so does Nigel Mansell.

So do yourself a favour, Formula One fans – stop watching the boring men in suits driving their cars to predetermined finishing order by even more boring older men in more expensive suits, take to watching the bikes instead if you love racing. If you love cars, take a deep personal interest in the Le Mans 24hrs this year. You won’t regret it.

Just let Formula One rest in peace.