The cult of the celebrity is an odd one. We live in an age when even the most average of talents, annoying of faces or buxom of chests can be bandied around the world's media like everything they do is in some way massively more important or more exciting than the average dull life of any old nobody. Film stars, musicians, sportspeople and the rest face a constant barrage of in-your-face attention from interviewers, paparazzi and gossip blogs, all desperate to document their every move like they were writing a gospel. For many stars, the ability to somehow live their life in a state of anonymity is probably some sort of impossible nirvana.
But for Nick Heidfeld, such a situation is pretty much second nature. He has been part of the F1 grid since 2000, was one of the most experienced men on the 2009 grid, and in theory, he has a CV that would rival most of the drivers in that happy band of talent between "world class" and "backmarking fodder", and yet in practice, he forever seems to struggle to get noticed. Show some casual F1 fans some photos of random drivers from recent seasons and they’ll probably pick out quite a few, but most may well struggle to even realise that Heidfeld is an F1 driver at all. Though that might just be down to his always-changing facial topiary.
And that problem seems to have once again conspired to hurt his career. It seems that even some F1 team owners don't realise he is an F1 driver either. On Frikipedia's old Nick Heidfeld page, we sarcastically documented the details of Ickle's invisibility, and although we gave up updating those pages many moons ago, it remains one of the few pages on the whole site that remains as accurate as it has ever been. This pre-season, Heidfeld has been passed over for drives at Lotus, Mercedes, Sauber and Renault, in favour of (Merc aside) drivers who realistically are not really likely to do any better a job than the German himself could have managed. And so Heidfeld has been left with a Mercedes test drive for next season.
In the distant future, Heidfeld is never going to be in danger of being remembered as a great driver, but one thing that it is worth remembering that over the course of his career he has outperformed Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa in consecutive seasons (admittedly when they were both rookies), beat Timo Glock at Jordan, was outperforming Mark Webber in 2005 at Williams when he suffered a late season-curtailing testing accident, and most recently has beaten Robert Kubica in two out of their three seasons together at BMW Sauber.
Now, while there are plenty of caveats to all of that (taking final championship position as an accurate reflection of the relative performance of two team mates is a fairly flawed exercise even at the best of times), it nevertheless makes rather impressive reading. And while you could rightly argue that there were a number of extenuating circumstances for Heidfeld finishing ahead of what are, on paper, a far more talented bunch of drivers, Ickle's results to date nevertheless reflect a driver who will deliver a solid and steady season behind the wheel of whichever car he is given.
And while that would have been a slightly tenuous reason for him to have been given, say, a Mercedes GP drive, one of the other teams that have been sniffing around the German like mildly traumatised puppies looking for their next meal should really have given him a chance. I mean, is Pedro de la Rosa, nice guy and all that he is, really going to do a better job over the course of a season than Heidfeld would have done? Really?
There are obviously factors that count against Nick in the eyes of any team boss. Last season he moved to second in the list of most F1 starts without a win, with Heidfeld now only behind the incomparable winlessness of Andrea de Cesaris in the list. Then, as mentioned before, there's the idea that although Heidfeld usually outscores his team mate, there always seems to be an easy "yeah, but.." rebuttal to explain away the phenomenon.
There were also a number of differing factors that played against him on the driver market this year, with each available seat having a slightly different set of priorities that ended up counting against him. At Renault, for example, the driver in the second seat needed to bring with him a couple of suitcases of money, and at Sauber, the team were clearly looking for a driver who could quickly develop their car and decided that long-term tester de la Rosa was a better bet than the German.
And then there might well have been other issues surrounding Heidfeld's lack of desirability with the teams. The other big-name loss over the winter, Kimi Raikkonen, managed to seal his own fate by spectacularly overinflating his own worth, and though there is no evidence that Heidfeld even has an ego, never mind knows how to use one, it is probable that the drivers that beat him to the available seats were significantly cheaper options for teams in the scary new world of the cash-strapped F1 midfield than a man who had become accustomed to a certain level of manufacturer decadence in his four years at BMW Sauber.
Heidfeld was also rumoured to have tested some of the team’s patience by holding out for too long over the second Mercedes seat. This wasn’t necessarily his fault, given the obvious kudos of the seat iover the others on offer, and the protracted time it took Schumacher to finally be given the all clear to return to racing. Heidfeld might have worried about looking stupid by accepting a lower drive only to see the Mercedes team advertising for another opening after Schumacher’s neck gave out. Perhaps, in the back of his mind, he is still hopeful that Schumacher will tire of his return to the sport before too long and free up a 2011 seat. Or even that Rosberg will collapse under the pressure of driving in the midst of such an illustrious setup, and be ditched at the end of the year.
Whatever the reasons behind Heidfeld’s eventual decision to essentially give himself a year off from proper driving, this obvious step backwards in career might not be the end of Heidfeld in F1. Though his chances at Mercedes may not be particularly rosy, what with Michael Schumacher on a three-year deal and with, it would seem, a fully-functioning neck, and Nico Rosberg being prepped to be Schu Mk.2, but there's a chance that he will find an alternative race drive in 2011 somewhere else. Granted he'll be 33 by the time next season rolls around, and have had a long year out of competition, but hey, if de la Rosa can still bag a drive at the age of 38 after three years away from the sport, then anything is possible.
In the meantime, maybe Ickle might be best advised to spend his time building up his profile a bit more. Because surely nothing will make the invisible man more easy to overlook for 2011 than a year on the sidelines.
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