Shock plot twists can be a very important tool in keeping your viewers entertained, but only to a point. In the most recent few series of 24, sudden shifts in a character's intentions, the path of the plot or Jack Bauer's clothing have happened so often as to render them instantly predictable. As George W. Bush would say, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me — I can't get fooled again. But it's a garbled lesson that F1 just doesn't get, and so we have our regular disappearances into hyperbole, threats, anger and strife, such as the current fiasco over the 2010 rules, that always come across like you've become trapped in a day in the life of Phil Connors.
The release of the definitive entry list on Friday, with the new teams pared down to the least useless and the FOTA teams grudgingly onboard for another season of complaining, was supposed to be the endpoint of this current spat, which boils down to everyone agreeing that the sport needs to cut it's overheads, but disagreeing on almost literally everything else. But with five little asterisks and a week-long delay for the FOTA teams to do what the FIA asked them to do before Friday and drop the conditional part of their entries, the FIA has magically pushed the dispute ever-onwards.
Added to that, we now have legal threats from Ferrari and the Red Bull pair over the FIA's insistence that an earlier agreement between those three teams and the governing body to race in 2010 counts as an unconditional entry, and the gloriously opportunistic maneuvering by the Le Mans organisers to lure F1's manufacturers away. Just when it looked like we were heading through to the light at the end of the tunnel, some bugger put a brick wall in the way.
All of which should have made for an intensely dramatic day of news, but instead, I found myself wondering what the weather was like in Punxsutawney. The FIA playing hardball and thrusting rules on it's minions, the teams taking up arms and standing up to them, threats of a breakaway series, last-second discussions and talks of compromise, it's just the same tune F1 has been making it's fans dance to for the last number of years.
The breakaway threat will never ever be a credible bit of blackmail. You don't need washed-up world champions shouting about how badly they've gone in the past for other sports, because both the FIA and the manufacturers already know that. Plus, given the rocky state of the motoring industry right now, to suggest that Toyota, BMW et al have a spare few hundred million pounds to throw into setting up a brand-new championship from scratch in around about eight months is not even remotely believable. The prospect of one or two giving up and going to play at sportscars or something for a while is plausible, some may even say likely, but a wholesale march out of F1 and into NotF1ButRemarkablySimilar is not.
So instead, we descend into this curious farce reminiscent of a playground argument, in which the manufacturers disagree with the FIA's take on the rules of a lunchtime football kick-about and start up with hollow threats about taking their ball home. "We're leaving," say the teams, "Well go on then, see if we care," says the FIA, "Yeah, we're going, right now," the teams shoot back, staying rooted to the spot, "Good, we didn't like you anyway," the FIA retorts with, and on and on we go. Like two characters in a badly-written sitcom, both are skirting around the issue that they need each other in order to keep our attention, until later on when the tension breaks, they end up getting together, and then Joey buys a yacht. Or something.
So where do we go from here? Max will continue to stare the teams down (though he has as-good-as admitted this week that he will be happy to adopt the FOTA take on the regulations from next year, namely a 100 million Euro budget cap in 2010, dropping to £40 million in 2011), and the FOTA teams will continue to shout, threaten legal action and kick their feet in the dirt in impotent frustration.
The main problem with this is that there is no real "side" for me to take. While many F1 fans out there in the ether of the world wide web are happy to spend their days cooking up straw man arguments against Evil Max And Bernie (TM), or shout at the manufacturers for being so greedy, but I can't bring myself to favour one side over the other. It's just two sets of horribly rich and richly horrible men posturing in front of each other, like two overly-muscled naked behemoths trying to beat the other to death with their steroid-addled "special parts".
If I was to pick out one 'side' to support though, perhaps it would be Sir Frank. His team broke ranks with FOTA ostensibly for no other reason than to continue to exist, the team having no other interests outside F1, but I'd like to think that they also signed up simply because they want to race in F1. No matter the rules, the owners, the politics, Sir Frank wanted to have a go at it. To compete in F1 for the same reason that George Mallory strived to climb Mount Everest, "because it's there".
Maybe the reasons for Williams signing up were far from as altruistic as I'd hope. But then, Sir Frank can remember better than most that the transient nature of the F1 rulebook has been a constant throughout the patchwork history of the series. In the last 59 years, Formula One has gone through a period of anaemic 1.5 litre engines, the introduction of aerodynamics, ground effect, sliding skirts, X-wings, V12s, V8s, V10s, slick tyres, grooved tyres, treaded tyres, slick tyres again, traction control, active suspension, fan cars and so many other changes and mishaps. Many of them were good, many of them were not. Some encouraged outlandish design and innovation, some restricted the creative canvas allowed for designers. But astonishingly, F1 survived.
And it will survive again. We may lose a manufacturer or two, we may have to put up with a few extra pointless teams clogging up the grid for the next few years, but once this farcical soap opera contrives to calm itself down again, we'll have one series, and everyone will be happy. Well, nobody will be happy, but then you can't have everything, can you?
Trackback(0)
TrackBack URI for this entryComments (0)
Subscribe to this comment's feedWrite comment
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
