And so, in a result more inevitable than your careful efforts to carry a four pint stash of disappointing beer back from an overcrowded music festival bar resulting in said pints getting knocked over by a drunken, moshing goon within 30 seconds of you returning to your circle of friends, F1's acrimonious rebellion is over before we really got chance to get properly scared by the prospect of a FOTA-led breakaway series resulting in the heat death of the universe. But just before we prepare ourselves for the next sport-breaking drama and get ready to throw rotten fruit at Max Mosley as he skulks out of his office for the last time in October (assuming he goes at all), let's just question the mendacity of the particular horse we as a body of F1 fans have chosen to back.
The impressive thing about this whole sorry farce is the way that FOTA have so easily managed to curry favour with the average F1 fan. Go onto any message board, forum or blog just recently and express an opinion on the situation that is less pro-FOTA than "DEATH TO MOSLEY AND HIS BAND OF INFIDELS!" and you're likely to be driven out of there in a flurry of keyboard-clacking anger and disgust. The general feeling is that FOTA are somehow the solution to all of F1's problems, rather than a fairly major part of the problem.
Which is a shame, because from where I am looking, safely ensconced in Patronise F1's comforting ball of cynicism, the rush to rally behind FOTA struck me as akin to an impoverished populace of a tyrannical nation, all rushing to support a coup led by a smiling benign dictator promising them the world and all it's goodness, while all the while he’s actually just itching to get his feet inside the big comfy presidential palace for the foreseeable future at the expense of the current incumbent.
The show of support for FOTA at the British Grand Prix was enough to visibly rattle Bernie Ecclestone, of all people. The man who always seems to be in control of the situation no matter how hard F1 tries to destroy itself from the inside out, was forced into some shocking bits of PR-seeking brown-nosing, not least in promising the British fans a GP next year whether Donington Park gets sorted or not. For a man who seems to have spent a considerable amount of his recent life in his office, throwing darts at a staff photo of the BRDC, such a sudden departure from type when the white whale was within his reach showed the depth of FOTA's army of supporters.
All this FOTA-worship is fair enough, of course. Everyone needs an idol, or a vision of aspiration to a better life. It's for the same reason that every four years, the population of most democratic nations choose to elect a lying, smug-looking bloke to lead the country, promising unbeatable this and more of that and less of the bad stuff without ever really having the ability, or desire, to deliver any of it. As a group of animals, we're often easily blinded by our own naivety in the pursuit of some sort of utopian dream.
This is, of course, not a situation that FOTA are keen to correct any time soon. As soon as the deal to keep F1 intact for 2010 and beyond was announced, the manufacturers and FOTA top brass were tripping over each other to see who could piss the highest up the wall marked "fan-friendly platitudes". Flavio Briatore gushed that he and FOTA wanted to "work to have a better show, entertaining better the people", while Toyota boss John Howett proclaimed the deal as "a victory for Formula 1", while BMW head Mario Theissen claimed that it was: "a fantastic day for the sport, for the fans and definitely for us as teams as well." Red Bull's Christian Horner exulted that "we can now focus on the fans, on creating a better show, on creating an even better sport".
Which, as a fan, is exactly what you wanted to hear. The era of greed and corruption and Mosley and evil is over, and now we will have the best championship the world has ever seen. But what is really going to change? The hastily revised 2010 regulations will be published over the coming weeks, and are expected to include a few of FOTA's proposals from way back in March in place of the FIA's take on cost-cutting and show-spicing. So we may get such exciting developments as a "specified number of chassis, bodywork and aerodynamic development iterations during the season", or possibly "radical new points-scoring opportunities". So the emphasis on gimmicks and vague promises seems to be alive and well. Plus any dreams of rose-tinted fans after FOTA published their proposed calendar of F1 returning to Imola, Montreal or Adelaide have probably been put on the backburner, being as the whole 'leaked' schedule always looked like little more than a fan-pleasing pipedream.
One thing that has gone, of course, is the controversial budget cap, in favour of a more malleable commitment to "get back to the spending levels of the early 90s within two years". Which rather throws up a number of simple questions. Which team's spending levels? How will that be adjusted for inflation? What does that mean? Will it ever happen? And, perhaps more importantly, how will this affect the 'new blood' that F1 has invited into the fold for next year? It remains likely that most of those questions will never get answered.
Granted, this may be a slightly knee-jerk and somewhat pessimistic view of F1's bold, FOTA-heavy future. After all, the teams and the FIA are still working on a final draft of the 2010 regulations as well as a new Concorde Agreement. Maybe they will be full of new commitments to improve the show and thank the fans for their support. But with a heavy heart of cynicism, I fear not.
To suggest we're going to be pining for the return of Mosley by this time next year is probably stretching the truth more than a little bit, but it probably won't take long to realise that the real losers in the whole saga has not been Max, Bernie, FOTA or the FIA, but us lot sat watching them, as we once again get ignored for the sake of the next round of political shenanigans.
The ringleader may be changing, but the circus remains the same.
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