It is slightly difficult to know which angle to approach a review of the Superleague Formula from. On the one hand, it is a straightforward, just-below-F1 motoring series, with powerful cars, ambitious drivers and all of that, and on the other hand, it is pitched less at finding the cream of the crop and more at trying to entertain a group of fans not especially used to motorsport, so the final results are less important that the road taken to them. Hence you have the serious business of qualifying mixed in with the knockabout showmanship of a second race reversed grid, indirectly rewarding the person who messes up race one the quickest with pole position. Let's get one thing clear from the start, the racing itself is fun. The cars, though looking slightly gawky from some angles, sound great, go fast and seem to allow for plenty of dicing throughout the field. After the sporting coma that was the European Grand Prix, it was all quite a thrilling novelty. And yet, despite this, I have one or two (or more accurately, loads of) issues with the brand. And seeing as it's far more fun to sit back and mock people for trying in a ball of bitter misanthropy, lets concentrate on these problems for a bit.
Firstly the name. Superleague Formula is the sort of focus group-led belch of a brand name that seems to be trying to say around 14 different things at the same time, and it ends up sounding like a cross between a northern game of rugby and a brand of baby milk. I'm not saying I could do any better, but something like "Formula Football" or "Racing Soccer Cars" or "Crazy Sports Fusion Loss-Making Franchise" may have been more catchy/marketable/accurate. Or not, but still, I hate it. And will never ever hear anyone say to anyone else whether they "watched the Superleague at the weekend" without someone replying with confusion or a rant about how lucky the Warriors were with that third try. Simply put, it's rubbish. Also, the tagline of the sport has it claiming to be "football at 300km/h". It isn't. I'm not even sure what such a garbled vision would look like. That is just a nebulous phrase that doesn't really mean anything, like "hockey at 300ºC" or "badminton at 15,000 feet". It's just two unconnected things fudged together in the hope that it sounds cool. Incidentally, both of those ideas sound infinitely better than SF, and I've got patent pending on them both.
Then there are issues which are less silly but a lot more important. The quality of the drivers on show is somewhere below the average invitational Porsche 911 event shoehorned into a club meeting at Cadwell Park to fill out the schedule. All you have is a series of failed or failing GP2 and F3000 pilots, the odd Champ Car refugee and a group of lower formula champions that were too unmarketable to make a reasonable leap to a higher version of motorsport. Granted, this is a slightly unfair thing to pull a virginal class of motorsport up on. Any brand new series is going to struggle to attract the highest calibre of driver straight from the off, and if SF becomes moderately successful, hopefully that issue at least will begin to disappear. I could also score cheap points by pointing out that the shocking car reliability on display at Donington probably isn't what you want to have for a series with 17 cars on the grid, but again, this was always going to be a teething problem for the new series, so I won't point it out. Except for just then, when I did.
The main overriding issue though, is who exactly is going to bother watching it? The crowd numbers on display at Donington would have embarrassed Wigan Athletic (though the weather may have something to say about that), and I've no idea what the TV viewing figures were like, but I'm guessing that as the series has been given a slot on the second channel of the poorly-subscribed-to Setanta Sports service, I'm guessing the total is in the ballpark of "not a pissing lot". To make matters ludicrous, the series debuted in the UK on a day where the races clashed with football games featuring the UK football teams that had actually bothered to join up. All three of Rangers, Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool were playing on Sunday, so if the plan was to appeal to fans of the teams, then why stage the races when most of the fans will be watching their teams actually play football? (n.b. What Liverpool played yesterday can only loosely be described as "football").
Or maybe the plan isn't to appeal to them, and instead get motorsport fans interested in football? Again, what's the point? As a convenient coincidence, I happen to be a Liverpool fan, and a motorsport fan. Surely this is made for me? But I didn't really find myself rooting for the Team Liverpool car any more than the others, any more than I would root for Nico Rosberg FC in the F1 Premiership, where eleven third division reject footballers get signed up and decked out in Rosberg-heavy kits to play against other football teams emblazoned with F1 drivers in an attempt to find out which F1 driver can luck into the best-run team. It's just a mess of a concept from the very beginning.
The main problem is how completely unnecessary the whole thing is. The cars are good, that's as granted, but that's no reason to like the thing the cars are in. Hell, there are series around the world crying out for a decent car (Indycar and A1GP to name but two). Imagine how much better of a spectacle we'd have if an established series got hold of a job lot of V12 powered monsters. It's be bloody ace! As I've already highlighted, the only good thing from the weekend was the sight of the racing itself, but it could have been an awful lot better with a full grid, and drivers that I'd at least vaguely heard about.
So, in a metaphor-heavy conclusion, what has happened here is that the creators have taken some damn fine ingredients, the sweetest sugar, the richest butter cream, the meltiest icing, but they've used them to bake a cake in the shape of a weeping stomach ulcer. So while there is no doubt that there is a tasty treat to be had, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who actually wants to eat it.
To summarise, Superleague Formula is possibly the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of civilisation.
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