The world of motorsport descended upon Melbourne last week, and with it was a small sideshow called Formula One.
The Australian Grand Prix at times seemed a distraction from the legal proceedings at the Supreme Court of Victoria, just a few kilometres from Albert Park, where Sauber was fighting for its very survival against one of four drivers it had contracted to drive its two cars in 2015.
Even once the warring parties agreed to settle their differences away from the court (which they’ve now done – why didn’t they think to talk to each other earlier?), Bernie Ecclestone seized the spotlight by threatening to throw the resurrected Manor team out of the sport for leading him on about its intentions to race in Melbourne.
Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko then grabbed the football (probably Sherrin-shaped) and ran with it when he threatened the FIA with his team’s imminent departure from the sport if the rules weren’t changed to help it close the enormous gap to Mercedes.
Somewhere between all of the politicking a race broke out, but even that only served to highlight the stark discrepancies in performance between the manufacturers. Even Nico Rosberg complained the Mercedes had no-one to race.
What ties these together? Cars and money: car performance varies greatly from one end of the field to the other, which makes for underwhelming racing. The Australian Grand Prix is a prime example.
This column has often argued the case, albeit with limited financial prowess, for FIA-governed cost control in Formula One. Mandating all teams spend the same amount of money would close performance gaps, leaving cleverness the only differentiator.
However, today I’m feeling conciliatory. I’ll give some ground: what if we attempt to eliminate the problem altogether, rather than simply treat the symptoms?
Therefore if accept the problem is the car, we need to eliminate cars – that is, the differences between them. Could the answer be to re-introduce customer cars?
Certainly the idea already has some level of traction within the sport itself, and sometimes in unlikely places. Graham Watson, sporting director at Scuderia Toro Rosso, sees the benefits.
“I don’t really know who gets hung up on the constructors championship, to be honest,” said the Kiwi when I sat down with him in Melbourne. “’Constructors’ is probably a bit old school.”
Given the disparity between the teams, is the constructors title still relevant in its current form? “It has some financial benefits for us to be further up the constructors race the way the commercial agreements are currently written, but that may change one day.”
Indeed it’s subtly changing now, centimetre by centimetre. Since the outlawing of customer teams in 2010, slowly but surely the regulations have allowed for closer, though less explicit, partnerships.
“There have been quite a lot of examples over the last few years of people pushing for more and more customer-based cars – maybe not necessarily full customer, but maybe some technical allowance to swap parts between constructors.
“There was a connection between Super Aguri and Honda, and there’ll be a pretty strong connection between Ferrari and Haas in 2016.”
“But if you really think about the last 10 years, [fans] don’t talk about the year Williams won or the year Red Bull won, it’s the year Vettel won or the year Schumacher won.
“People are generally only interested in the world champion. As an outsider looking into the sport, I’d only be interested in Hamilton or Rosberg.”
There’s the key: the average fan is most interested in the squishy pink bits sitting in the cars. Even the most rusted-on supporters of Formula One, for all their love of the technical and data-driven elements upon which the sport is based, must admit that it is human interest that makes every other Sunday afternoon something more than a glorified bench test.
It’s therefore relatively easy to see why the sport returns so quickly to what is billed as a fix-all solution. It is because Formula One’s strength, as is the case with virtually all sports, is its ability to tell stories – and, as we’ve seen recently, the cars can be little more than an inconvenience when attempting to weave a compelling story.
Think of the outrage when it seemed Nico Rosberg would nab the title based largely on Lewis Hamilton’s greater share of technical failures. Consider the disgust we felt knowing double points rather than human endurance could decide the battle between two drivers. Dare I remind you of the worldwide seething that followed team orders at the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix?
What would happen if we took out all of those bitter elements and distilled the sport, as much as possible, into a pure driver versus driver, human versus human competition?
Perhaps this is what Christian Horner had in mind when he publicly called for the FIA to do something – anything – to rein in Mercedes.
Consider this: Red Bull’s own technical chief Adrian Newey has described 2015 as the most stringent year for technical regulations in the sport’s history – so much so that he’s decided to semi-retire. There’s similarly limited room for creativity when it comes to engine specification – a quick glance at the World Endurance Championship engine regulations will confirm as much.
We already live in an era or draconian technical limitations, many of which were been enthusiastically supported by teams as a method of keeping costs down. What more could possibly be done to regulate such performance differentiators out of the sport?
The customer car. Maybe that really has been the answer to the sport’s many ills all along.
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