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Matt Youson is chief writer for the F1 paddock daily newspaper The Red Bulletin. He also contributes to F1 Racing, Racing Line, Intersection, FX and The Observer. Here he writes exclusively centraltyre.net on what's really happening inside Formula One.
Inside F1
The Massacre At Paris
September is usually the month when the details of the World Championship are decided. This year the month included three races: Monza, Spa and Fuji, but the real action was off-track. The descent into madness began on September 5th with an announcement that McLaren had been recalled to a second hearing into the spying case by the FIA World Council. At its first hearing that body had chosen to let McLaren off without sanction but reserved the right to reopen the case if further evidence came to late. Obviously it had.
Throughout the Monza weekend, where McLaren comfortably ran away with the race, whispers in the paddock, that Fernando Alonso was the whistleblower, grew in volume. F1 left Italy expecting fireworks the following week.
The series has a taste for melodrama, and it was no coincidence that McLaren’s fate was to be decided in Paris, concurrent with the rest of F1 assembling in Spa. The hearing took place on Thursday, traditionally the first day of the meeting (not for mechanics, they usually arrive on Monday or Tuesday). The press centre in Spa was half-empty, many rightly concluding that Paris, not Belgium was the place to be. All day rumours filtered out, McLaren would escape; McLaren be banned for two races; McLaren would be banned for two seasons.
Autosport were the first to go live with a confirmation. Via text message from a mole on the inside, they announced a two season ban for boys in grey. Cue pandemonium in the press centre at the racetrack. It proved to be a premature pronouncement and McLaren lawyers jumped on it. The story disappeared from Autosport’s website, but the damage had been done, and it spread across the Internet – in the future it will no doubt be a case study for the power of rumour.
There is considerable space between the perception and the reality of Formula One. The perception, built up over the years by all the interested parties, is of a technocracy in which brilliant minds developed super cars to be driven by superheroes. From the inside, the everyday picture is different. F1 is a village, granted it travels across five continents but from the inside, one paddock looks very much the same as any other. Everyone sets up in the same order, the same faces are there day in, day out. There’s a defined hierarchy, age-old antagonisms, complicated relationships, and absolutely everybody is interested in everyone else’s business. Gossip, basically, rules.
When the judgement finally arrived it was… surprising. A fine of $100million and exclusion from the constructors’ championship seemed harsh. Most people were not convinced the punishment fitted the crime. I’m not even sure it’s a crime. This may be a controversial point of view, but the idea that one F1 team would steal information from another doesn’t seem that odd.
Motorhomes in the paddock have electronic counter-measures to prevent conversations being overhead, presumably by electronic listening devices also in motorhomes. Nobody talks about it, everyone knows it’s there. When an engineer announces he’s moving teams, he’s sent out to pasture for six months. His computers are confiscating and he’s escorted off the premises. Presumably there are software measures in place to stop the wholesale copying of data, but someone owning an iPod and clever enough to design an F1 car is probably smarter than the guy trying to catch him. There have been documented cases before, and I would be genuinely surprised if McLaren are the only current team in the paddock guilty of espionage.
Indeed later that weekend several teams disclosed minor infractions, including Ferrari who admitted they have in the past made attempts to crack the opposition’s encrypted radio communications. Their defence was everyone does it. No-one stood up to disagree with that point of view. So what is espionage, as applied in F1? Listening, it appears is not. Looking, it appears, is. McLaren can weather a $100 million fine, smaller teams can’t. The rumour mill is already placing a couple of other teams in the dock. If McLaren are the precedent, they might be in serious trouble.
The race passed off without major incident. The Ferrari’s as everyone knew they would, went away from the rest of the field. Flowing circuits with fast corners suit their longer wheelbase. There aren’t many circuits like that.
The races may be two weeks apart, but for most crews, the gap is much shorter, a day off, three or four days back at the office, then on to the next race. Few working now were present the last time the series visited Fuji, back in 1977. A surprisingly large number of those that were are journalists, many of whom had a very lucrative week flogging nostalgia pieces to all and sundry.
They almost didn’t need to. The race was a carbon copy of 1976, complete with driving rain, cloud, low visibility and a happy Briton: Lewis Hamilton winning the race where James Hunt won the championship. Nowhere is the distinction between what F1 wants and what F1 needs more obvious than Japan. F1 wants the reconstructed Fuji, with it’s modern facilities and slow-speed sponsor’s logo-friendly TV camera corners. What it needs is Suzuka, former home of the Japanese Grand Prix: yes a bit frayed around the edges, but a great circuit requiring incredibly bravery, with a special atmosphere, a huge and loyal crowd and, more importantly, a legend. F1 needs legends like it needs heroes. And while Fuji looked adequate, it didn’t look like providing either – at least before the rain came. Then again, racing halfway up a mountain during autumn in a temperature climate, rain is pretty much guaranteed.
The series moved on to China with Hamilton in a dominant position. There were various permutations, basically boiling down to Lewis needing to beat Fernando to secure his championship. No only did he fail to do that, Kimi Raikkonen’s typically nerveless performance means a three-way battle in Brazil. It’s almost as it Bernie Ecclestone plans it this way.