WHO killed Formula One? The billionaires who run the sport have this week been squabbling around the corpse, arguing about sums of money that make your nose bleed. The only thing they agree about is the lifelessness of the corpse. But as the power-brokers look for someone to blame, the murderer walks scot-free and is treated as a hero wherever he goes.
Michael Schumacher killed Formula One. It was a rare case of death by genius. In sport, we are schooled to admire the champion, the master with the unslakeable thirst for excellence, the alpha male for whom one championship is never enough: Pete Sampras, Steve Redgrave, Muhammad Ali.
Schumacher is seven times a champion. Or, he being German, seven times Weltmeister. He is one of the great serial champions of all time and he killed his sport with his brilliance, murdered it with the thousand cuts of excellence. Motor sport will survive in some form or other, but Formula One as we know it is no more. That is why the politico-financial affairs of the sport are making all the headlines. It is the dance of death.
Is excellence a bad thing? The very idea is a sporting blasphemy. Redgrave’s 16-year odyssey of rowing excellence created one of sport’s abiding legends. Nobody thought it would be “good for the sport” if Redgrave had met an Olympic defeat or two. True, some people felt that Sampras’s dominance at Wimbledon was “boring”. But then Sampras had a shock defeat and followed this with a hugely popular victory after being written off as a yesterday’s champion. Sampras, by the late revelation of his fallibility, succeeded in humanising his story.
In sport, we love excellence and we love drama and when they come together, we love it best of all. But Schumacher has done more than take the drama away from his sport. The fact that we know who is going to win long before the race has started is not the worst of it. Schumacher has also taken away the humanity of the sport. And it is that which has proved fatal.
Schumacher is the best. Perhaps the best ever. You can tell that because, every now and then, Formula One becomes a test of men rather than machinery. That happens when it rains. Schumacher is best in the rain. That means he is the bravest and the most skilful. No argument; none whatsoever.
You may remember when Steve Davis dominated snooker. Some found that enthralling, others found it predictable, but at least there was an argument. So — what if the sport had come up with a notion? To make it more interesting, let’s give Davis a three-blacks start in every frame. To make tennis more interesting, let’s give Sampras a free service break in every set. Let’s give Redgrave a 50-metre start and let’s improve the Rumble in the Jungle by tying George Foreman’s right hand behind his back.
Silly? Yes, bloody silly, and precisely the way in which Formula One works. Schumacher is the fastest driver, so he gets the fastest car. And then we are supposed to be interested in the fact that the best driver, driving the fastest car, invariably wins the race. Oh, and as a little bonus, the best driver in the fastest car is allowed to start in front of everybody else. That doesn’t exactly add to the uncertainty.
That Ferrari, season after season, produce the fastest car is a testament to Schumacher’s drive for excellence. He has been the central part of Ferrari’s culture of success. He has earned that car with his time and his energy and his hunger and his remorseless quest for perfection. For Schumacher, every lap is now a lap of honour. It is a fantastic achievement; it has killed his sport.
What would it be like if they all drove Ferraris, if every driver was given the best equipment? That would produce a rare bit of sport. But at least it is a fact that one other man has a Ferrari to drive. So let us salute Rubens Barrichello, the beta male of all beta males.
In 1988, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost drove for McLaren. It was McLaren’s year. The team managed a one-two finish ten times in the season. But God, they were racing against each other and they did so like men possessed. Senna shaded the title with eight wins to seven in one of the great racing seasons of all time.
But Barrichello doesn’t race Schumacher, whose power is such that his team-mate is required to be a lackey, a domestique, a gopher, an after-you-sir man, a private solider who begins each day: “Good morning, Sergeant-Major, here’s a sparrow for your cat.” In return, Schumacher tosses him the occasional crumb of a victory and Barrichello beams: “Thank you, Master!” We shouldn’t complain. Schumacher’s overwhelming nature insisted on a zero-threat colleague. It was just one more aspect of the victory machine he created and Barrichello is a vital piece of that machinery. It is a glorious achievement. It is the ultimate expression of Formula One; and may God have mercy on its soul.
All motor sport embodies a contradiction. It is about machinery and it is about people. The buffs, the addicts, the petrol-heads find a deep satisfaction in the battles of machine against machine, in the quest for mechanical perfection. Their allegiance is not in danger. But a global sport needs more than buffs. A global sport must also sweep up the uncommitted.
The uncommitted seek drama and find it in every sport in the calendar. We didn’t watch Paula Radcliffe’s New York redemption because we are interested in biomechanics. We switched on for the drama: Paula v Paula on the last incline up into Central Park, a soul stripped bare for us in suffering and desire.
The floating voters even watched curling past midnight a couple of years ago, to see the last sweeping of Rhona Martin and her immortals, and found great drama in the occasion, great humanity. But motor sport, by definition, is always struggling for humanity. The characters are helmeted and masked, their abilities are hard to read, their emotions impossible to decipher at the peak of the action. Drama comes in spectacle, in crash and spin and near-miss and overtaking.
But the machines have won. An overtaking manoeuvre is as rare as a Spix’s macaw and, what’s worse, we know who is going to win. The most exciting thing in Formula One is the question of when Schumacher is going to stop for petrol. Five years of excellence have killed the sport.
As the traditional heartland of the West yawns and walks away, the sport seeks its future in the impressionable, underdeveloped nations, places that seek to be more Western than the West, eager to show that they can equal if not outdo the developed world in noise, pollution, destruction of natural resources, valuation of technology over humanity, worship of money and pell-mell eagerness to promote cancer the cowboy way.
If a sport is to have a long-term following, it must show us fallibility and weakness and it must show us greatness; it must show us badness and it must show us goodness; it must show us triumph and it must show us disaster. That is to say, it must reveal for us our humanity. In sport you must (a) care about what happens next, and (b) not know.
Schumacher has robbed his sport of those two things. By being the most effective person his sport has seen, he has killed his sport stone dead. In a famous piece of Olympic commentary, David Coleman asked the world: “And — who cares who’s third?” This is Formula One. Who cares who’s first?
