What happened in the closing stages of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last Sunday was unfair to Lewis Hamilton and his Mercedes team. That much was obvious.
But it should not have been a surprise. Not in the context of modern sport anyway. Not in the context of the need to pander to the market. Sport is being bastardised in front of our eyes. It is not a race any more. Sport, more and more and more, is just a last lap.
We are shrinking sport to fit our own attention spans and the demands of broadcasters. We are shrinking it so that it conforms to the modern concept of entertainment. That concept demands that there is no downtime and no quiet time, no time for attention to wander. Particularly not near the end of an event. The idea that sport might be allowed to finish in anti-climax is anathema to those who promote it.
And so we still have Test matches but they are under siege from Twenty20 and The Hundred. Replays in football cup ties are being phased out. Penalties are king. Since 2019, only one of the Grand Slam tournaments of tennis — the French Open — does not enforce a tie-break in the deciding set of singles matches.
Even the extra inning system in baseball, once a magnificent holdout, has started to be compromised during the regular season.
In some ways, it is remarkable that
Formula One has resisted the kind of contrived, slate-wiped-clean finish we saw in Abu Dhabi for so long.
‘This has been manipulated, man,’
Hamilton told his team over the radio after Max Verstappen had passed him on the final lap on the Yas Marina
Circuit. To which, one answer would be: ‘No s***, Sherlock.’ It is, increasingly, the way of modern sport.
Formula One is merely playing catch-up. When Nigel Mansell went to the US to race in the IndyCar series nearly 30 years ago, it did not take long for those of us ignorant of the ways of American autoracing to wise up. If there were no ostensible reason for a yellow flag to be shown towards the end of a race to bunch the field up, IndyCar would find one.
Mansell suffered from that process at the 1993 Indianapolis 500 when he was leading in the closing stages of the 200-lap race. He was
18 laps from victory when Lyn St
James stalled in Turn 4 and the yellow flags came out. The field contracted and when the race restarted two laps later, Emerson Fittipaldi and Arie Luyendyk got the break on Mansell and swept past him. Mansell finished third.
Look at the blue riband events of American motorsport, the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500, and they rarely finish without a bang. Earlier this year, Helio Castroneves overtook Alex Palou on the penultimate lap of the Indy 500 and won by 0.49secs. The 2020 race did end ‘under caution’ after a heavy crash five laps from the end but in 2019, Simon Pagenaud took the chequered flag, beating Alexander Rossi by 0.2secs. The 2018 race finished in a six-lap shoot-out.
The debate since Verstappen’s victory last week has, rightly, centred on quite how much sport should compromise in the face of television’s demand for a dramatic denouement. It was clear in those closing laps that Formula One was terrified of a title race, which had breathed fresh life into the sport this year, ending with the field lapping sedately behind a safety car and Hamilton easing to an anticlimactic
victory. And in its terror, in its determination to avoid disappointing the legions of new viewers it has seduced through the compelling Netflix series, Drive to Survive, Formula One went too far.
It got the balance wrong. Sport has to be fair or else it is meaningless. The rules have to be clear before the contest starts, or else it is meaningless. In Abu Dhabi, both those principles were betrayed, along with Hamilton.
The rules were adapted on the fly in Abu Dhabi and that makes a mockery of sport. In the circumstances, the reactions of Hamilton and Mercedes showed considerable grace. And when Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, said last week he could not accept being ‘held ransom by ad hoc decisions in every field, in technical, and in sport,’ it was hard to disagree. Let
us hope that Hamilton is not so disillusioned by what happened that he chooses this moment to retire, as Wolff hinted he might.
Imagine if he comes back next season and avenges the injustice of Abu Dhabi by beating Verstappen and winning a record eighth driver’s title. Imagine the drama of that story. Imagine the plot twists. Imagine the viewing figures for Drive to Survive.
But then that is Hamilton’s dilemma. If he comes back to rejoin the battle with Verstappen and Formula One explodes in popularity as it thrills to the revenge narrative that will lace their renewed rivalry, the people who cooked up the farrago in Abu Dhabi will have their vindication. The imperative for entertainment will have triumphed over the desire for true sport and another citadel will have fallen.