CHRIS HARRIS
The F1 finale may not have finished quite how we wanted, but it’s time to halt the hate, says Chris
“I DON’T SIT ON THE FENCE ABOUT MY F1 ALLEGIANCES. I’M A LEWIS FAN”
Spare a thought for Michael Masi, the F1 race director who couldn’t have made more of a balls-up of his role this season if he’d drunk 16 pints before each race. But despite how bad he’s been, the level of hatred spouting from social media really is dreadful. It’s just a bloody sport – people need to calm down.
Or do they? F1 is back as a box office offering and people have an opinion about it. Every sport has its Drive to Survive moment
– or it hopes it does – when a sudden influx of new fans appears and exerts its mass on the spectacle. The problem is this time it’s happened in the Twitter era, so we have a few million faceless idiots trying to be nothing but offensive and with little knowledge of the sport. The idea they might calm down is clearly laughable.
F1 is now in the best and worst place it has been for 20 years. It has, to coin a phrase, cracked America, is making itself appeal to a younger audience and that means the audience is growing. And that appears to be part of the reason why the sport and the FIA is happy to roll with a series of bizarre decisions by its stewards and the race director – people love the show, so why does it matter?
Where do you begin? This is a sport that chooses its stewards on a race-by-race basis, which even a thicko like me knows isn’t the best way to distribute consistent decisions. Furthermore, one of those stewards is often an ex-driver with very obvious connections and allegiances to current drivers. It’s actually such a poor state of affairs it makes you laugh, and it also completely explains how a situation like Abu Dhabi was allowed to happen.
I don’t sit on the fence about my F1 allegiances. I’m a Lewis fan and I think Max’s approach to wheel-to-wheel racing is sometimes too much, but he is a deserving champion. By the most basic and, to me, most important metric, he was the best this year – he won the most races. But there’s something so rotten about the way he won that F1 needs to be careful how it feeds this very welcome influx of new fans. Put simply, most people I know who have been drawn into this title battle who don’t know much about the sport cannot fathom how a driver can utterly dominate a race and then have it taken away from them at the last moment. “It’s like seeing a side 7-1 down with a minute to go, and then somehow losing.” And this is where I’m torn – yes, that’s a tricky situation to explain and support, but it’s also the key to motor racing. Nothing is certain, until it is certain. Anyone who has raced has probably suffered and benefited from this in equal measure.
But in the past, these slings and arrows came in the form of mechanical failure, or the weather, or some other act of God, not on the back of a race team apparently challenging and overturning a decision that had been broadcast to all us viewers. It just looked all wrong. And it sadly diminishes Max’s achievement, when he clearly deserves to be a world champion. Whatever happens next, I suspect Masi won’t be involved. But he doesn’t deserve all the hate. It’s just cars going round and round.
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