Wednesday (Night) Racing Thread

Open to all subscribers. Focusing on F1 this week but anything goes

from the left: all the talent and none of the luck, all of the talent and most of the luck, some of the talent and all of the luck

What’s the point of watching F1, anyway? The championship is rarely in doubt — and when it is in doubt, the contenders are often teammates “fighting” to see which of their cars will have fewer reliability issues. It’s not uncommon for twenty or thirty laps to pass without a single significant position change. At least 70% of the teams have no chance whatsoever to win a race on pure speed. As far as spectacles go, it isn’t one.

And yet I’ve paid at least some attention to it in about twelve of the past twenty years.

After some thought I’ve come to believe that the joy of F1 is in the contemplation. Pretty much everything that happens in the sport happens because of an understandable reason, whether it’s “Brawn has a double diffuser” or “You can see the difference between Max and Sergio every single weekend”. The video coverage, as Tom Cruise once said of another sanction, is excellent. Much of what goes on is deliberately transparent to the viewer.

Most importantly, it is in no way chaotic. It has baseball pacing, rather than the basketball pacing of NASCAR. There’s just enough time to think about strategies then observe them succeed or fail. A shorter race would have fewer interesting things happen; a longer one would strain the viewer’s patience. And while the “Netflix effect” is often ridiculed, it’s just part of a bigger machine that gives you a sense of each individual driver, even when the personalities involved are largely fake or PR-adjusted. Twenty drivers is a good solid comprehensible number. And all the teams are financially sound enough that you don’t have a lot of meaningless churn with “start-and-parkers” or musical-chairs drivers.

This weekend was a good example of how the whole thing works. There was little chance that Max wouldn’t win — but you can see the gap shrinking between Red Bull and the others, and Checo is doing a good job of suggesting how things might go if they had him and Danny Ric instead of him and Max. Random things that occurred to me:

• The Williams journey from sliding-skirt tech overdog to Ralf-and-Montoya cash-rich contender to scrappy broke Cinderella story scoring an unlikely points finish with a discarded Red Bull driver is hugely depressing AND hugely cheering, somehow.

• Alonso may have wanted to win the race, but it wasn’t in the cards. I suspect he and his team did a bit of kayfabe with their “lift and coast” and “brake issues” just to get Hamilton to use up his tires in the middle of the last stint rather than at the end. Had there been a safety car, that would have paid off big time in Alonso’s favor. It truly is a joy to watch his mind at work; rather ironically, he’s the successor to Michael Schumacher who always seemed to know more about the race than anyone else, including Alonso in his young “prime”.

• One good reason to hate Mercedes and their involvement in the sport is the inexorable nature of their progress over time. You’d be a fool to bet against them winning races in two months. The car always gets better, always keeps developing. And it’s always dead reliable. Today’s Mercedes race car is like the Mercedes street car of 40 years ago.

• Penalizing Hulkenberg was nothing more than FIA Lewis Assistance. Giving Lando Norris five seconds for safety car stacking was inexcusable. Someone needs to let the FIA know that kicking low-tier teams when they’re already down isn’t just a “bad look” as the kids say. It’s bad for business.

• What kind of desperation is happening inside the mind of Nick “I’ll be the team leader” DeVries right now that he is willing to repeatedly go wheel to wheel with Kevin “Suck My Balls” Magnussen? What did he think was going to happen? Has he simply never watched an F1 race in which he was not actively “competing”?

• Princess George Russell is completely falling apart. Someday we will all find out why most of Hamilton’s teammates have this dependable combination of bad luck and mental errors. What happens inside the team, almost every time? The only way to beat it, and subsequently beat Hamilton, is to be a handsome white man in the twilight of his career who loves beautiful women, doesn't work too hard at racing, and doesn’t give a shit about much else, cf. Messrs. Button and Rosberg. (Oh, and Kimi too, as a competitor.) It’s almost like the more genuine talent you have, the worse you do as The Chosen One’s teammate.

• Last week, Lewis suggested that Max could easily eclipse his record in F1. Max responded indirectly by saying that winning multiple championships past a third would “just be the same thing over and over again”. I can’t even begin to guess what he might do if he exited Formula One at the age of thirty or even younger. Meanwhile, Lewis is strongly hinting that he wants to stay several more years in the sport. There’s a whole book to be written about the different approaches taken by top drivers to F1. Alonso loves it and can’t leave. Max is designed for it like no other human in history but he is willing to leave, or at least he SAYS he is. Lewis has long given the impression of wanting to be bigger than F1 somehow, and he has never appeared to enjoy the work, but he is going to… stick around another five years?

All of this, too, is part of the joy in watching Formula One. No other motorsport in the world has this range of possibilities. Everyone knows that in NASCAR you stay until your sponsors leave you, in LeMans you stay until you can’t pedal the car, and in IndyCar you stay until you’re embarrassing yourself. Only in F1 do you have a Rosberg or Prost just walk away. What does that really mean? Your guess is as good as mine.