To go back to the original topic: I think this is more a relatively recent phenomenon. Back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, F1 was more of an amateur sport. Corporate sponsorship in the form of stickers on the car showed up only in the late 60s itself. Drivers and their families use to travel together and had more fun. Their role was more to show up and drive. Teams would help each other if needed - e.g. if one guy's gear linkage broke in practice and he ran out of spares, some other team would help out with their parts. Lot of good bonhomie. The TV viewership numbers were pretty tiny in comparison to today. Most people around the world (particularly in Asia) would get their information from magazines. Beginning with the late 80s onward, there has been a lot more money injected into F1. It has become a serious sport as a result. Teams have to do well to be able to bag the next multi-million, multi year contract. Niceties are no longer important. Another critical factor is that the TV viewership/news interests has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years. We can now see events that we used to read about. Also the press in the past used to be more civil and ignore the quarrells and stuff. Today, they are hungry for the latest scoop and keep coming up with lots of speculation driven rather than fact driven commentary. They try to make a rivalry worse than it is. Sound bites are interpreted in many ways. "Alonso hates his team", etc. The drivers in the past could relax at the race tracks with the others. Today they have a packed itinerary with lot of sponsorship commitments. Most of them really don't meet except for a hello or something. Edit: Forgot to add one more point ... One big difference between then and now is the rapid car development that is required throughout the year. The F248 that raced in Bahrain in March 06 was much slower than the car that raced in Brazil 2006. Teams are looking for things that result in 0.05 secs/lap improvement. In the past the technology was quite basic and there was little to none improvement in the car all year. Today, teams cannot afford to drop the ball or let go of any way to get ahead of the competitor or conversely negate the competitor' advantage. Ross Brawn said the same - he will protest anything that the front running contender does that he believes is contrary to the rules. He cannot afford not to protest. Dog eat dog world
At the end of the first Concorde Agreement in 1987 Ecclestone became the FIA Vice-President in charge of Promotional Affairs and began to spend less time on Brabham. At the end of that year the team lost its sponsorship and Ecclestone decided to take a year out of racing. He sold the team to Alfa Romeo in preparation for the new Procar Championship. When the new series failed to get off the ground Alfa Romeo had no use for the team and so it was sold to a Swiss businessman Joachim Luhti. The sale of the F1 TV rights originally belonged to all the teams but in the early days the business was risky and not very profitable. Ecclestone gradually distanced himself from the other team owners and eventually they allowed him to establish Formula One Promotions and Administration to manage the rights for them. TV revenues were split with 47% going to the teams, 30% to the FIA and 23% to FOPA. FOPA, however, received all the fees paid by promoters. In exchange for this FOPA paid prize money to the teams. In 1995 the FIA decided to grant the commercial rights to F1 to Formula One Management for a period of 14 years, in exchange for an annual payment from Ecclestone. The F1 teams were upset as they found that they had lost the rights. McLaren, Williams and Tyrrell refused to sign the new 1997 Concorde Agreement but the other eighth teams backed down.Eventually an agreement was reached for a 10-year deal with the teams and a 15-year deal with the FIA. Once this has been agreed Ecclestone began to plan for the flotation of his company. The European Commission began an investigation into the Formula 1 business and eventually this led to the flotation being cancelled and in 1999 Ecclestone issued a $1.4bn Eurobond, secured on the future profits of the company. Later that year he sold 12.5% of the business to the venture capitalist company Morgan Grenfell Private Equity for $325m. In February 2000 sold another 37.5% to the San Francisco investment company Hellman & Friedman for $725.5m. These two then combined their shares and sold them to Thomas Haffa of EM.TV in exchange for $1.65bn in cash and shares. When EM.TV ran into trouble the shares passed to Leo Kirch who acquired another 25% of the business leaving the Ecclestone Family with only 25% of the business but despite heart surgery in June 1999 Ecclestone remains firmly in charge of F1.... SOURCE: GP Encyclopedia (not the dreaded Wikipedia) Reinforces what Sam said. Bernie had a huge impact on the sport, particularly in the 90s. F1 went from more of a sport to more of a business IMHO. One of the good parts about this is we get to watch the races on TV. The bad parts involving too much money are all too obvious.
Going back to the original quote by Orwell...what makes him an authority on sport? He was a geeky author who as far as I know didn't play anything more agressive than chess. His description of serious sport could equally be a cynical view of business, politics, or life for that matter. He probably would've been a Schumacher fan...
On Clark, most conjecture centers around a sudden tire deflation/rear suspension collapse-given the Lotus' fragile build quality that is most likely-but not definitively-the cause. I honestly believe Senna had a steering problem, prosecutors believed that the welds on the steering shaft were suspect at best-again, all speculation, nothing definitive. On Lauda, I think rear suspension or a driveshaft failure and the car veered suddenly into the guardrail....he was obviously fortunate as compared to poor Clark or Senna. Hemingway said it best, 3 real sports-mountain climbing, bull fighting and auto-racing....that element of risk is always there but in mountain climbing and auto racing if your gear fails you're fcuked...
I guess the one thing I have learned from this thread is that the greatest drivers only cheat a little bit. And I guess that's what makes them great.
Paul and Senna1994, I still believe there is an element of Senna and Clark were too good to make mistakes and that clouds many peoples judgement. In the end Senna1994, it does not matter whether you are just driving to work, or a Formula two race or the top tier, mistakes can have disasterous results. Heck I crashed my last race car on a test day ... stupid mistake and I had taken that same corner thousands of times. Also Sennas car was bottoming very badly through Tamburello, and you could see that it was all over the place. It took somebody as good and brave as Senna to rip it through so hard, but even he lost it IMO. If it had been a steering failure we would have seen instant brake lock up as Senna would have gone into component failure mode and killed as much speed as possible ... instead he was busy trying to regain control, but there was not enough run off. Anyway I was not sitting beside either driver, but we have all watched MS make mistakes, sometimes stupid ones. Heck I've watched Senna make stupid ones too, even by his own admission and I'm sure Clark was human too ... I just think we need to keep the possibility of driver errors in the equation. I also think, because many of us are club racers, that we need a safer, easier to deal with explanation for our heros dying, and it makes us feel safer to blame their equipment than to think 'heck even drivers as good as Clark and Senna can't always control their cars, what chance do I have ... ?' Just my opinion. Best Pete
Agree. We'll never know 100% what happened th AS, JC or NL... As long as it doesn't happen again it's all good....
