The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (43 page)

 

Formula One, though concentrated historically in Europe and associated with ascots and champagne, is now perhaps the only truly global sports league—a legitimate world series—with Grand Prix races staged in 19 countries across five continents. The breadth of its television audience is surpassed only by the Olympics and the World Cup, with more than half a billion viewers from nearly 200 countries tuning in each season, according to the sport's promoters. Among the competitors in 2012 were an Indian-backed team (Sahara Force India) and a Russian-backed team (Marussia), to go with the likes of Ferrari, McLaren, and Mercedes, as well as a Japanese driver (Kamui Kobayashi), a Venezuelan (Pastor Maldonado), a Mexican (Sergio Perez), and two Finns. All told, 13 nations were represented among the 25 drivers. The best of those drivers are compensated as well as A-Rod and Kobe, while the bottom half are what's known as “pay drivers”—they're expected to raise money, through independent sponsorships, to offset the privilege of wearing flame-retardant bodysuits covered in advertisements. They're like publishing interns, or the jet-set equivalent of preteen soccer players holding a bake sale to raise money for their spring tournament.

The business relationships between the racing teams and their parent companies can be dizzying to a novice. This was made especially clear to me late last year, as I watched the mostly thrilling Brazilian Grand Prix, in rainy São Paulo, on television. McLaren's Lewis Hamilton was leading for much of the way, until he was clipped by Force India's Nico Hulkenberg in the 55th lap (of 71) and forced to withdraw because of damage to his front suspension. Force India, like the majority of Formula One teams, has no real expectation of winning races; its cars help justify the existence of a Grand Prix in New Delhi, where monkeys still outnumber luxury automobiles. It also has, as it happens, a “technology sharing” partnership with McLaren, which provided Hulkenberg and his teammate Paul Di Resta with gearboxes and hydraulics. Yet Hulkenberg's aggressive move—“That's what happens when you are racing with a less experienced driver,” Hamilton later fumed—cost McLaren 24 points in the standings and, in effect, $10 million of prize money. “One can only hope that the Force India deal brings McLaren more than that because otherwise the customer programme will have been operating at a loss!” the racing journalist Joe Saward wrote on his blog. It was almost as though the Steinbrenners had lent a pitcher to the Royals to help extend the Yankees' brand awareness in Kansas City, only to watch that pitcher drill Derek Jeter in the head.

Hamilton, in any event, had already announced that he would be leaving McLaren at the end of the season to race for Mercedes—or, rather, to use the teams' more sponsor-friendly names, he was leaving Vodafone McLaren Mercedes for Mercedes AMG Petronas. This was big news. Hamilton, who is 28, is often thought of as Formula One's first black champion, and he was already the second-highest-paid driver on the circuit. But, viewed another way, you could say that he was merely expanding his commitment to Mercedes, from an outfit in which the company invests $15 million a year to one in which it sinks $70 million.

 

On the morning of my trip to Milton Keynes, I stopped to visit the headquarters of Formula One Management, overlooking London's Hyde Park. I was received there by the so-called F1 Supremo, Bernie Ecclestone, a self-made character who would seem to have been invented by Fleet Street to sell newspapers. Great Britain's fourth-richest man, Ecclestone is five feet three, with a white mop of hair and a perpetual squint, from being nearly blind in his right eye since birth. (A
Daily Mail
writer once called him “a tortoise in an Andy Warhol wig.”) Last summer, a couple of months before his 82nd birthday, he was married for the third time, to Fabiana Flosi, a 35-year-old Brazilian whom he met on the track in São Paulo, and who towers over him. (The joke goes that he can look her in the eye when he is standing on his wallet.) His two daughters from his previous wife Slavica, a six-foot-two Croatian who has modeled for Armani, are the Kardashians of England. Tamara, the older one, recently starred in a reality show called
Billion $$ Girl
, and Petra was married in a Roman castle before buying what had been billed as the United States' most expensive house, for $85 million, from the Hollywood widow Candy Spelling.

The son of a North Sea herring and mackerel fisherman, Ecclestone grew up in a house without plumbing, quit school at 16, and became a used-car salesman in South London, earning a reputation for “clocking” odometers, or forcibly rewinding them, in the manner of Ferris Bueller. His ruthless street savvy stood him in good stead when he got involved in racing, which had originated as a pastime for Europe's landed gentry. Racing teams traditionally negotiated with the various circuits individually. Ecclestone persuaded them to negotiate as a bloc—a sort of racing cartel. He was also quick to see the value in television for a sport in which the contestants were distinguished by degrees invisible to the naked eye, and he envisioned, in the paddock behind the teams' garages, an opportunity to cultivate an exclusive atmosphere such as you'd find at Wimbledon or Henley. By consolidating power over the sport's promotion when no one else could be bothered, he made himself indispensable, even as the cash flow that Formula One was generating, at first through tobacco sponsorships and then through exclusive television rights, attracted banks and larger financial interests. They could buy him out—and, indeed, a controlling interest in the sport is now owned by a London-based private-equity firm—but they'd still need a public face to run the show. As we spoke, in a tall, dark-glass-fronted building he'd bought nearly 30 years ago from the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, Ecclestone was facing the threat of indictment in Germany, on suspicion of bribery in the amount of $44 million. (He maintains that he was extorted.) But that wasn't what had him concerned. “I think Europe's a thing of the past,” he said, and let out a sigh. He meant this both existentially, in the way of a right-winger who sees the welfare state choking itself to insolvency, and as a source of revenue growth for a sport that is sometimes said to thrive on cubic dollars.

“From the day you grow up and start looking at TV, all the sports you watch have an enormous number of little breaks,” Ecclestone continued, addressing me as a representative American. “So you can watch any of the games—football, Lakers, whatever it is—you walk away and it's, say, 42 plays to 48, and you disappear and you come back and it's 63 versus 65. And that's how it is! It doesn't make any difference if you don't concentrate. Whereas in English football or Formula One . . . I mean, you can go to an English football match and not see a goal, which would never be acceptable in America, would it?”

The equivalent of a scoreless match in Formula One is a race in which nobody passes anyone—or, at least, in which the driver who begins in the pole position goes on to win, unchallenged from behind for 300 kilometers, or the better part of two hours. (The starting grid is determined by the fastest individual laps registered during qualifying sessions the day before the race.) After going through a “fairly dark period” a few years ago, as Martin Whitmarsh, the chairman of the Formula One Teams Association, called it, “where we weren't producing a good enough show,” the sport's organizers agreed to give trailing cars an artificial boost, like a turbo button in a video game. The technology is called DRS—for drag-reduction system—and it enables drivers to maneuver an adjustable flap on their rear wings, adding about a dozen extra miles per hour on straightaways. You can activate it only on certain stretches of each track, when you're within a second of the car in front of you and hoping to slingshot past.

DRS was introduced before the start of the 2011 season, over the objection of many purists, who felt that this kind of pandering to an impatient audience was beneath the European motor-sport. Nonetheless, roughly half of all races that year consisted of Red Bull's German phenom Sebastian Vettel essentially leading from start to finish. In all but one instance, the fastest qualifying laps belonged to Vettel or to his older teammate Webber. Red Bull's cars were simply too much better, owing in large part to Adrian Newey's ingenious use of the cars' exhaust as an aerodynamic aid.

If DRS couldn't sufficiently speed the other teams up, something would need to be done to slow Red Bull down. Haggling over the “outer envelope of permissibility,” as Whitmarsh put it, is the hidden essence of Formula One. “If you believe your competitors are driving a performance advantage, you've got to either duplicate it or prevent them from doing it.” And so the 2012 season began with an amended set of rules in which exhaust gases could no longer be fed through the rear diffuser, as Newey had been doing, to reduce pressure underneath the car's floor. Red Bull was forced to lower the car's ride height, in compensation. The first seven races produced seven different winners. Parity restored.

 

Like many kids, Newey was initially drawn by the allure of stardom behind the wheel. His father was a veterinarian and a metalworking hobbyist, who tinkered with his Lotuses and Mini Coopers in the backyard while his younger son looked on. When Adrian expressed an interest in driving, his father proposed a deal. “He said, ‘If you want to do it, that's great, but you're going to have to show your commitment,'” Newey recalled. “So what he offered was that for every pound I could earn he would double my money to buy a go-kart.” Newey took odd jobs delivering newspapers, washing cars, and mowing lawns, and with his father's subsidy was able to buy a secondhand vehicle. “The combination of it and me was pretty uncompetitive,” he said. “More and more, my interest then became modifying the car to try and make it go faster.” He learned to weld, and made his own electronic ignition, scouring kits for spare parts. “I'm not sure it actually made it go any faster, but it gave me something to do,” he said.

He was an indifferent student. He attended Repton, “a rather Dickensian public school,” as he put it, which had been founded in 1557. “Very pretentious,” he added. “It revolved around sport more than anything—depending on the term, football, cricket, or hockey.” Newey was not a jock. He wore leather jackets and bell-bottoms, which were roomy enough for him to tape bottles of vodka to his shins, for use at school functions. The most memorable of those was an end-of-term concert in 1975, which the sixth-formers had organized, bringing the prog-rock band Greenslade to campus. Newey was then a fifth-former, and having doubts about proceeding to A-levels. Emboldened by the vodka, and eyeing the mixing console in the middle of the auditorium, he waited until the sound engineer was on a break and moved in. “I jumped to the controls, set them all to max, and the stained-glass walls that had survived Cromwell and God knows what . . .” With his hands, Newey pantomimed an explosion. That was the end of his time at Repton.

Newey wasted a year at the local community college, during which he mostly rode motorcycles and chased girls, before getting serious and applying to the University of Southampton. He studied aeronautics and astronautics, not because he had any particular interest in flight but because it struck him as the closest thing academia had to offer a gearhead. Race cars were like planes flying into the ground rather than above it. Instead of seeking lift, they relied on downforce, which effectively pinned them to the road as they navigated corners, but the same Bernoulli physics applied. It was all a matter of balancing downforce (good for turning) and drag (bad for straightaways). Upon graduation, in 1980, many of his classmates went to work for British Aerospace or Rolls-Royce. Newey showed up for his first job interview on a Ducati, in riding leathers. This was with a small Formula One team founded by the famous Fittipaldi brothers, Emerson and Wilson. His would-be interviewer noticed the bike and asked if he could take it out for a spin. When he returned, he offered Newey the job.

The position Newey applied for was a junior aerodynamicist, but he soon discovered that there was no senior aerodynamicist. “I was lucky in my timing,” he said. Much of race car design until that point had been mechanically determined. “The aerodynamicist would give a rough idea of what he wanted, and then the mechanical designer would take it, and invariably, if things looked a little bit too difficult to package, he'd just change it and not even report back,” Newey explained. “And you could see it in the cars that came out. You'd see all sorts of nasty lumps and bumps on the car where mechanical bits had got in the way of what the aerodynamicist wanted.” After the late-1970s rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda, which contributed to the popularity of the sport, budgets were beginning to grow, and this allowed for more research and a greater emphasis on engineering—an opportunity for Formula One teams to demonstrate their technological superiority.

Newey spent much of the 1980s working in the United States, on the IndyCar circuit. His designs twice produced Indianapolis 500 winners, and, while serving as a race engineer at the track on weekends, he impressed Mario Andretti, who immediately identified Newey as a budding genius. “We were on the grid with 10 minutes left, and he came out and changed the front springs to suit the situation,” Andretti told me, recalling the Indy 500 of 1987. “As a result, I led from the get-go and had the field covered by one lap, with 20 laps to go—until the engine broke. And you know why the engine broke? Because I should've been turning 600 more revs, and I was in a bad harmonic range, vibrating. If I had been pushed more, then I would have used that shorter gear, and I probably would have finished. So, ironically, the fact that the car was so good was what killed my chances.”

This tension between the abstract pursuit of excellence and realistic limits became a recurring theme in Newey's work as he returned to England and Formula One. It was the end of the turbocharged era, which had resulted in sloppy design, to Newey's eyes. The cars, relying on souped-up engine power, were often big and clumsy. Newey was relentless in his pursuit of efficiency, sometimes squeezing drivers' cockpits to the point of discomfort. Viewed from above, his cars began to look like acoustic guitars, with the chassis tapering into a needle nose. “Adrian was forever trying to find a way of making the needle nose smaller and smaller and smaller,” Nigel Roebuck, the editor of
Motor Sport
, recalled. “He did actually suggest at one point arranging the pedals so that the driver's feet, instead of being side by side, were on top of one another.” Roebuck added, “If you talk to any of the mechanics, Adrian's cars are always very, very difficult to work on, because they're always so tightly packaged, and everything has got to be perfect, and sometimes they're
too
tightly packaged, so things overheat and whatnot.”