2007 F1 Season: Speed merchants vs Spin merchants

The English had a bad week in sports. The soccer team succumbed to Russia mid-week, putting their Euro 2008 qualification hopes in peril and as expected, prompting calls for Second Choice Steve to get the sack. I don't know, this was always going to be a touch match for England, on the artificial pitch in Moscow and pitted against Guus Hiddink's tactical nous at home. I think these were points they should have expected to drop right at the start of the campaign. On Saturday (or Sunday morning in this part of the world), the rugby team went down valiantly to South Africa in the Rugby World Cup final. I thought that England did great in that match. They were clearly outclassed by the Springboks but held their own and played above their limitations.

It seemed that Lewis Hamilton would salvage English pride in a week of sporting blows. I fully expected him to duly score the needed points and take the F1 World Driver's Championship. Unlike the soccer and rugby teams, Hamilton was clearly favoured to win and more importantly, had put himself in a strong position to do so - he was leading the WDC on points and had qualified ahead of both his challengers. Which is why the astounding result from yesterday's Brazillian Grand Prix is probably the biggest blow of all to English expectations.

For the record, Kimi Raikonnen won the race, Fernando Alonso was third and Lewis Hamilton an unexpected 7th. The WDC points table ended up with Raikonnen on 110 points, Hamilton and Alonso tied on 109 points but Hamilton being declared 2nd place finisher on a count-back.

It was an almost surreal unfolding of events right from the flag-off. By the 2nd corner of the first lap, Hamilton was down to 8th. A few laps later, he was down to 19th after a gearbox failure. The unthinkable had happened - Hamilton seemed to be blowing it!! Raikkonen had pushed up to 2nd, but Alonso was right behind him in third. At that stage, advantage Alonso. Suddenly, Robert Kubica overtook Alonso and it was all up for grabs again. Then Raikonnen took the race lead after a pit stop, but Alonso was back in third and Hamilton had fought his way back into the points and was in with a shout again. Things kept changing and viewers who watched the race on Star Sports were not helped by the commentator's apparent uncertainty over the points calculation.

Following the race via the Star Sports commentary was completely chaotic. They were simply so determined to keep Hamilton's hopes alive. At one stage, the commentators were convinced that Hamilton (then in 8th place) was within 2-3 seconds of a cluster of cars in 4th to 6th places. One computer update later, it was clarified that he was close to the 7th place car but was in fact almost 30 seconds behind the 6th place car.

With fewer than 10 laps to go, the commentators finally got it straightened out and told us unequivocally that Kimi Raikonnen would be the 2007 World Champion if he won the race and the other two finished in their current positions, as they were likely to do. Finally and rather belatedly, when all hope for an English winner seemed gone, they began to commend Raikonnen as a deserving World Champion. Mind you, I sensed a somewhat insultingly dismissive tone in these comments, but perhaps it was just bitter disappointment. "He's not the wonder-of-all-wonders, genius-of-all-geniuses that is Lewis Hamilton, but he deserves to be World Champion." Why, thank you, Steve Slater and Matthew NotChrisGoodwin (sorry, didn't catch the name at the start of the telecast). I am sure Kimi Raikonnen is so very pleased to have your stamp of approval.

By and large, the commentary and media coverage of the 2007 F1 season has been blatantly and nauseatingly pro-Hamilton. Of course, the problem partially lies with us being English speakers and English readers, and so we get British commentary and coverage by British media. Even so, the parochialism in the F1 coverage was downright obnoxious, much more so than in English coverage of the national cricket, rugby or soccer teams. I wonder if it was because Hamilton came so much closer to being World Champion, that his ascent to the top had been so assured, that his crowning seemed a matter of formality and as such, a matter of entitlement.

Whatever the reason, it was enough for me to root for Raikonnen yesterday and failing that, Alonso. I had been put off enough to adopt the Australia ABE (Anyone But England) mantra .

Kimi Raikonnen won the World Championship where it mattered, by scoring points on the race track. He won 6 races this year, more than Alonso and Hamilton who both won 4. By that measure alone, he "deserves" (take that, Slater and NotGoodwin) to be World Champion. He struggled to adapt to the car initially and has had more than his fair share of bad luck with engine reliability issues (I think he is legitimately the unluckiest driver in F1) but he ground out the finishes and scored points when he could. He was part of a Ferrari team that struggled with consistency but crucially, operated as a team from the first race to the last and did not allow itself to splinter internally, unlike some other team we could think of.

During a race held at the height of the "spy" scandal, one of the Star Sports commentator confidently declared that "If you are a neutral, you would want McLaren to beat the Ferraris this weekend!". That about summed it up for me. Okay, I am not exactly a neutral, but how were Ferrari the bad guys when they were the ones who had their secrets given to the enemy?? McLaren certainly has a fine line in portraying themselves as hard done by, and the media has done its part to hone that impression.

And now, ludicrously, McLaren mismanager Ron Dennis intends to appeal the result of the Brazillian Grand Prix on a technicality relating to fuel temperatures. He apparently wants the 4th to 6th placed cars of Rosberg, Heidfeld and Kubica to be excluded from the final standings because the petrol in these cars had cooled to a temperature lower than the regulation 10 degrees below ambient. The race stewards had already conducted an inquiry and ruled that the placings would stand. Apparently, this is not good enough for McLaren who are intending to lodge an appeal, which if successful, could see Hamilton promoted to 4th and scoring the points needed to win the World Championship.

You know, it seems implausible that either McLaren or Hamilton would want to win the Championship in this backdoor manner. F1 has enough PR issues without having the WDC decided not on the race circuit, but in the courts.

Then again, not only McLaren but Bernie Ecclestone and the FIA also appeared to be desperate for Hamilton to win this year. So maybe they don't mind how they award him the title, as long as they get it to him somehow. Already, he seems to have avoided being docked points in several situation which may have gone against most other drivers. He is purportedly the "ambassador" they want for the sport; he is young, British, articulate and media-savvy. That he is of mixed-race in a sport dominated by decidedly WASPy types is deemed a triumph of modern multi-culturalism. It seems that F1 wants Lewis Hamilton as World Champion more than Hamilton himself does. The PR people are dying to have a glamourous golden boy as World Champion, after years of the polarising Schumacher and two years of the confident but unflamboyant Alonso.

Here's the rub of it - I don't find Lewis Hamilton likeable. I don't think he would make a great ambassador for F1 outside of England. Even within England, he might put off some people because he can come across as a mean-spirited SOB. I think I am more repulsed by Hamilton's public persona than I ever was by Alonso's. I did not care for Alonso because his on-track confidence sometimes manifested itself as arrogance and self-involvement off-track, although he does seem overall a decent enough chap. Hamilton strikes me as being more than just cocky or self-centred (which you have to be to succeed at this level). He seems to have a genuine nasty streak in him, which came to a boil in his unwarranted media attacks on Alonso. Neither of them covered themselves in glory over this situation, but Hamilton was in the driver's seat (heh, almost literally). He had the points lead and the openly avowed support of Ron Dennis and the McLaren team. He was in a position to take the moral high ground and keep his trap shut. Maybe he was just buying too much into his own publicity and being young, he can still tout immaturity as an excuse. I have no doubt that he is probably a pretty nice guy, but he gives off a vibe that I cannot warm to. We are talking about his PR value here, not Hamilton personally, whom I do not and cannot know.

This is not to discount his abilities as a driver. He's had a phenomenal season by any measure and will probably go on to become one of the great drivers of F1. He will likely one day make a great champion. I just don't think he will necessarily make a great ambassador right now.

I hope the people in charge of the F1 inquiry summarily dismiss the McLaren's appeal. Why was it that both McLaren drivers escaped points deduction although the team was disqualified from the constructors' race because of the spy saga? Because the FIA made an "emotional" rather than a "logical" decision to keep alive one of the most exciting championship races in recent years. I am not sure how they can, in good conscience, allow the title to be decided by a technical decision now, having set a precedence of punishing the team but not the drivers. If they deduct any points at all, it should be contructors championship points from the teams - Williams and BMW - who mismanaged the petrol temperature, and not the drivers who had nothing to do with this at all.

McLaren failed to win because the team was shockingly mismanaged. The entire spy email scandal could have been avoided if Ron Dennis was a better man-manager who did not make Alonso feel marginalised in his own team. Nobody came out of that smelling of roses. Alonso's threat to Dennis at the Hungarian Grand Prix was unconscionable. At the same time, Dennis choosing to take the information straight to the authorities revealed a complete inability to keep his own house in order. This was airing your dirty linen in public because you could not fix your own washing machine. Yes, Hamilton's race heroics took everyone by surprise and the team did not expect to deal with the rookie being ahead of the world champion. This is a management challenge, specifically a man-management challenge. In sports management, handling multiple massive egos is practically de rigeur. McLaren failed at this, in a much bigger way than Ferarri failed in the engine reliability stakes. (Raikonnen also made a telling comment about being much happier at Ferarri than he had been in his several years at McLaren, which was another pointed denouement of McLaren's failure in team management).

Ultimately, Raikonnen won because he won the most races, he was the fastest on the track the most often and he was part of the stronger team. If the F1 authorities conspire to award the WDC title to Hamilton, the suits in the boardroom would triumph over the jumpsuits in the pits and on the race-track. They obviously want a "new face of F1", but at what price?

Update: Well, good on Hamilton for saying he does not want to win the Championship on a technicality. Of course, it does sound rather like a response to the salvo fired by Alonso in an earlier interview with Spanish media. I am not much buying his professed ignorance of why McLaren is pursuing the appeal. He might not like it or agree with it, but he must certainly know why they are doing it. I think the PR spin machine are on the job here.