The Editor: ’F1’s rebellious streak is what makes it special’

A head of the new Formula 1 season, I sat down with Motor Sport’s F1 experts Johnny Herbert and Mark Hughes to discuss the key talking points and themes of 2023. You can read the edited highlights of our conversation and both Mark and Johnny’s brilliant insights on page 54. The full-length version is available via our website as a podcast and will hopefully leave listeners armed with all the information they need to get the most out of the first few grands prix taking place this month.

We covered a lot of ground as you might imagine but one topic lingered with me long after I’d packed away my tape recorder. In the context of discussing the growing popularity of F1 and in particular the new series of Drive to Survive (reviewed in Matters of Moment) and the new Las Vegas Grand Prix, Mark made the following point which is worth repeating in full.

“Vegas is emblematic of the rise of F1 in the Netflix era,” he said. “How long that can keep expanding is an interesting point. And also where it takes F1, not just geographically and politically, but just in the way that it presents itself.

“Part of the core appeal of F1 is that it has always been a bit rebellious against the normal world. It doesn’t necessarily traditionally encompass the same values and morals. But if you’ve got something that is so commercially successful, you run the risk of it becoming bland, especially if you’re telling drivers what they can and can’t say, and we’re starting to get into that territory now with the FIA. It’s got to be a free-spirited thing, otherwise you’re in danger of losing its core appeal. That’s where they’ve got to be very careful as they might be expanding too quick to keep that core.”

The idea of F1 being in possession of a buccaneering spirit is plain for any student of the sport’s history. Obviously, you have the drivers. Stirling Moss may have been the first ‘celebrity’ sportsman, but he lived life in the fast lane off the track as well as on it, while characters such as James Hunt and Eddie Irvine have become rather clichéd shorthand for rebels. But the iconoclastic spirit of racing runs deeper.

The early pioneers took to the roads in their newfangled machines determined to explore the limits and thrill of speed and risking life and limb in their pursuit. Women racers like Dorothy Levitt and Hellé Nice defied contemporary convention to race. Even the national colour British Racing Green can trace its roots to an rebel sense of sticking two fingers up to the law: it supposedly came about after the 1902 running of the Gordon Bennett Trophy, which was won by Selwyn Edge in his Napier. Unable to compete the following year in his home country (as the rules required) because motor racing was illegal in mainland Britain, the race took place in Ireland where, as mark of thanks, the British entrants painted their cars green.

“Part of the core appeal of F1 is it has always been a bit rebellious”

Perhaps the best examples of the outlaw spirit that has infused motor racing, however, can be found among the team bosses who succeeded not by respecting mainstream convention but precisely because of their refusal to play by the rules.

I am thinking of characters like Colin Chapman – who couldn’t see a rule without plotting how to bend it, or Ken Tyrrell who took on the world and won from a small Surrey shed. Ron Dennis was famously a stickler for rules – but they were his rules; Enzo Ferrari was literally a law unto himself, while Flavio Briatore was ultimately too much of an outlaw even for F1. And then of course there is Bernie Ecclestone…

Johnny Herbert, therefore, is onto something when he surveys the new breed of team principals made up of technically brilliant managers and software specialists and laments the passing of the buccaneering team bosses of his day. “Team principals today and yesterday display their cunning side but there’s also sometimes a need to be a bastard. And there’s a difference! Among the new breed, it’s debatable who has that extra edge to get the job done…”

The sport needs that edge too. As we barrel into Formula 1’s 2023 season with its record-breaking and shareholder-pleasing 23-race calendar and its expansion into the US ‘market’, as giant new manufacturers from General Motors to Ford and Audi clamour to climb on board, and as television shows push F1 further into the mainstream, let us not forget the outlaw core that refuses to be bound by that mainstream. That is, after all, what makes the sport so special.

Motor Sport and the wider motor racing community attended a memorial for the journalist and photographer Simon Arron at Silverstone on Friday, February 17. Friends, family and former colleagues remembered Simon’s unique character and love of racing.

By chance McLaren was using the track to shakedown what appeared to be its new MCL60, giving the occasion a fitting soundtrack. Among the speakers was Christian Horner, boss of Red Bull who has known Simon since his days in Formula 3. “He was a very rare type of journalist,” he said. “One you could trust.”

Simon would take that.

Joe Dunn, editor
Follow Joe on Twitter @joedunn90

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