May 29, 2006

Monaco - Flawed Jewel In The F1 Crown

Wow! It's Monaco! Woohooh! The glitz! The glamour! The shiny opulence of it all!

Rubbish - most people's experience of the Monaco Grand Prix isn't glamourous at all: it's just sitting in front of a telly, shouting at interminable adverts and hurling abuse at James Allen.

Monaco always has some kind of Get Out of Jail Free card, and never gets a rough ride from the authorities despite the fact that it is the very opposite of everything they demand from every other event.

It's a narrow, unforgiving circuit that would be struck off the calendar in a flash for safety reasons if it were based anywhere other than the diamond encrusted cliffsides of Monte Carlo. And before I get taken for some raving communist let me just say I honestly don't mind that: I just think there are far better venues that get treated abysmally (Silverstone or Spa for instance) and I don't like double-standards.

That rant out of the way, Monaco has certainly staged some memorable races in both the past (1982's surrealist comedy where pretty much everyone took it in turns to lead the race in the final couple of laps, stopping after 100 yards each) and the present (Raikkonen creaming the field in 2005 - and one of the most quietly classy passing moves of the season by Nick Heidfeld).

There's also the hilarious one-upmanship of the teams and their daft publicity stunts: the Red Bull 'Star Wars' pit crew last season who got so much extra coverage from the cameras that it was even more embarrassing than it need have been when both their cars dropped out. Or the Jaguars in 2004 with fabulous diamonds in their nosecones to promote 'Ocean's Twelve' - until Klien put his Jag into a barrier and the diamond was never seen again. Somewhere there's probably still a Marketing executive being punched in the windpipe every hour for thinking that one up....

And yet it's hard not to want to make an exception for Monaco - it DOES look very cool, it can thrown up spectacular moves and crunches as the grid powers into St Devote, the cars sound massive as they tear through the tunnel and out into the harbour...

Okay, I admit it. It IS glamourous. But only in a ludicrous way. Monaco is great because it typifies and magnifies the excesses of the Formula One world. If ever you wanted to distil the essence of F1 - money, egos, marketing and spectacle - you couldn't find a finer or more potent mix than Monaco.

As a race, it's pretty good (but I defy anyone to disagree that there's far better on the calendar - or NOT on the calendar in the case of Spa...) but as F1 it's brilliant.

May 22, 2006

Simon Fuller Spices Things Up

Simon Fuller... Name ring a bell? How about if I mention the Spice Girls? No? Well, let me put you out of your misery (although I'm probably partly to blame for that misery by mentioning the Spice Girls in the first place)...

Simon Fuller is '19 Entertainment' and the man responsible for the Spice Girls and S Club 7 (I personally think it's very big of him to own up to that...) and he is also the man now responsible for bringing stacks of clever yooftastic funtainment to Honda Racing.

Quite who at Honda had the great idea of bringing in Fuller I don't know, though it has all the hallmarks of a particularly punchable marketing executive - and why it's so crucial when they should be concentrating on not weeing away their race weekends is simply beyond me.

Nonetheless there he is, ready to help bring modern showbiz tricks into the biggest showbiz sport in the world. Who knows, maybe his pop and entertainment formats can bring a new dimension to the way F1 is presented and to the way it appeals to audiences...

He could pull together shows like "Jenson's Deal or No Deal" where a panel have to guess how many of the boxes in front of them contain contracts between Jenson Button and any number of different teams (and whether any of them are worth the paper they're written on).

Or a special "Pimp My F1 Ride" where teams compete to build a more or less viable car from a 4-year old chassis with the aim of making it look utterly cool, so long as it still goes at least one lap per lap slower than everybody else.

I'd quite like to see a special F1 edition of Antiques Roadshow where a bunch of experts inspect Max Mosley and tell him he's worthless, (old gags, always the best...) or a variation on The Apprentice, where Mike Gascoyne goes round teams, helping them build better cars and repeatedly gets thrown out with the words "You're fired!"

Best of all they could do their own lottery show where random events and the fickle finger of fate conspire to... Oh, hang on, that's called Qualifying isn't it.

The Fuller/Honda relationship, and the Ron Dennis "More Fun!" statements both smack a bit of desperation; like some government initiative, or a lame geography teacher who wants to be loved.

Truth be told, F1 honestly doesn't need that (although the idea of an F1 version of Fuller's Pop Idol format would be good if only for seeing Ant Davidson cream a whole bunch of mediocrities from the 2006 grid). On the whole though, if the sport is good then everything else will follow.

And if it isn't good then no amount of superficial tarting like this is going to help.

May 15, 2006

Kicking The Habit

Well, I'm just glad they're stopping tobacco advertising in F1. I'm fed up with switching from Camel to Marlboro to Lucky Strike to West, depending on who I support... I even had to give up and switch to Nicquitin patches when I supported Williams.

That's a lie of course; nothing more than pure, lame sarcasm. It's just that the constant idea that people are idiots ruled by pavlovian responses to advertising and branding is one that annoys me to seething point.

Advertising does work of course, or else brands wouldn't fork out vast sums of money to fritter away on cars that go so fast you can barely see their logo. And admittedly people are often idiots too. (How else do you account for the frankly inexplicable popularity of Robbie Williams?)

But that doesn't mean that there's a massive fog of idiocy that gathers whenever people watch sport and forces them into taking up smoking or switching their zombie-like allegiance from brand to brand.

Philip Morris, the owners of Marlboro, have apparently decided that the Ferrari red is now synonymous with Marlboro and so plan to continue spending a huge amount of money on the team even if they can't show their logo, possibly moving towards a red car devoid of other logos.

It was this extraordinary strategy - and presumably a hefty and secure financial commitment behind it - that led Ferrari into allowing Vodafone (who would gladly have been their title sponsor) to part ways with them and leap into the arms of Ron Dennis and McLaren.

Already Ferrari often replace the Marlboro wordmark with a bunch of anonymous blocks, and McLaren used to replace the West wordmark with the drivers' perfectly fitting names (possibly the only remotely fathomable reason for having Montoya in the team).

Even further back, McLaren used to replace Marlboro with the word McLaren in the same typeface: very cheeky and a pretty effective trick on anyone without 20/20 vision.

But will the 'non-Marlboro' Marlboro Ferrari be worth it for Philip Morris? I have my doubts: Ask most people why a Ferrari is red and they won't stroke their chins and say, "Ah... this is of course because red is the primary swatch in the brand palette for Philip Morris's Marlboro cigarette line..." No, they'll look at you as if you're an imbecile having a particularly stupid day and say, "Because it's a Ferrari of course... Durh!"

Probably the main group of people who actually would know the answer are already F1 fans and already committed to either smoking or not smoking: You can't help wondering if it's not like burning money. Sponsorship, like smoking, can be a very expensive habit.

May 8, 2006

The Euro Issue

It's a Eurosceptic's dream really - alighting upon the European GP, getting really wound up and bellowing "European??? It's always in Germany!!! What does that tell you?!?!" before going on to somehow relate it to fishing quotas and the end of the world as we know it.

Still, it's actually a very good point. The 'European' isn't genuinely a European GP at all. It's just a second German GP. Just as the 'San Marino' GP is a second Italian GP.

With talk of bringing on a second Spanish race, you surely have to wonder if there's a better way of handling the 'European'.
I have to say if I were Max or Bernie then, apart from getting a decent haircut, I'd drop the San Marino GP, and drop the Nurburgring as the 'European' venue too.

Imola could then alternate with Monza as the venue for the Italian GP, or it could be one of the many genuinely European venues for a genuinely European Grand Prix.

There's only room in the calendar for a finite number of Grands Prix, so giving Spain a second one purely as a sop to Ferdy's newest fans seems pretty fickle and shortsighted.

Why not do something more constructive and have a proper "roving" European GP that takes in Zandvoort and Estoril and this second Spanish venue? There are plenty more good tracks that could inject some more personality and variety too: Donington, the A-1 Ring, Paul Ricard...

Short of adding half a dozen extra races to the calendar (which I must admit I'm all in favour of, although it would be completely unfair on the teams and their families, damn them!) I'd take the opportunity to re-jig the summer into an extended and geuninely European sector of the season.

At the same time, other chunks of the season could be rethought and reorganised into more geographical legs of the Championship.

Sadly Bernie thinks in 'markets' not 'circuits'. And whilst there already exist plenty of great venues, he's always going to jump at somewhere with a vast untapped TV audience. And build a shiny new Hermann Tilke abomination in it.

In fact, that Hermann Tilke's German and he gets to design all the tracks!!! What does that tell you, eh??? Eh???

May 1, 2006

What's In A Name?

When I first heard the name 'Team Super Aguri' I thought it must be an insanely violent Japanese cyberpunk cartoon on Sky. Surprisingly it turns out to be something even better...

In my head they had outlandish haircuts and went around doing superhuman things, and the truth isn't far off: despite their first pit stops being choreographed by the Chuckle Brothers, what the team have actually achieved in so little time is a pretty superhuman feat.

We've all grown used to a relatively stable line-up of teams of late, and it's great to see new ones like Aguri diving in. In the eighties and early nineties it seemed like dozens of crazy new names would appear and disappear each season.

It would be nice if more teams had such lively sounding names though: Super Aguri is just the kind of name we need, and in fact Yuji Ide does sometimes sport a strangely Manga haircut too - so that's perfect.

Red Bull always sounded just right for a cool fast team; and their second team Toro Rosso is a brave and cheeky attempt to extend that vibe, but makes the staggering faux-pas of nicking the word 'Scuderia'.

And although I'm not actually a Ferrari devotee, even I hold the somewhat irrational belief that nobody else has the right to call themselves 'Scuderia' anything...

'Midland' however, must be the most non-F1 name ever dreamt up - even when they put 'F1' right next to it. It could only lack more glamour if they called the team 'Kidderminster' or 'Derek'. Even calling it Scuderia Midland wouldn't save that one...

It seems a bit unfair to blame Midland for being dull though: that's like blaming the rain for being wet... go to www.midland.gg and you'll be surprised they didn't paint the car completely grey. And make the drivers wear grey nylon slacks.

Super Aguri could certainly teach the big teams a few things about exciting names: Renault becomes 'Equipe Ultra Flav', McLaren becomes 'Silver Shiny Ronster Monsters'... it would be the perfect marriage to James Allen's hyperactive commentaries.

It still leaves us with the problem of what to call Midland though. I'm still working on something sexy and exciting that starts with the word 'Conglomerate'...