Mosley says he’s not quite sure what F1 must do to make its overall show more entertaining. He appears not to understand that the whole F1 scene is far too antiseptic. It’s more of a testing and development laboratory, designed increasingly for the benefit of the participants. The fans are far removed from the action and entirely banned from the garage area. The message is: Thou shalt not come within a mile of this sacred ground! It’s all part of F1’s ultra-exclusive profile which attracts many sponsors and some high-rollers, but over the years has steadily dissuaded and soured many old-line fans across Europe, F1’s heartland.
Another aspect in all this is that as far as I’m concerned, F1’s pitstops are ridiculous. They are the antithesis of the massed pitstops seen in American racing where there’s huge amounts of frenetic, crowd-pleasing action with a limited number of crewmen allowed over the wall. In
F1, the cars come in one at a time and are lost amid a platoon of crewmen. It’s all for the folk in the pitlane, the pressbox and the TV audience, but ignores the fans in the grandstands and is a classic example of F1’s powers-that-be missing the point.
To put on a better show, F1 also needs more cars. The world’s top racing series surely should attract both a bigger and more deeply competitive field. In F1, as in Champ Car and IRL, we’ve become accustomed to seeing only eighteen or twenty cars, rather than twenty-six or more like it used to be in both F1 and CART in the eighties and nineties. But now that F1 has become the almost exclusive preserve of the manufacturers there’s little or no room for any little guys.
