Oh the beauty! The passion! The perfect past!
It can be all too easy when one is not actually Master of the Destiny of a mighty company, country, or sporting business undertaking, to ease back into a favourite chair, preferred beverage in hand, to extol on how one would do it all correctly. So, dear readers, this column is rather about the joys of recalling it all with a smile rather than trying to fix any of it.
In advance of the up-coming season, which will hopefully in equal measure delight and shock us, here is a cheerful glance back over the shoulder. Not as how it really was but as how one recalls it. For humans and history being what they are, thirty years from now folk will recall the days of V6 motors and energy recovery with misty eyes and a faint smile hovering on their lips as they too recall how great it used to be. Even these days will pass into legend. Just give it time…
So with that preamble setting the scene let us move to the main body of this current article! It is indeed comfortingly easy to pick a pet irritation and wax eloquent on how one would fix such a malady if only one had the time / power / money / knowledge, raw passion and focus to fit it. So I felt my meander through the fields of Formula One for this article deserved a good clear drive for nothing but pure delight and clear heart beating passion.
Thinking back I cannot remember a time before Formula One. It seemed that Sunday afternoon and Murray Walker were simple acts of being British. Just like milk and tea, Cricket and another loss to the Aussies, and politicians falling in and out of affairs. It was an unquestioned mix of simple action and reaction. Man has car. Man go race. Race good. Man race again.
The silent beauty of early black and white historic clips. If one was lucky the BBC would feed us now and again, long before the History and Discovery channels documented everything. Von Tripps, Caracciola, Farina, all too short clips of Nuvolari, early footage of Enzo in neat suits and cool sunglasses (I believe he was a Persol rather than a Ray Ban man). Easy laughter from the lovely ladies that were already, like innocents to a Taylor Swift concert, drawn unquestionably toward the brightness of life lived fast. The silence and the stark lack of colour rendered them as moving art works. The hard work of the machine, and the bravery clearly dancing on the edge of madness of the man.
The tracks flowed. The black and white rendered it more Bauhaus art than sport. The beauty was beyond question. Here was humanity rendered clear. Here was life flowing strong because it was so close to death, the quick and the dead, displayed clear and simple. The Silver Arrows airborne over a bridge hump. Dust thrown in a delicate arc by a four-wheel drift cutting so calculatingly across the compact earth of the track. Straw bales comfortably good for an impact of 10 kph before offering instant death thrown casually around the base of aqueducts to protect men in polo shirts flying around at 250kph. Simple care free elegance.
Was it style over substance, madness over sanity, or art over life? Really rather awkward to say. I'm going to weasel out by saying it was a heady mix of them all. A time when gender roles, for good or bad, were very clear, and being a hero or a villain was a fairly direct and easily assessed state. The mores of the age had been shaped by centuries of war, a "middle class" that was very much working-class and self-sufficient in many ways, with central governments that were more boys clubs, and very much less obsessed with tax collection, or gathering statistics to bend to their will.
So people cheered heroes, frowned at the frequent deaths, went wide-eyed in delight at the sights and sounds of this amazing new-age invention freeing them from the horse and steam engine. Statistic, guilt, and iPhone free they were good times as long as one did not need advanced medical care. With rose-tinted hindsight-o-magic glasses and endless silent reels to watch it is a time that simply grows greater with each re-telling.
Then we went Technicolor! From the fading sensibilities of the 19th century to Technicolor Gillies Villeneuve in what felt like a single bound. The cars went from cigars with a large engine nasally fitted to sleek clean beauty and a ten thousand watt sound track in the blink of a backward looking eye. To crown humanities glories, Boeing released the "Jumbo Jet" and Kennedy ensured the star spangled banner flew tens of thousands of miles above the White House. The public were entering the jet age, the dream was alive, and statistics had yet to be used to beat us all into night terrors.
"Jet Set" was a cool phrase for a global life-style. In fact the tag life-style (along with jumbo jet) simply had to be developed to allow this exciting age more room to move. Never mind that computer scientists were already generating hash-tables for references and look-ups, the great unwashed would catch the hash-wave about forty years later... The sheer simple joy of the 1950s (mostly born of not having been dead in the 1940's) had staggered through the chaotic 1960s and emerged as the alarmingly un-embarrassed very-glad-to-be-here 1970s.
Triumph Stags, MG GT V8, Concorde, Star Wars. Heck it wasn't that the only way was up... It simply had to be faster, higher, stronger to simply get a mention.
Formula one rode the wave like the embodiment of a Hawaiian wave warrior. Sweet flat-12 Ferrari engines. Naughty Lotus "double-chassis" genius. James Hunt play-boy antics. Niki Lauda determination to win. Tobacco sponsorship so hot you could smoke it. Formula one transitioned from being the cutting edge of human adventure, through the curious playground of the brave play-boy and the immortal hero into the arena of world class entertainment. And then all those statistics, all those wanna-be politicians and all those in search of a fast road to money and power caught up to it and realised it was a diamond in the rough, very open to some highly skilled cutting and polishing. All of a sudden it was 1066 all over and a battle line between the French and the English was drawn.
In the Gallic corner we had, of course, Jean. In the English corner we had Bernie. In Italy, all style and all substance we had the Grand Old Man who had lived through every age of racing, was still wearing hand-made Italian sunglasses, and knew a mythical fight when he saw one, and a money stream when he smelled one. While Maximus or Spartacus might have more historical weight, his name, Enzo, captured his unique powers to write a legend to equal the mythical past.
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