22/10/2009
FEATURE BY STUART GARLICK
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I make no apology for this article being close to my heart, and personal to me. I thought long and hard about writing about this topic - before realising that life is nothing if people don't stick their neck out for something they believe in.
There is a contest being fought out at the moment which, put in proper perspective, does not signal the potential end of the world, or of life as we know it. However, for the follower of motor racing, and not only Formula One, the election of the next FIA President, which takes place tomorrow, Friday October 23rd, is an important one. And, tantalisingly, it is something that, unless any of us represent a national motor club, none of us will be able to vote on.
Ari Vatanen is a genuine folk hero for generations who remember him holding a rally car at the edge of adhesion, everywhere from Kielder forest to the Paris-Dakar Rally. For those too new to motor sport to really put Vatanen's achievements on the stages into context, just go to Youtube, and search under "Ari Vatanen Climb Dance". That should do the trick.
Of course, Vatanen's former life as a rally driver should not make him any more suited to the sharp end of sporting politics than anyone else. How it does help is in showing him as someone who has reached the highest level in the sport he hopes to run, winning the World Rally Championship in 1981. What really marks him out as someone with the potential to make a positive difference as FIA President is his work as a Member of the European Parliament, where he campaigned for road safety with a number of well-received speeches and papers. Anyone who tries to paint him as a naïve, inexperienced man in the work of politics should look at his record in Brussels. It was not perfect, and Vatanen remains a politician too reliant on the soundbite, but the passion for making things better through political office is there to see, even in some dry policy documents.
Jean Todt always struck me as a man who would rather shy away in the background. He was one of the most successful team principals of the modern era, with Peugeot (the rally and 905 sportscar programmes), and then Ferrari, where he was in charge of the team's longest period of sustained success, from 1992 until the end of 2007. I am quite sure he cares little about what I think of him, but any admiration I may have felt for him was destroyed when pictures were released of Ferrari staff celebrating victory in the 2007 F1 Constructors' Championship.
I am no apologist for McLaren - the FIA World Motorsport Council found them guilty in the "Spygate" scandal, and they were punished - but what was needed after that punishment was a period of sober reflection. Fans such as I were mourning something lost from Formula One in 2007, in the midst of the fighting and scandal. Todt and Ferrari will feel they took the Constructors' title that season fair and square - the point is, it didn't matter. To glory in the sheer tit-for-tat pettiness of what went on that season made it worse for many supporters, displaying a win-at-all costs mentality which came across in entirely the wrong way. He also described McLaren's punishment as a "soft sentence" - all $100 million of it. If Todt really believed in the offices of the FIA, he would have accepted the fine handed out to McLaren and got on with the business of competing. Many people in many team uniforms displayed poor judgement that year. The fact that one of them was Jean Todt, in his last major act as an F1 team principal, does not bode well for the role of FIA President, which is supposed to encompass impartiality.
I am not trying to argue that Ari Vatanen would be a perfect FIA President, a kind of petrolhead Obama without the premature Peace Prize. More, the argument I venture is that we need a change of the guard. Formula One has been run for years on the principal of the major deal, the tacit agreement, the temporary amendment, with a side salad of fear of reprisal for outspoken critics. Following another year of infighting, we have a temporary Concorde Agreement which was tortuous in its gestation, and we have no indication as to who will succeed CVC Capital Partners as the owners of Formula One when their mandate runs out.
The 2009 rule-book was bulldozed through, KERS and all, without any thought of making changes understandable to the average TV viewer (although the BBC must be thanked in the UK for doing their best with a complex topic). The 2010 regulations have changed again, but there is no clear pattern of thinking which says why mid-race refuelling was banned in 1984, brought back in 1994, kept in spite of a horrific fire on Jos Verstappen's Benetton in Hockenheim that year, and then banned again for 2010. Similarly, the media reported Max Mosley backing the introduction of grooved tyres for 1998, to restrict the speed of the cars. Now we have slicks again. The point is, changes to Formula One in the Nineties and Noughties have been overseen in a manner which could appear haphazard. The FIA must be made to remember what made F1 great - a combination of great drivers at the top of their game, in significantly-differing designs of car, with lessons in technology and safety which can be transferred to the road. Stable governance, and a consistent mission statement from the top, would help a lot to focus F1 on these goals, and to make the sport great again.
F1 in general needs to see an end to the perpetual chaos of constant scandal. Spygate, Liegate, Crashgate - fans have had enough, and casual viewers will not tune into a sport if they believe it is tainted. There is no way the scandals in F1 have endeared the sport to a wider public - good, unsullied competition on the track between recognisable personalities is the only way to achieve that. A change at the top of the FIA, along with a firmer and more consistent code of penalties for F1 teams which are shown to have cheated, would help everybody to enjoy their Sundays more.
Formula One is in a mess, even with the pleasant diversion of a great success for Jenson Button and Brawn GP. The story of how we have got to this juncture is one of people becoming intoxicated by power, and removed from the people who gave them that power. Not the leaders of national motor clubs. Not Formula One team principals. No, the people who give the FIA the power it has today are humbler than that. To them, motor racing isn't a path to an embroidered blazer and an office in Paris. The people with the ability to give and take away power in motor sport, ultimately, are those who pay to stand on muddy banks and watch the club racing on a Saturday, before they sit on their sofa on a Sunday to watch a Formula One World Championship growing further adrift from its public each passing season.
These people want change. They want a sport which returns to its roots, which governs in the interests of its fans, not some concept of continued power. They want an electoral process which is beyond question. Above all, they want to be able to enjoy their sport without nervously looking out for the latest unsettling rumour or scandal. And, powerless, all they can do is hope that the gentlemen of the FIA's member clubs can sense what they are thinking, and make the change when it counts. A new broom, a new leadership, and a new sense of purpose for F1 and all motor sport - that would be a start.
Stuart Garlick
stuart@pitpass.com
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