20/08/2013
FEATURE BY TONY PURNELL
Step Six: Drivers
Views on Formula One vary, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone get on a soap box and argue that these cars shouldn't be driven by the best drivers in the world. Equally I've not met anyone in Formula One who doesn't want the drivers to at least be perceived as the world's best drivers.
Here we are lucky because most things in life need a bit of getting used to, even if you are ultra-talented, and Formula One offers no real opportunity for the up and coming to learn, so today's crop of drivers probably are the world's best at driving Formula One cars. What's not clear (I'll leave the reader to judge) is that if say twenty new faces all got a couple of weeks experience, testing as much as possible, including a race or two, how would they stack up against the incumbents. What would the results look like, new faces versus old?
To answer this in a speculative manner and come up with a picture that reflects the likely outcome is the purpose of this article.
First one must understand that sports achievers have two aspects to their skills, natural talent on one hand and training or practice on the other. This is covered well in Matthew Syed's book 'Bounce'. In this is it is argued that give a reasonably skilled person 10,000 hours targeted practice at a sport and they'll get to the top, provided they have the mind-set to practice with dedication. Now this might be feasible for table tennis but it certainly isn't for motor racing. A GP2 driver has just 70 odd hours per year, a karter perhaps 250 hours, either way they'll die from old age before they accumulate 10,000 hours.
Let's take a look at three sports: Premier League football, Olympic cycling, and motor racing. The UK has a population of about 60m, with a lifespan of about 75 years, so each year about 800,000 new people are available to choose or be selected for a new career as the same number leave. Now here we are talking about a male sport (F1), sorry but that's the way it is as the cars are so physical to drive, so half of these (the girls) are realistically unavailable. This means that we have a 400,000 annual pool, of these there will be a normal distribution of any given talent, but let's ignore talent for now.
Premier League Football: Number of clubs is twenty, with squads of about thirty players each. So 20x30=600 players, 42% of which are British (say 250). Lifetime in the Premier League for each player, say, five years on average, so each year one fifth of these 250 enter and one fifth leave i.e. 50 new places a year are on offer each year. Thus without any other factors a boy has a 50/400,000 chance of becoming a Premier League player, i.e. one in 8,000.
Cycling: There are about fifty Olympic cyclists in the 'squad' across all disciplines. The Olympics only occur every four years, and the 'lifespan' of an Olympic cyclist is about two Olympics (8 years), so 50 divided by 8, i.e. about 6 riders come or go each year. It's open to both male and females. On the same logic as for the footballers, a child has a 6/800,000 chance of becoming an Olympic cyclist, i.e. one in 132,000, or if the child is a boy it's a one in 66,000 chance.
Motor racing (F1): There are 22 F1 drivers, three or four of which tend to be British, let's be generous and say F1 could handle five British drivers and that they average a five year F1 career, so that's one slot per year. The demands are such that only men need apply (although I'd love to be proved wrong). So here a boy has a 1 in 400,000 chance of being a F1 driver.
Summary: Taking a boy at random and with no other considerations, the odds look something like this:
Premier League player - 1 in 8,000
Olympic cyclist - 1 in 66,000
F1 driver - 1 in 400,000
Well on the face of it, Formula One is the hardest to get into by far and one might think that only superstar sportsmen are going to get there. Let's now go on and consider how to improve the chances in each sport. Clearly money can't improve inherent ability, but it certainly can improve the training so that you may not be talented per se, but you'll be well trained.
Let's explain why Premier League and Olympic Cyclists are talents, and, in comparison Formula One drivers really don't compare.
Premier League: Essentially no money is really needed, nor much 'influence'. Nearly every schoolboy in the UK has the opportunity to play football in front of someone who will direct the child at the next stage. This might be a school teacher, the 'coach' who takes kids out for a game on a Saturday or even 'spotters' from professional clubs. Talent and application are necessary for sure, but the system is there whereby any kid can get on the ladder to the Premier League. Lord knows it is very cut throat to make one's way up the ladder, but no amount of money will really help. It's true to say that many families would not be supportive, and this is necessary. The cost to the parents is modest. Perhaps for ten years travel and kit might add up to £5000. Just guesstimating perhaps as much as half of the kids who could make it to the Premier League don't because of lack of family/school/infrastructure support or simpler put, due to lack of opportunity. So the 1:8000 figure is halved to a 1:4000 figure choosing a boy at random. So boy who sets his heart on the Premier League needs to beat some 4,000 others to the position, with perhaps a total spend by the family of £5,000. To make it to the top of the heap clearly talent and dedication are needed in spades.
Olympic Cycling: Cycling needs two things, supportive parents or help from within a club and some money as the equipment and the travel are quite expensive. I'll not break down the analysis for money, but suffice to say that I've worked out that about £80K needs to be spent on a boy or girl over the course of ten years. Half of this will come from the support system in place in the UK, from government, from clubs and from sponsors. So Mum and Dad or the kid doing paper-rounds need to come up with about £4k a year, quite a bit less at the beginning of the career. That's quite a commitment, but feasible for at least 50% of UK families in terms of disposable income. However the number of parents who will guide a child towards becoming a cyclist or children who will self-guide, is very small, after all it is still a minority sport. I did a little survey of my son's school and about one child in fifty has taken up cycling such as one could say they are on the first rung of the ladder. So of our 66,000 child pool, half have wealthy or committed enough parents (33,000), and of these perhaps one in fifty will take up the opportunity (660). So a boy needs to beat about 660 other kids to get on the squad, and he'll require a war chest in the order of £40,000 from parents or friends over ten years to do so.
Motor Racing: A motor racing career needs one thing as a given, parents who are (a) keen enough to dedicate pretty much all their spare time on training their youngster or have enough money to pay someone else to do so, and (b) a disposable income such that they can spend at least £40K per year for ten years to get through karting and Formula Ford or similar. It is not possible for a child to take up motor racing off his or her own initiative. A bigger budget increases the chances of success most considerably. Looking at UK annual incomes and wealth, this cuts out all but the top 5% of households. This takes our 400,000 pool down to just 20,000. There is a small chance that some rich person will take a young driver under his wing (Ron Dennis with Lewis Hamilton), but this is excessively rare.
The 20,000 crop of boys available whose parents could spend €400,000 is further reduced because the training needed is only possible with parents who want to direct their child to go this way. Taking your child karting for 40 weekends out of 52 each year for six or seven years needs dedication. My experience in karting suggests that only 20 new parents back their child in this manner. However of these just one will be rich enough, or be able to attract the backing of someone super wealthy to pay the extra 5m euros required to get on the F1 radar, by competing in the big league single seaters. So I'm afraid that just one UK national per year has the opportunity to make it to Formula One. He has to beat about four or five others from the rest of the world assuming four or five UK drivers on the grid i.e. spend the 5.4m euros and it's a one in four maybe a one in five chance. This can be further skewed by an extra big wedge to buy the F1 seat, add 10m euros and only probably be only competing realistically with one other.
Summarizing:
If one selects a boy at random with no selection through talent and trains him to try for one of the following sports (by spending the ten year budget required) the chances of making it are:
Premier League: 1 in 4000 with £5K required from parents over ten years.
Olympic Cycling: 1 in 660 with £40K required from parents over ten years.
Formula One: 1 in 4 with £5m required from the parents or backers. Add an extra £10m and it's pretty much 1 in 1, i.e. near certain.
In all cases pumping money in is bound to reduce these odds, but not much in football as opposed to big time in motor racing. In all cases it is better to have real talent as clearly true talent at the sport will accelerate one to prominence.
The latter point is important. Jackie Stewart was certainly a brilliant racing driver, he got there through talent. His adeptness for the sport is revealed by the fact he was exceptional at another, more competitive, sport - clay pigeon shooting. I've worked with the man and he has another key talent, that of sensitivity - he notices every little vibration and squeak a car has. Lewis Hamilton was a fantastic kart racer as a boy, and while I don't think he has Stewart's sensitivity, he does have superlative spatial awareness and a very good sense of balance. However would Lewis have made it without Ron Dennis spending the £5m or so to train him up? Maybe but realistically probably not.
The result is that Formula One is, at least statistically speaking, full of 'B' list talents, who have been 'A' list trained. One or two clearly have real talent, Alonso is the stand out guy for me, but unfortunately being the best driver gives you no inside lane to getting the most championships, the car and team eclipse talent in a driver.
To finish let's think how this could be undone, and motor racing have a system whereby 'buying' one's way to the top is at least seriously challenged by 'talenting' one's way into Formula One.
One idea that Max Mosley and I discussed was to have a stepping stone ladder to Formula One that requires success at each level to get to the next. Thus one starts in Cadet karting starting with regional events at 8 or 9 years old. Do well in these and one's license gets upgraded to race in the National Series, do well in this or for late starters get through a regional competition in the next class up, and then one can race in the National JICA Series (or FIA chosen Formula), do well enough and you get selected to represent the country at the European Championships. Today one just has to turn up pretty much. Come the age of say 17, one can start in single seaters. An entry level Formula is chosen by the FIA as the nominated 'route' (this could of course be more than one type of Series, so it could be Formula Ford and Formula Renault). Again one has to do well to get to the next stage, and then well enough for the next and the next. Thus only drivers with enough success in competitive 'approved' Formulae make it through to F3 or GP2. A ladder route to F1, through FIA only approved Series, would transform the racing business.
Things like the F2 series, which in my opinion was an excellent idea to lower costs, would be part of the ladder. This ladder idea would need a huge amount of thought as it would need to be international and global in its scope. It would need to consider relationships with non-FIA run series (GP2, GP3, Indycar, NASCAR) and get the 'acceptable performance' criteria right.
None of this is beyond the wit of man. Now it wouldn't have an instant effect on the talent of drivers who make it, but I think it has the potential to improve the skill level of Formula One pilots over time most considerably, especially if the feeder was really low cost, fast racing that was very popular, like karting could be. It would give the FIA much more control and grip on world motor racing as a consequence, which didn't escape our notice when I was at the FIA. I'd have thought the FIA would have a vision and a plan for all this, it was on our Agenda when I was there. Still one would hope the FIA would have a vision for many things in motor sports, perhaps they do but prefer to keep it all to themselves.
Learn more about Tony and check out his previous features, here