06/02/2019
FEATURE BY MAX NOBLE
One is a lovely number.
The French, long may the Lord bless their cheese, claret, and penchant for riots, loved it so much they created a metricated system where finding the telephone number of Miss Physics was far, far simpler than the utterly confusing mess that was the old Imperial system of weights and measures. One gram transmutes with ease into one kilo and onward and upward to the tonne. Similarly, as the units get more complex so the cross-conversions have a simplicity psychosis that keeps Miss Physics all at one with herself.
The joy of creation mapped in maths, so sweet and simple Mother Nature herself could hug it.
So why, oh why therefore is it that business human after business human confounds the "One" with the word "Formula" and hears it in their head as "Formula to make One Money!"?
Haas are the latest in a long line of fine folk, to an extent including Colin Chapman and certainly including the delightfully eccentric Paul Stoddart, to see Formula One, to read the press (indeed including the manic musings from these storied pages so professionally edited by the esteemed editor Balfe), to see the leviathans of the freeways backing fresh cash up to Bernie's back door and still somehow conclude that running a Formula One team is not only reasonably simple, but cheap and profitable!!
Lord, they cannot all be on the same vegan tea Eddie Jordan, surely?!
Time after time we see them bound into the sport shouting "Formula to make One Money", only to see them, post a Bernie frisk 'n' shakedown, stagger blinking, broke and confused back into the daylight a few years later silently mouthing... "What the F1 just happened to me?" As if this outcome was ever in any doubt or unknowable in advance.
It's enough to make the humble fan turn to politics for sanity and direction...!
Off-shore yacht racing, or the America's Cup, or indeed Australia's very own Sydney to Hobart yacht race are all aquatic wallet racing. Pure and simple.
Commission the design and build of a world class racing yacht to the "Maxi-Class" or "Super-Maxi Class". Ensure every single leading edge refinement is included with no expense spared. Spend a fortune on Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) modelling (a la F1 practice). Spend more on "Single Use Nano-fibre" racing masts (which weigh nothing and are good for several hours of continuous use...). Then buy sails made of hand woven unobtainium that make Gossamer Albatross look bloated. And top off with the world's best crew... that come at the world's top price...
...and the guys in the Big Boy Pants... they know this. Yes they do...
Alan Bond, long may his memory fail him, kicked if all off for the modern era by financing the Winged Keel America's Cup yacht (Australia Two). But any cursory amble back through the pages of history will see that the "America's Cup" was pure, simple, totally understood, Aquatic Wallet Racing from day one.
The Americans knew that. Those dear, sweet, tweed-wrapped English chaps just took a little longer to catch on. Not Bond. He plundered big. Lived big. Spent big. And as a result won big. Score one for the colonials, winning a trophy off, well, the other colonials.
Yah Boo Sucks to you Green and Pleasant Land (of losers...).
So, to return not unlike a rabid rat to Warfarin, why in the name of all that is purchasable do men of some intellect and some wallet thickness hold on to the belief that F1 is cheap, and profitable?
Dear Lord, it's like going to a Taylor Swift concert and expecting a fifteen minute Slash guitar solo and drum risers flying over the crowd... I mean really...
Or expecting a tear-jerking Miles Davis cover at a One Direction Concert... Big tip fans... Neither is going to happen!
So dear grown men of some means and - judged on performance to date - limited intellectual ability for assessing the world outside your own orbits. In simple words. I'll resist using capitals, hoping you can work with lower case (It's an Internet shouty thing...).
Formula One is a Massive Wallet Racing (that's money) exercise.
My genius plus $300m beats your genius with $247m.
You double to $494m? Cool I'll double to $600m as I so LOVE winning. (Sorry capitals, my bad).
Just look at the non-zero, non-one figures...
Mercedes is worth around $65bn.
Aston is worth in the region of $6.4bn, one tenth of the value of Mercedes, but still a big number.
Haas is privately held, but is estimated to have made Gene Haas around $750m. So while not to be sneezed at, if he was pumping a few hundred million extra through his team to keep it going, you can see where he would be "Doing a Stoddart" in the not too distant future.
If Lance Stroll's dad dropped every penny of his reported net worth of $2.7bn on F1 and motoring he'd still only be 4.15% of the value of Mercedes. The Big Boys in the designer Big Boy Pants really are big, no matter how you measure them.
Paul Stoddart was worth "a fair bit" and it was too much for him. Mr King Fisher himself, V.J. All OK Mallya, was, depending on whom one asks, worth, or at least had access to (regardless of precise details on ownership) a fair bit.
Richard, million-dollar-smile, Branson ran Virgin Racing for around thirty-five minutes before, rightly, concluding the figure required to win was way... way... way... more than it was worth to him. Consequently, he took his money and ran... And there, via that exit door, goes a smart man.
Enzo knew what it took to win. His fight with Ford about not selling out forced the American giant to design and build the original GT40 at excessive expense. That was wallet and ego racing writ large. You simply do not get that level of passion and near-insane commitment these days.
Recall, Enzo only sold (irksome) road cars to fund his racing obsession. The. Man. Was. Obsessed.
Love it or hate it, heck you had to respect it. One Man, One Mission.
So dearest of readers (for you are still reading...) we have the pure passion that is Ferrari today. One great Italian team. We have Mercedes, the one colossus left from the pre-war years of Auto Union and auto racing being the cutting edge for human engineering. We have Red Bull, the one crazy extreme sports, cost no object, company on the planet (seriously guys, without them and Christian ‘The Yokes on Me' Horner where would the giggles in F1 be these days?). We then have One mighty dust-up in the mid-field, and One mighty let down in McLaren.
Do you see the Power of One in all this?
Each One of us is a fan. Each One of us is the Master of being One's Self. Each team is struggling in a world of One simply to beat themselves from last year.
Formula One. One is Fun (sorry 1980s Delia Smith cook book, how did that get in here...?). One day we will win...
One day we will, I promise, look back on this decade as one of the golden ones of years gone by... Each day is special. Each team struggles mightily to perform. But most importantly each person is special. Each engineer, marketer, designer and driver in F1 is driven and they share One passion; to race, and in living that One passion they know what winning demands of them.
...and the One thing rich men who have come to believe their own press releases fail to grasp time after time is that the One thing One needs to race in F1 is One giant mother of a wallet.
No matter what lunacy Chase and the gang inflict on us starting in March, I promise you'll feel better for giving One big smile that we all get to enjoy this circus together, with you team owners in the central ring of One global circus!
And then, with Miss Physics once again commanding with One ring to rule them all, One FIA to confuse them all, and One Christian to out-whinge them all... we will have the One 2019 Formula One Season for all of human history. Never One before, and never One after. Resulting in One deserving champion.
And that is simply One awesome thing.
One last thing. One 2019 Super Bowl, One winner... and only One touch down! I mean really and they complain about a lack of overtaking! Lowest scoring finals game in history! Do you see One big coast-to-coast sulk in the US, demanding rule changes, cheaper players, and more American grass?
No. Amusingly One hears One universal muttering that the half time show was a tad lame. The one thing Liberty are keen to push more of into F1, is the One thing Super Bowl fans complained about! One classic lesson there...
Remember it is wallet racing writ large and stop whinging for once and for all when One finds that One needs One pair of freshly pressed Big Boy trousers and One darn big wallet simply to walk in the gate. And then kindly place One world class smile on your face. Because you are racing with One mighty set of titans. One would do well to remember that when One's bank account is empty. For all you team owners simply remember you paid the ticket price... for One hell of a ride!
Max Noble.
Learn more about Max and check out his previous features, here