A very good friend of mine just shared with us his very interesting point of view on automobile racing. He says,
“Gallons of fuel is burnt during car and bike racing competitions, just to whet the egos of automobile majors.”
Being a huge fan and an arduous follower of both F1 and MotoGP, I couldn’t stop myself from pondering over the thought. For a moment I thought, ‘Is it really so? The sport that I love so much is actually just about auto-companies throwing away millions of dollars to prove who’s the fastest? Is it just a showcase event where everyone gets to flex their muscle in front of a crowd and gather applause?’ But then, the true blue racing fan inside of me (remember I’m the Adrenaline Junkie) rises from the very depths of my heart and mind to quell any such sentiment that goes against my very identity. The racing fan says, ‘No, can’t be! The likes of Ferrari and Porsche, Mercedes and McLaren, Honda and Toyota, Yamaha and Suzuki, Audi and BMW, Ducati and Jaguar, Ford and Alfa Romeo, Renault and Aston Martin can’t be racing just to whet their egos. You name the best of the auto-companies in the world and chances are they are into some form of racing or the other (Lamborghini seems to be the lone exception, but that’s for completely different reasons). These auto-majors cannot be putting in the best of their engineering and technology and human resource apart from huge amounts of cash into something that trivial, can they? What is it then? I do seem to have an answer.
(You might be wondering what’s a fashion show got to do with racing. Don’t worry, I will come to that later in the article)
Formula One today stands at the pinnacle of all motorsport in every aspect, including technology, difficulty, budgets, competition level, viewership, global reach, and its been so for more than five decades. The world’s best drivers, racing engineers, car designers and engine makers dream of participating in this event. No wonder that F1 today commands a global audience of more than half a billion per race, exceeded only by the Football World Cup and the Olympics, both of which are not annual events unlike F1. Even India has almost 60-70 million dedicated viewers, and that’s when we don’t even have a racetrack or a driver featuring on the F1 calendar! Imagine a Karun Chandhok or an Armaan Ibrahim driving a Force India in the Indian GP, what sort of potential numbers are we looking at?
The eleven F1 teams’ combined budget in 2008 stood at more than $3 billion, a major portion of which is provided by the team sponsors who recognize the event’s advertising potential due to its immense global viewership. Which bring us to the debate – is there a point in spending so much money when it doesn’t concern the common man apart from providing a fun and glamour filled weekend? Does it directly affect us or our automobiles in any way? The answer is – yes, it does.
Formula One also stands at the pinnacle of innovation in automobile design. Technologies like disc brakes, aerodynamics, engine design efficiency, energy recovery systems, turbo/super chargers, all have their origins in racing. For example, Ferrari road cars are designed, manufactured and tested under the same conditions and in the same factory as their F1 cars. Their road cars derive their engines, transmissions, gearboxes, braking systems, suspensions, aerodynamics, wheels, traction control and even their paints directly from their F1 cars. After manufacturing, these road cars are tested by their best racing car drivers on the very same race track as their F1 cars. And its not just the high performance super sports cars for the uber-rich that get the best of the world. These technological breakthroughs eventually trickle down from racing cars to the very passenger cars that common people like you and me drive. And Formula One, apart from speed, also prioritizes safety, cost and energy efficiency. Currently the FIA and manufacturers are discussing adding bio-fuel engines and regenerative braking for the 2011 season. FIA believes F1 must focus on efficiency to stay technologically relevant in the automotive industry as well as keep the public excited about F1 technology. The energy recovery system, or KERS as it is popularly known in F1 (which denied Force India their first ever victory in an F1 race) is a recent example of a technology which I’m sure in few years time would be regularly seen in our road cars. Therefore, saying that all the money spent by F1 teams is just to be the fastest over a weekend race does sound quite unfair to me.
Also, going by the logic that money spent on F1 is a waste, what would you call the Olympics or any such worldwide sporting event where national governments spend billions of dollars to host a 15 day event that does not even provide guarantee that their investment would return? What would you call India’s bid to host the Commonwealth Games even though more than half it’s population lives below poverty line? The reason is that the Games provide a major opportunity for the host city and country to promote and showcase their culture, infrastructure and economic might to the world and hope that it would ultimately raise their own standards of living by luring huge foreign investments.
Besides, would you like to watch a sluggish 80bHP Maruti Wagon-R slugging it out at 80kmph against a sluggisher Hyundai Santro on a racetrack? No, right? You want a roaring 800bHP superfast, super agile Ferrari racing at 320kmph against a super noisy, super powerful McLaren, because that is what gives you the ultimate thrill and adrenaline rush. But all this does require money, millions of it!
The F1 part got a bit long, so I decided to give Fashion its own space…to be continued…
