Sacramento,
California -- For someone who has had a lifelong love of auto racing -- particularly high-speed,
open-cockpit, open-wheel racing -- the fiasco that occurred
Sunday at the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal was heartbreaking.
F1 is the most
sophisticated, expensive and exotic international racing series in the world.
It's also the least competitive ... and has been for a long time.
This year, as
has been the case for the previous five years, Mercedes has dominated the
races. Everyone else is racing for second or third place on most weekends. On-track passes for the lead in Formula One
are as rare as a solar eclipse at a fixed spot on the planet.
So, on Sunday,
there was a real race for the lead, with Ferrari driver Sebastian Vettel
driving his guts out to hold off a hard-charging Lewis Hamilton in his
Mercedes. Vettel, pride of Germany with
four F1 series championships, and Hamilton, the superstar Brit with five F1
titles, are rightly regarded as the two best pilots in the globe-hopping series.
On Sunday,
they were giving thousands of Canadian fans and millions of TV watchers
worldwide something we don't see in F1 -- an exciting dice at the head of the
field. Coming on the heels of a pulsating finish between Alexander Rossi and
eventual winner Simon Pagenaud in the May 26 Indianapolis 500, this was
something F1 needed to drum up genuine excitement.
Leave it to
the convoluted, Byzantine, wrong-headed rules of Formula One to screw it up.
On lap 48 of 70,
with Hamilton within striking distance of passing Vettel for the lead, Vettel
made a mistake entering a high-speed corner.
Simply put, he overcooked it, and went off let into the grass. He
quickly snapped the Ferrari right, re-entered the course and hung on as his car
drifted right and blocked Hamilton from blazing past. Vettel kept on with the lead and Hamilton
right on his tail.
Commentators
in the worldwide TV feed immediately speculated that race stewards would review
the lightning-quick incident for an "unsafe re-entry" to the course,
blocking Hamilton. The commentators
quickly speculated that such an appeal would be denied, given the nature of the
racing incident. They felt (as did I)
that it was a high-speed run off-and-on, and Vettel didn't really have time to do a
controlled block of Hamilton. Vettel was
simply trying to hang on to his car.
In my view,
anybody who has watched high-speed auto racing for even a short time knows the
physics of this incident: a winged bullet moving at high speed through the
grass cannot be turned left on a dime once it re-contacts paving.
Vettel was fortunate that he simply hung on to the car and did not slam
into the right-side barrier.
Alas, the
lords of F1 didn't see it that way. They
slapped a five-second penalty on Vettel for unsafe re-entry and blocking
Hamilton. Ultimately, Vettel took the checkered flag first, but the penalty handed the win to the close-following Hamilton.
Not
surprisingly, Vettel went ballistic. One
of the exasperated TV booth announcers wailed: "It's racing!"
I couldn't
agree more. F1 finally has a blazing
shootout for the lead on its hands, and it makes a call that defies physics and
rational thinking. It's almost like they
don't want real racing, which is probably why F1 has never caught on in the United
States the way it has on distant shores.
I suppose if
the lords of F1 had been watching the last 13 laps of this year's electrifying
Indy 500, winner Pagenaud would have been disqualified for over-aggressive
driving, or blocking or maybe driving a car that was too yellow.
I keep
watching F1 events in the hope that something
will be done to make the racing more competitive. Looks like I'm in for a long wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment