A good friend of mine made an interesting comment this morning. I've asked my wife for some free time this weekend to sit down and watch the Le Mans 24hrs, he said. I can't remember the last time I asked that for an F1 race, he concluded.
It took a moment or two to think back, but I realised that I was the same. Same request for time to watch, same lack of excitement vis a vis Formula One. Certainly in these two households, Le Mans, and the World Endurance Championship which orbits it, have beaten out vainglorious Formula One.
To say the very least, this came as something of a shock to me. I have, for as far back as I can remember, been an utter F1 fiend. Ever since my dad ponied up for multi-channel TV back in 1993, I had barely ever missed a live race transmission, and would often try to make time for qualifying and even practice sessions. I have spent half a life time poring over copies of Autosport, F1 Racing and Motor Sport magazines, mining them for every small detail, every nugget of interest. I wept with joy when Damon Hill, for a long time my favourite driver, took the 1996 F1 World Title and the great Murray Walker got a lump in his throat. I cried again in agony when Ayrton Senna died, so upset in teenage angst that a driver so talented could be killed in the midst of the sport I loved.
Lately though? Meh. Couldn’t really care less. F1 seems to have succumbed to the same disease as big-league football. Too much money, not enough passion. Too many people taking a cut, and in doing so destroying the basis of the sport. We’ve spoken previously on these pages about the disastrous financial arrangements of Formula One, where CVC Capital Partners, which owns the rights to the sport, squeezes it down to the pips for a billion-dollar-income while teams, great teams like Williams, Sauber and Force-India-Which-Used-To-Be-Jordan struggle for survival. Bizarre rules such as wings that help a driver overtake and pointless rigmaroles of degrading tyres, byzantine engine and sporting regulations and the enormous influx of semi-talented pay-drivers have driven me away, along with near-countless other fans, according to the TV viewing figures.
Le Mans, though? Now that's another matter. Today's announcement that Ford is going to come back next year to take on Porsche, Ferrari, Aston Martin and Corvette in the GTE Pro category (that's the Le Mans class that looks like ordinary high-performance road cars) with its stunning new GT supercar is the icing on a cake already awash with rich, heady flavours.
"When the GT40 competed at Le Mans in the 1960s, Henry Ford II sought to prove Ford could beat endurance racing's most legendary manufacturers " said Bill Ford, executive chairman of the company that bears his family name. "We are still extremely proud of having won this iconic race four times in a row, and that same spirit that drove the innovation being the first Ford GT drives us today." Ford's return underlines the burgeoning success of the World Endurance Championship – the Ford badge has been absent from the front-lines of global motorsports for some time now.
Two nights before the Ford announcement, Porsche's Swiss driver, Neel Jani, set a searing pace around Le Mans' Circuit De La Sarthe, setting a new record for the current track layout and the sixth fastest lap of all time. At night. In the dark.
It's worth comparing that to the current faffing about in F1. F1 wants to make its cars sound more exciting and go a bit faster, and is tying itself in knots trying to figure out how to do so, while all the vested interests in the sport pull in different directions. F1 switched to hybrid engines to try and justify its existence in an environmentally conscious world and to tempt big car makers both to stay and to enter anew. In the process it slowed the cars down, made them sound anodyne and gave one team (Mercedes) a massive advantage that the rest are talking about abandoning the sport because the rules basically mean they can't do anything to catch up.
Le Mans introduced hybrids for much the same reasons (as well as to stimulate technological development) and the cars have just gotten faster and faster. It's worth pointing out that Jani's lap time bears comparison with lap speeds from the late eighties and early nineties, when the cars were regularly approaching 400kmh top speeds. That Porsche 919 hybrid might be frugal and high-tech, but it's packing some serious old-school speed.
And it's up against a plethora of opposition. Audi's diesel-hybrid R18 TDI, Toyota's petrol-electric hybrid TS040 V8 and Nissan's barmy LM GTR Nismo hybrid. It's worth pointing out that the Audi uses a mechanical flywheel hybrid (as does the Nissan), while Porsche uses batteries and Toyota uses super-capacitors. Oh, and the Nissan is front-wheel-drive. That's the genius of Le Mans – careful tweaking of the rules to allow close competition and encourage technological diversity, but without allowing any one team a massive advantage. Yes, Audi has dominated Le Mans in terms of wins for the past decade and a half, but much of that has been down to sporting nous and good luck, not technical dominance.
What Le Mans has over F1 though is a sense of endeavour. F1 cars run around in circles on mostly deathly dull tracks in the middle east and Asia (the great European circuits are slowly being weeded out as they can’t afford to pay Bernie Ecclestone’s towering fees) for an hour and three quarters and then they pack up and go home. The teams are secretive, the drivers kept separate from the fans.
Le Mans is very different. Scrutineering, the process by where cars car declared eligible to race, still takes place in the city centre of Le Mans, and the public throng their way in. The track has its corporate boxes and hospitality units of course, but it also has camp grounds where you’re likely to see a group of fans who’ve driven down in a ratty old Transit pitching a tent next to another group who’ve come down in priceless vintage Bentleys. In fact, I’ve seen just that.
The drivers and teams are accessible to the public, as is the pitlane before the race, and when the actual race itself kicks off, it’s almost as much of an adventure watching it as it is driving in it – staying awake as long as you can, venturing out into the distant recesses of the massive track – spectating as essayed by Bear Grylls.
That's what F1 has lost – that sense of intrepidity. That feeling of excitement and of passion. F1 has become corporatised and homogenised, but Le Mans still has that whiff of Bentley Boy derring-do, where colossally fast cars whip through the night, their headlights and tail-lights melting in with the stars on the horizon.
There is much talk of F1 getting its house in order. Of new rules, new strategies, new teams, customer cars, cheaper parts and more races. Frankly, I no longer care and I suspect a lot of my fellow racing fans feel the same. Audi, dominant at Le Mans for so long seems to feel the same too, repeatedly shunning F1’s siren song. Long may it do so, I say.
I’ll be there this weekend, parked on the couch in front of Eurosport, matchsticks keeping my eyelids apart to catch the action at 3am. I will love every minute of it. And I won’t think for a second about Formula One.
