View from Peter Windsor's room at the Melbourne Hilton, Wednesday, April 1,
0730hrs (Peter Windsor)
They’re still dismantling the barriers over at Albert Park, a couple of miles from where I write, and of course we are at a very early stage of F1 2009.
Forgive me, though, for breathing not a little sigh of relief: F1 is not only alive and well (despite the “economic downturn”) but is also entering its new era with barely a slip-up. The crowds over four days in Melbourne were only 10 per cent down on 2008 (and actually up on race day compared with 2007) and the response of the world to yet another F1 start-to-finish victory was delirious.
Of course, this was no ordinary go-to-whoa Sunday afternoon drive of the type that Ferrari, McLaren or Renault have been delivering over the past decade and a half: this was a dominating drive by one Jenson Button in a brand new car in a brand new (but not start-up!) team. The big question – recession or not – was always going to be: how would the world react to a rapidly-changing F1?
New rules, a shrinking economy, a “politically-incorrect” sport of conspicuous consumption: all of these things had us on edge, even if they were only real in the minds of the doomsayers who wrote about them. What, though, if Ferrari were off the pace? What if McLaren really were mid-field? Could F1 survive in the form we know it? Would the fans turn away from their beloved megateams?
The signs from Melbourne are that the fans love the idea of new names coming into F1 and upsetting the established order. If that had been Felipe Massa out there, winning from the pole and making it look easy, the reception would have been about what it has always been, bearing in mind that it would all have been fairly predictable. The Ferrari fans would have loved it, the Lewis fans would have hated it and everyone else would have quickly moved on to something else. Like football. Or stamp collecting.
Now, and for a variety of reasons, the only thing that is predictable is that Ferrari and McLaren have a massively difficult year ahead of them – McLaren even more so than Ferrari. Quite why this should be so is a question I can’t fully answer. I guess McLaren you can understand: they put everything they had into their 08 car and are thus kind of entitled to be a little behind the eight-ball in early 09. Also, they are not particularly well plugged-in to the inner sanctums of the sport’s power brokers.
Ferrari, though, are something else. They have everyone’s attention and their love. And Michael Schumacher. Michael may have retired from active driving but he is still under contract to Ferrari and as far as I understand it plays some sort of consultancy/sponsorship/test driving role for which I am sure he is paid extremely well.
