Why star drivers are key to F1

The drivers are arguably the most important element of Formula 1. Yes F1 is a team sport, featuring some of the most advanced racing car technology in the world, but most of the key players within agree it's the drivers who are the true focal points.

Without them the cars don't turn wheels at all, and racing doesn't happen.

"It has to have the elite drivers," McLaren acting CEO Jonathan Neale tells Autosport.

"Drivers in Formula 1 have to better than anywhere else, and it has to be something they aspire to get into.

"Drivers are definitely central to it. When you've got your two heroes - your top guns that you're putting out against the others on a grand prix weekend - that point of alignment for the organisation is something everybody can identify with and get behind.

"To be a great sport it has to have jeopardy, drama, upsets, thrills and spills, and heroes. And it has all of that in spades. At its most fundamental, it's two mad men in chariots trying to clash it out.

"If you are a Formula 1 driver you have to have earned your way to be in the paddock, because you are among the best 22 drivers on the planet."

This is certainly the key draw for the drivers themselves - the opportunity to go up against the best in the world and beat the best in the world.

"If you want to do racing on the circuit, for sure F1 is still the top level - the fastest cars," says 2007 world champion Kimi Raikkonen. "If you take the top rally guys it's absolutely amazing what they do. If you take the top NASCAR guys, it's not like we could jump in and suddenly beat them.

"They are specialised in their own things they do. If they come here they will also be in trouble. It depends what you're used to. [But] if you purely look for the best level of racing on circuits, for sure it's F1."

But F1 could definitely do more to make this absolutely the case. It suffers - and has done pretty much throughout its existence - from the problem that part of its grid is made up of 'pay drivers', athletes who have bought their way into the top level of motor racing rather than earning it through their exploits on the circuit.

"Formula 1 should be the best 22 or 24 drivers in the world," says Red Bull boss Christian Horner. "We've probably got the best 12 and then the rest are paying to be there."

In this way, F1 does not actually appear meritocratic in the same way other global sports do. Top footballers secure enormous sponsorship deals, but do not depend on those deals to ply their trade at the highest level. Most racing drivers do, and this is a problem.

This reaches to the core of an issue that affects all of motor racing: namely that it is expensive to compete in the first place and therefore is mainly the preserve of people with vast sums of money to invest to begin with. Drivers now fund racing at all levels, rather than racing funding the drivers.

Where this is not the case is an exception rather than the rule, and is reliant on the whims of manufacturers, a global drinks company with its own F1 team, and the generosity of patriotic businessmen and entrepreneurs.

"The pay driver model is being reduced," argues Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff. "Before it was only Red Bull getting the best ones into Formula 1. Now it is equally Ferrari, Red Bull, Renault, Mercedes. Big car companies have started to deploy junior programmes.

"This is purely on merit. Financing capabilities and sugar daddies don't play any role in the best boys.

"There were always pay drivers in Formula 1. Indeed, some of the pay drivers became some of the best in the world. Niki Lauda was a pay driver when he entered the sport.

"We've seen a phase where at the top are the best racing drivers in the world, then you had a bit of a pay driver grid, but the momentum has reversed.

"Seeing Ocon, Vandoorne, Wehrlein, Magnussen - now the best boys are getting back into Formula 1."

This is true for most of the grid, but not all of it. Some teams still rely on drivers bringing budget to compete at the highest level.

At the lower levels nearly all drivers bring money to their teams in order to compete.
Without a core restructuring of the business model of motorsport, it is difficult to see how this can change.

"When you look to other sports, maybe basketball, you see most of the teams have money," argues Williams driver Felipe Massa. "When you see baseball and American football, most have money to take people from other teams, to invest.

"In F1 it is not the case. Maybe in football it is not the case. A few teams have the money, the others do not. It's nice to see teams with money because the sport is at the top of professionalism with a little difference between teams. If you see that, you will see different cars winning because it will be closer."

Trying to create conditions whereby more of the best drivers can genuinely compete with each other would automatically make F1 more appealing. Though here there is also an immediate tension with the technological aspect that differentiates the teams and cars.

"If people were seeing Vettel, Hamilton, Raikkonen, Button, Alonso - five world champions - exchanging places for 60 laps then people would talk about 2016 being epic," argues Pirelli motorsport boss Paul Hembery.

"That's really the bit that's got lost along the way. People ask me what's happened to the extraordinary driver Fernando Alonso. Well it's not him, it's the result of technology and that's a shame for fans because they want to see their great hero Fernando - or Jenson if you are a Brit - up there with the others.

"That's not to say anything negative about McLaren, it's more to do with what impact it has on fans seeing their idol maybe not where they want to see them. They want to see them battling away with the other great champions."

It is also vital that F1 maintains the impression that its drivers are a league apart, performing feats behind the wheel that are beyond the scope of 'mere mortals'.

"It's that sort of gladiators and chariot races [idea]," argues Horner. "It goes back that far, and thinking 'I couldn't do that'.

"Those drivers need to be the heroes. Of course we want Formula 1 to be as safe as possible, and we don't want anybody to get hurt, but like it or not it's got to be risky.

"The accident that Fernando Alonso had [in Australia], I'm sure there is a spike in viewing figures around what happened at that point because it's spectacular.

"And then your admiration for those drivers - that they are even prepared to get in the cars and take those risks - only grows."

When the drivers themselves are increasingly outspoken about this - questioning the driving challenged posed by the cars, the nature of the racing, and the pure visceral appeal of F1, there surely must be something seriously awry.

The drivers enjoy the most privileged and exciting positions in all of Formula 1; they should all be its greatest fans, not its biggest critics.