A decade of living dangerously

So we wave goodbye to F1 in the 'noughties' - a decade in which we saw the sport come pretty much full circle.

It was 10 years in which the might of the car manufacturers came and went; the full force of a combined Ferrari and Michael Schumacher was unleashed on the sport before he headed off for what looks like having been a temporary retirement; and F1's independent teams were driven to the brink before once again regaining their strength.

This was a decade in which there was fascination on both the driver front and on the teams' fight to keep F1 alive.

On the driver front, the 2000s will perhaps be remembered most as the 'Schumacher/Ferrari' years. Never in the sport's history has one driver/team combination left their mark so indelibly and dominated to the extent that this pairing did from 2000 to 2004.

And yet the second half of the decade was filled with excitement at the young talent that came through - from Fernando Alonso inheriting the mantle as the man to dethrone Schumacher, before Kimi Raikkonen, Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel showed their credentials.

If the on-track battles were fraught, they were nothing compared to the off-circuit fights and politics that took us to the brink so many times - and came oh so close to causing a breakaway championship in the dark days of this summer.

Here then are the main themes that marked out the last decade.

Schumacher and Ferrari

Formula 1 blasted into 2000 well aware that Schumacher and Ferrari's time was going to come.

After years of having got so close to the championship - only to see late-season heartache rip it from their grasp - the fact that Ferrari took the 1999 constructors' championship said everything about what this team was ready to do.

Sure enough, 2000 proved to set the scene for an incredible decade of dominance. Schumacher and Ferrari duly led the way for much of the season - and their joy was clear to see at the season-closing Malaysian GP when their constructors'-drivers' double was celebrated with those red wigs.

Yet while the entire sport was initially delighted at seeing Ferrari end that 21-year drivers' title drought and return to form, Schumacher's dominance soon turned opinions in the other direction.

In fact, the biggest black cloud that hung over the way Ferrari went about rewriting the history book in F1 was over team orders - and especially that dreadful afternoon at the A1-Ring in 2002 where Rubens Barrichello was forced to concede the win to Schumacher on the run to the line.

It was a move that divided fans' opinions - with the numbers of those in awe of Schumacher and Ferrari's brilliance equalled by those unimpressed at Ferrari and its then team principal Jean Todt's ruthlessness in gunning for wins.

Much of the unease at Ferrari's form was only increased in 2004 when the team was completely dominant - showing in its first laps of practice at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix that the rest of the field may as well have not bothered.

Yet no sooner had Ferrari proved so all-conquering, than F1's unstinting ability to ensure success is cyclical knocked them off the top.

New tyre regulations for 2005 wrecked Ferrari's campaign (albeit ultimately helped it win at Indianapolis), and the following year the arrival of the Fernando Alonso/Renault powerhouse left Schumacher with his biggest challenge since the Mika Hakkinen battles of the 90s.

The season-long duel was gripping, but by year end Schumacher was on his way out of the sport for what may well have been a temporary retirement - and in his place at Ferrari came Kimi Raikkonen.

Yet while the Finn started off in the right fashion (on paper at least) by clinching the 2007 world championship, the Raikkonen/Ferrari partnership was never one that looked like matching that which had come before it.

The question now as we leave the decade is whether Alonso/Ferrari can become an ever greater force in F1 for the 2010s than Schumacher/Ferrari was in the previous decade.

The changing of the guard

We only need to look at the record books to show that F1 got younger over this decade.

In the space of these 10 years, we had the youngest man to take part in a grand prix weekend, the youngest man to start a race, the youngest man on pole position, the youngest race winner and the youngest champion. The youngsters kicked down all the barriers it seems.

This was a decade where youth really established itself - and that has certainly been good news for F1. Has an F1 with 20-somethings like Sebastian Vettel/Lewis Hamilton/Fernando Alonso/Jenson Button/Nico Rosberg ever looked so exciting?

No longer was F1 an old man's game and, although there was much benefit for the sport to have its elder statesmen as the key contenders - as they were in the Piqeut/Prost/Mansell/Senna era - there is much to be said for getting the kids up there.

The theme of the decade going full circle is replicated on this youth aspect too, because it all started when a young British driver called Jenson Button was gifted a dream chance to join Williams in 2000. That same man ended the decade as world champion.

Button's success, even though there were plenty of trials and tribulations along the way, showed to teams the importance of bringing on the next wave of talent - and ultimately paved the way for men like Alonso, Hamilton and Vettel to be steered into the top flight.

Indeed, you have to wonder whether Sauber (and even the FIA in granting the super licence at the time) would have been so keen to see Kimi Raikkonen make the jump from Formula Renault to F1 in 2001 had it not been for the sterling job that Button did.

The stir that was caused at the time about these kids getting to F1 has been replaced by an acceptance that a lack of years does not necessarily mean a lack of talent.

Sure, there remains the desire for experience - as the continued success of Rubens Barrichello in F1 shows - yet now we could be heading to one of those unique scenarios of having the most experienced men in the field battling it out during their wonder years.

F1 would certainly relish the prospect of seeing how some of these new kids can compare to a veteran in his 40s like Michael Schumacher.

The rise and fall of the manufacturers

Formula 1 came the closest it has ever been in the modern era to become a pure 'manufacturers' championship' during the decade just gone.

The growth of the sport, both globally and in popularity, made it a no-brainer for the car makers to use it as a marketing platform.

In 2000, BMW arrived as an engine supplier with Williams - taking a podium in its first race back in the sport, setting off on a journey in which it would deliver the best engine on the grid for several seasons, embark on its own team, deliver a win but ultimately fail in its ambition to win the championship.

That year too came perhaps F1's biggest manufacturer failure - as Jaguar embarked on a tumultuous five years in the sport that would fail to deliver even a win as it got mired in intense politics.

Renault did better, having returned to F1 as the new owners of the then Benetton team in 2002. Led by Flavio Briatore, the team became a real force in the middle of the decade as Fernando Alonso delivered back-to-back world championships.

Toyota also stepped into the fray - throwing its many hundreds of millions of yen at the sport in a bid to show that the car in front could be a Toyota. Sadly for them, it never was.

Honda too joined the fray officially as a works-entrant from 2006, having been an engine supplier for BAR and Jordan earlier in the decade, but it too would never reach the heights of success that it had enjoyed in earlier spells in the sport.

This arrival of the manufacturers had two net results. First, it helped fuel a dramatic rise in costs. If a sport was worth winning, it was worth winning by whatever financial means possible - and budgets were soon running out of control.

Those rising costs fuelled the second consequence - that because it was so expensive the need to win became even more important. That meant a push to spend even more to make sure you won - although everyone knows that in each season there can really only be one winner.

So, when the world's financial climate took a turn for the worse at the tail end of 2008, something was going to have to break. And it became the resolve of the manufacturers.

(Jaguar had long gone by this stage - cutting its losses and selling out to Red Bull, whose funky image seemed far closer aligned with F1 than the luxury car makers.)

Within 12 months of the end of the 2008 campaign, Honda, BMW and Toyota had all quit the sport - citing the financial troubles in the wider industry for no longer being able to justify a continued presence in F1. Renault too came close, before a rescue package was put in place to keep it in for now.

The decade thus ended with just three manufacturers left on the grid - the ever-present Ferrari; Renault; plus Mercedes-Benz - whose engine had become the customer-unit of choice and who felt its future was best served setting up its own Silver Arrows team in conjunction with Brawn rather than forging forwards with McLaren.

Yet the loss of the manufacturers at the end of the decade has shown no signs of leaving the sport on its knees - indeed it is ending with the prospect of more teams on the grid than we have had for many years.

That can only be good news for the sport.

Global expansion

For years Bernie Ecclestone was convinced that Formula 1 should be going east, not west.

While many sports looked to settle their future with firm establishment in western Europe and the States, Ecclestone was convinced that F1's future would be best served by moving out in the opposite direction.

As the decade ends, Ecclestone not only proved that he would stick to his word - with the host of new additions to the calendar exactly where he hoped them to be. But also, that it was wholly the right thing to do.

Australia, Malaysia and Japan were already on the calendar at the start of the decade, but back then it would have been hard to imagine just how much the sport has expanded.

Now we now have races in Turkey, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, China and Singapore. Indeed, around half the calendar is in what we can call the east.

The growth of the sport in this region was not without its problems though - as Ecclestone juggled the benefits of moving to far away events (which included the dollars those country's governments were keen to pay for the privilege) with the risks of alienating the traditional European television audiences that has been the lifeblood of the sport.

The solution was another Ecclestone campaign - night races. The long traditional early afternoon race start was of little benefit to European television companies back home if that took place in the early hours of the morning. The easiest solution for all was to move the start of the races.

So it was Singapore that started the trend - holding F1's first night race back in 2008. It proved a huge success and has meant other venues following suit.

Australia and Malaysia both shifted to dusk events, Abu Dhabi became F1's first day-night race and other venues are actively looking into the option.

It's not the detail here that matters, but the fact that the sport has shown itself over the decade to be willing to move with the times - even if sometimes it has done so kicking and screaming.

Mosley and the political fallout

That move to change, albeit reluctantly at times, was very much the tale of the off-track politics over the decade, as tensions between the governing body, the FIA, and the teams at times exploded into all-out war.

The huge rise in costs that was the result of the manufacturers' involvement in F1 was the central battleground in this - as Max Mosley got to grips with a situation he felt needed reining in.

Mosley knew costs could not carry on rising the way they were and fought a series of battles. There were the fights over engines - coming down from a situation where teams would be using three or four engines over a single race weekend - to ending the decade with the use of just eight for a whole season.

Max Mosley © LAT

Moves were made on the car front too. Parc ferme, which was once simply a place to dump the cars for post-race checks, has become the centre of a race weekend. Strict limitations were put on when teams could operate on cars and what parts they could replace each night.

Although those rules proved far from easy to install - as Ron Dennis and Frank Williams even planned to go to court to challenge their imposition in courts as being unsafe - in the end, they proved a success.

The decade ended though with the biggest fight of all to bring the costs down. On the back of Honda's withdrawal and the ongoing worldwide financial crisis, Mosley felt that F1 needed to move more to bring costs into check - or risk losing the car makers.

Those ambitions, and the urgency by which Mosley felt they needed doing, were in conflict with what the manufacturers wanted - especially as they had a feeling of strength through the formation of the Formula One Teams' Association (FOTA). Tensions between the two parties had not been helped by the sex scandal that had engulfed Mosley in 2008.

That battleground, which involved disputes over a budget cap and the expansion of the grid, led to a total breakdown in communications on the eve of the 2009 British Grand Prix - when the teams said they were to begin preparations for a breakaway championship.

In the end, a compromise was reached. A budget cap was replaced with a Resource Restriction Agreement, compromises were made to help the new teams get a foothold, and Mosley agreed to go through with his original plan to step down once his final presidential term came to an end.

So where do the lessons of this decade leave us?

There have been some difficult times, especially over the last 12 months, when it seemed the fights between the teams and the FIA threatened the very existence of F1.

But the sport came through it and has probably come out stronger. There is a resolve within FOTA to make the sport better - and teams working together can only be a good thing as F1 faces ever greater challengers from other entertainment and sporting categories.

This will become of ever more importance if this decade becomes a post-Ecclestone era - as the sport hopes the succession plan is in place to see it through that spell with minimal disruption.

On track, though, things certainly look good heading into the new decade. The F1 grid has never been closer and it is rare to have such a wealth of talent all on tap at the same time - with so little to choose between them.

Yes, the overtaking could be better - and the jury is out on whether the refuelling ban that comes into force in 2010 will improve things at all. But at least the lessons of recent years show that no matter what the teams think, the FIA has shown it is not afraid to ruffle feathers to make things happen.

F1 may have come full circle in the 2000s, but it is moving to the future in a single direction - becoming bigger, better and determined to bring its fans more.

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