The downside to F1's show and tell proposal

We’ve had enough of experts. Michael Gove said it, so it must be true.

I’m being flippant, of course. “We’ve had enough of experts”: the enduring charm of quackery was the title of a fascinating 2018 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Medicine was the subject, but you could easily swing the lens around to focus on Formula 1’s guff-saturated information economy.

“My interest,” said author Nick Ross, “is the boundary between easy thinking – fast, intuitive, barely conscious and which leads to quackery, prejudice, populism – and the stuff you have to work at: slow, calculating, conscious, which leads to science, maths, evidence and, above all, accepting contra-evidence (the stuff that challenges or undermines a truth you’ve long regarded as fundamental).”

Where am I going with this, you ask? Well, tucked within Formula 1’s plans for a revised race weekend format is a proposal to ditch the Thursday media conferences entirely in favour of a ‘show and tell’ on Friday mornings.

“We’re pushing on with initiatives to get greater engagement and a greater insight into what’s happening,” says F1’s managing director of motorsports, Ross Brawn. “So next year, on a Friday morning, the cars will be presented to you [the media]. The teams will explain the changes they’ve made for that weekend, and they’ll declare to the FIA the changes they’ve made. [Good luck with that, Ross!]

“It will create another nuance and other interest in the sport, because the technical side of the sport is quite fascinating to a lot of fans.”

Ross Brawn, Managing Director of Motorsports

Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images

I can’t think of anything more ghastly. We know, because every aspect of life is measured, that F1 fans are interested in the technology. This much was known back in the days when reader research was conducted via pen and paper, and is backed up in granular data from scrutiny of your internet habits. Any story offering an insight into such-and-such-a-car’s ‘tech secrets’ is guaranteed to drive traffic.

Where a demand exists, a supply surely follows, and here’s the beef: F1 is appallingly serviced by self-appointed ‘experts’ who have few formal qualifications and offer little in the way of actual insight. But by gleefully glossing piles of absolute twaddle with a veneer of plausibility, on a certain level they are giving the audience what they want.

We’re into servicing the aforementioned ‘Type 1’ thinking here: the quick, easy ‘magic bullet’ solution that sounds plausible, rather than the nuanced, difficult, uncertain world of science. A case in point is the recent proverbial storm in a teacup surrounding Mercedes’ rear suspension.

"My experience is that there’s no such thing, it’s all small gains, marginal gains that are being added and then bring performance" Toto Wolff

Barely had one drawn breath from seeing replays of the W12s visibly squatting on Istanbul Park’s straights than the first learned articles, videos and illustrations began to pop up, courtesy of F1’s army of self-certified tech geniuses.

And of course, none of them had a clue what they were talking about, but they carried it off with due plausibility – because this is, after all, a sales job. And there are people out there desperate to be sold to; the tropes of Type 1 thinking dictate that the more cosily a piece of information sits with your world view, the more instantly it is accepted into lore.

“Competitors always try to find out whether there’s some kind of silver bullet,” said Mercedes boss Toto Wolff of the Mercedes non-story. “My experience is that there’s no such thing, it’s all small gains, marginal gains that are being added and then bring performance.”

But people don’t want to read about marginal gains. That’s far too Type 2. Should F1’s plans come to fruition, expect more tech white noise (or, as an F1 engineer once said to me, “utter bollocks”) next year.

I’ll be washing my hair.

Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes W12

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images