Why hope is gone from F1 launch season

It's not the winning, it's the taking part that counts. That Corinthian spirit has long since been abandoned by professional sport, and for good reason given that simply turning up shouldn't be enough at the very top level. But in Formula 1, it remains alive and well.

That's a good thing, right? Many pine for the days of amateur sport when winning wasn't everything, before the ruthless pursuit of success polluted the purity of the sport. That's something of an idealised past, but when it comes to the sporting side of grand prix racing, participation alone has become what matters for the majority. And that's not through any lack of ambition - it's cold, hard, financial reality.

The 2019 grand prix cars are on the cusp of being launched, but we can already predict with confidence that the vast majority will not win a race. Based on the past two seasons, six won't even take a podium finish.

Launch season is exciting for enthusiasts because of the possibilities it offers, the days when you cannot just hope, but be utterly convinced that the latest machine from your team of choice will propel your favourite driver to victory. But other than the most absurdly optimistic, it will only feel like that this year for fans of Mercedes, Ferrari, perhaps Red Bull and, at a real push, Renault.

That a team like Renault, which is manufacturer-owned, well-resourced, populated by high-quality people and with a strong driver line-up, will have had a good season if it repeats last year's fourth place in the constructors' championship and simply cuts the gap to the front, is telling.

There is a chance it could pull something remarkable out of the bag, and if one of the big three has a disaster, Renault could do better, but it's unlikely. Given the glacial rate of progress towards the front in F1, the objective for Renault is 2021 and the major rules changes.

If it's that tough for a manufacturer team, just think how hard it is for McLaren or Williams.

Both have endured six seasons in the winless wilderness, but an exceptional step forward, the most miraculous new-car leap, would just move them into the dust-up at the front of the midfield. A brilliant job would be rewarded with a plethora of minor top-10 finishes. Hardly stirring stuff, yet probably better than what reality will offer.

So imagine you're Carlos Sainz Jr, George Russell, Kevin Magnussen or Sergio Perez waiting to see the new car for the first time. Twenty years ago they might all have dared to hope, but for all of them the most outrageous dream is nicking a fortuitous podium and some may even struggle to score points. They know their new steeds won't make them winners without the kind of freak result that is now vanishingly rare.

Given that every single driver on the grid made their name by winning constantly in karting and the junior categories, this is incredibly difficult to get used to. With the exception of Robert Kubica, whose last victory in car racing was the 2008 Canadian Grand Prix (he did also win some minor rallies and WRC2 events in the interim), the driver suffering the longest drought is Sergio Perez.

Despite his knack for picking up unlikely podium finishes, Perez's last time on the top step was in GP2 on 13 November 2010. Since that Abu Dhabi victory, he has started 156 races - all but one of those in F1.

The unusual things that happen now have to be so unusual that they are almost impossible

That's statistically the F1 career of a journeyman, but given that term is a pejorative one that suggests a solid performer who picks up drives as and when they can without ever really excelling, it sells him short.

Performing midfield heroics is all well and good, but racing drivers crave victories. They don't necessarily want it easy, but they want realistic hope and fighting for seventh place and Class B victory is hardly nourishment for a winner, even if those who 'win' the midfield often do so with performances as good as - perhaps even better - than those at the front.

Nico Hulkenberg would have the longest win drought of all, but for his 2015 Le Mans 24 Hours victory. His last single-seater win was in the final feature race of the 2009 GP2 season, before his step up to Williams.

Another driver with a hefty haul of F1 podiums, Romain Grosjean, is in a similar boat. He has shown time and again that he's one of the fastest drivers in F1, and while there have been too many troughs, his peaks have been remarkably high. He has led in F1 on merit but has yet to win. While he did have the machinery earlier in his F1 career, for the past five seasons he hasn't had a hope.

"I'm still very happy to come to the weekend and race the car, but it's a bit frustrating that it could be better," said Grosjean late last season.

"If you take Hulkenberg, myself or Perez, the last time we won a [single-seater] race was 2010/2011. Our junior category records are pretty good. But if you're not in the right team, then you will never have a chance. It's just a bit of a shame. Jordan finished first and second in 1998 at Spa, there were some [unusual] things happening, but now not so much."

The unusual things that happen now have to be so unusual that they are almost impossible thanks to the size of the chasm between the big teams and the rest.

Their pace is so good that the impact of random factors can be weathered, while reliability is so good that you simply no longer see races where several teams fail to get both cars to the finish. So many times last season, drivers from Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull found themselves at or near the back and cut through the field almost unopposed. The pace advantage was such that there was no point for anyone to seriously race them.

You could say that's a lack of ambition, but when the real battle is with your midfield peers, wasting valuable seconds trying to hold back a leading car except in the closing stages of the race, or at a track like Monaco, is as futile as trying to keep a Toyota behind you in an LMP2 car. It achieves nothing.

Drivers get to the top by winning, then they stop winning

The capacity of drivers in the leading cars to recover means the scale of disruption needed for an upset is now seemingly beyond what the gods can supply. Short of the front three rows of the grid being struck by lightning, unlikely wins are almost impossible. These outrageous results were always rare - races like the 1996 Monaco Grand Prix or Brazil 2003 - but they just don't happen now.

And it's not just drivers. Racing teams ostensibly exist to win, yet many rarely do. Haas, a three-year-old operation that has done a remarkable job in grand prix racing, has nonetheless not got anywhere near winning a race. That's not the team's fault, it's just doing what is realistically possible.

What is currently called Racing Point (formerly Force India, Spyker, Midland and Jordan) hasn't won for 16 years. And that was an outrageously fortunate victory in an uncompetitive car, the consequence of heavy rain and Gary Anderson's clever strategic gamble to ensure his car was at or near the front when the race hit its minimum viable distance. The equivalent would be a Williams winning a race last year - circumstances it's almost impossible to conceive of.

The newly renamed Alfa Romeo Racing team, as Sauber, hasn't won since 2008. It's a slightly longer drought than Toro Rosso, which won that year's Italian Grand Prix and has just a single victory to show for an involvement in F1 that stretches back to its arrival as Minardi in 1985.

The lack of hope is what's the problem.

It's always been profoundly difficult to win in F1 and victories shouldn't be shared out evenly simply to reward participation. Most F1 teams end up as failures. But the sheer relentless drudgery of knowing you are locked fighting for midfield positions almost indefinitely must get to you, doubly so given there's not a team on the grid that isn't very credible. Some of the drivers involved are among the best in the world, and yet they do not and cannot do what should define them - win races.

Looking back, Nick Heidfeld is a great example of this. Since winning the International F3000 Championship in 1999 he has consistently been a well-known driver in F1, then in sportscars and Formula E. Yet since taking his final F3000 victory in Austria in 1999, he has taken a grand total of one proper race victory, for Rebellion Racing at Petit Le Mans in 2013.

You could claim that says more about Heidfeld than F1, especially given he has the record for most podiums without a win both in the world championship and Formula E, but it reflects a growing problem. Drivers get to the top by winning, then they stop winning.

Other sports also have this kind of problem, but the extent to which the established order is locked in is a big concern. Even in football, you can hope that a well organised group of players with some exceptional individuals, combined with others hitting trouble, can take you to glory. Leicester City's Premier League victory in 2015/16 is the classic example of this, but even that was an outlier. If one of F1's midfield teams does the perfect job this year, it will not win.

It's an easy problem to describe, but not a straightforward one to solve. As is usually the case in F1, the inequitable distribution of the revenue shared with teams is at the heart of it. Whether that will ever change is up to Liberty Media.

But what really matters is that teams and drivers must have a chance. Winning in F1 has always been difficult and it should always be that way. But there's a difference between that and impossibility. There needs to be more hope in F1 for teams, drivers and fans. And that can only be a good thing for grand prix racing as a whole.