Dodgy Business

Energy efficient power trains. Kinetic energy recovery systems. Manufacturers. Road car relevance. Budgets.

I was going to write a column about all that before I worried you might not have problems with insomnia after all. All very laudable and possibly even necessary, but not especially sexy. And four years down the road.

In Monaco, Honda's Nick Fry, on the subject of F1's future direction, pointed out that the show we have now is actually very good. But, in comparison to other sports coverage he has witnessed, we could do a better job with it.

I couldn't agree more. It brought to mind Ross Brawn a few weeks ago when Ferrari's ex-technical director was asked what it felt like to be watching on TV.

Ross had put down his fishing tackle and wandered into a bar in New Zealand to watch the Melbourne season-opener. He found it incredibly frustrating not to have the information you take for granted at the circuit - the screens with lap times, sector times, gaps, etc. He didn't think the commentators did a particularly good job of conveying what was going on.

The live timing screen as seen by the teams © LAT

I admit I winced a bit when I read that, wondering what James Allen and Martin Brundle would make of it, but knew exactly where Ross was coming from. Forced through personal circumstances to watch Turkey and Brazil at home last year, I experienced exactly the same frustration.

You wanted to know the best guess about the respective fuel loads and, last year, which tyres people were on. And when the projected fuel stops were. How close X had to stay to Y to jump him at the stops. And so forth.

Ross, I believe, actually called Martin to express some regret and qualify his comments, acknowledging the difficult job faced by live commentary teams coping with a sport that is largely strategy-based and in which information is guarded with Masonic secrecy.

I had a similar conversation with James last year, when he patiently explained the limited mileage in getting overly technical with a general Sunday afternoon audience.

It was a mixture of petrol heads and others who might just as easily walk the dog if he started blinding them with science about fuel effect and tyre degradation.

People, he said, don't want to be told what's going to happen, they prefer to see the story unfold. Try to tell them and you look like a smart-alec and leave yourself open to ridicule when the myriad factors involved in a Grand Prix conspire to skew the picture.

Monte Carlo was the perfect example. You may think you saw a motor race, but you didn't. Not in its purest sense. The vast majority who watched Monaco on TV or read about it in the newspaper had not the faintest idea what went on. That was brought home to me by the questions friends and family asked the following week after reading the brouhaha stirred up by the newspapers on Monday.

It was completely potty that McLaren was under investigation, especially when you consider what Ferrari has gotten away with over the years but, nonetheless, Monaco was frustrating for the Lewis fans.

It's ancient history now but to have a decent understanding you need to have read Mark Hughes' race report in Autosport magazine. Mark's a mate and I don't want to embarrass the lad, but it was as good a piece of sports journalism as I've read in 20 years, on any subject. If it isn't nominated for an award, it ought to be.

The tragedy is that only Autosport's readership had the benefit. Anyone who watched on TV or read a newspaper was relatively clueless. The simple fact is that F1, as it stands, does not lend itself to live TV coverage. It's too complex.

Ron Dennis speaks to the media © XPB/LAT

Similarly, a newspaper journalist doesn't have the time or inclination to do F1 proper justice. Typically, the copy deadline will be a couple of hours after flag fall and the editor has probably allocated 750-1000 words, tops. There will have been football, cricket, rugby, golf, tennis, etc, on the same weekend.

It's a summary of what happened, a few post-race quotes and press the 'send' button. The more fortunate hacks will get a Tuesday morning follow-up but, even so, have to be aware that the readership, though maybe 20 times larger than Autosport's, is casual interest. Tyre compounds and fuel-adjusted qualifying times, three days later? Forget it.

In fact, in Montreal this weekend, the Fleet St boys will be five hours behind the UK, which means that when the flag drops at around 3.45pm in Montreal, the newspaper first editions are just about ready to go.

The reporters have their stories written as the race develops, drop in the press conference quotes, et voila. They all sit there tensely watching the last 10 laps hoping like hell that nothing happens to fundamentally alter the drift of what they've written.

Remember 1991 when Nigel Mansell, with characteristic theatre, lost the Canadian GP on the last lap when he was so busy waving to the crowd that he forgot to change gear, let the revs drop, the engine died and he was beaten by a hysterically amused Nelson Piquet?

The panic caused in the Fleet St ranks had to be seen to be believed. Someone said Mansell had run out of fuel and most of them went with that. Then Williams saw the telemetry, the truth dawned and word leaked out.

The Sun's correspondent came charging up the press room steps shouting 'it wasn't fuel, it was the bloody gearbox!' The news was greeted with expletives all round. Frantic phone calls and rewrites all round. The Sun's guy grabbed the phone, got onto his desk and yelled "Scrub the 'Oh you silly fuel' headline and run with 'Oh gear, oh gear ...'" Cue spontaneous round of applause from his under-pressure mates.

We don't even know who was fastest in qualifying these days until the first stops have played out. It was quite possible to watch Monaco and deduce that Fernando Alonso deserved his win because he started on the pole. And yet, fuel-adjusted, he was 0.3s slower than Hamilton.

That was never accurately conveyed, and neither was the fact that Lewis was called in earlier than expected for his first and second stops. In no other sport are the fundamentals so poorly understood by the vast majority.

Watch football on Sky, for example, and you've got Andy Gray playing with his counters or diagrams showing you where the key areas of battle will be.

You might not understand quite where 'the channels' are that X is going to run down, or the ins and outs of a Christmas Tree formation, save that when Chelsea are playing you've obviously got a fairy on top of it because a bloke the size of Didier Drogba keeps falling over every time someone sneezes.

But it's all there, with a band of top-name managers and ex-managers all lobbing in their two pennorth. And, it has to be said, given some of the negativity and paranoia about losing that afflicts the modern game, the insight and analysis is often far more entertaining than the actual game.

The media center at the Shanghai circuit © XPB/LAT

You could easily see such a situation with Formula 1 as well. Except that the analysis isn't there. Many of the F1 journalists who work for specialist publications have the luxury of more relaxed deadlines than their newspaper colleagues.

But while the job we do is hardly rocket science, it's not that easy either. Autosport might come out on a Thursday but the copy deadline is still 7.30am on Monday morning. The amount of people who don't grasp that is astounding. You still get PR people inviting you to parties on Sunday evening. Dream on ...

The better specialist writers tend to be freelance and will have more than one client to service - magazines simply do not pay enough to make being a staff member a viable option for anyone out of their twenties or thirties.

Post-race, the specialist will do the round-up of the major players' media scrums and then head back to the media centre with a tape full of blurb by, say 7pm. You then sit and transcribe some of it. A newspaper journalist simply doesn't have the time to do that. His copy is filed and he's already at the airport awaiting the plane home, in keeping with half the paddock.

The specialist will then review some of what he's been told against the evidence of the 'race history chart' a document published by the FIA which lists every driver's lap time and the gap between cars on each lap.

An anorak could quite easily spend a couple of hours poring over the details of the race history chart, looking at such things as when X was held up and who by, the effects of heavier fuel loads, tyre degradation, etc, but you have to have the discipline to keep to the salient details.

Most of what you've been told will stack up against the facts. You might find this surprising but that's because team principals, technical directors and race engineers are such pure racers and are so wrapped up in the business that it's actually very difficult to tell a bare-faced lie.

At worst, if something is a little marginal or controversial they will likely have fudged the issue or been economical with the truth.

By perhaps 8.30pm the specialist might be ready to sketch out the bones of his report before fleshing it out. By this time though, he's already done a 14hr day given the early start to beat the traffic on race morning.

You're getting hungry, but having a meal only causes further delay and hastens the onset of terminal tiredness, which is the real enemy. Succumbing to a beer or a glass of wine can be fatal.

Get to the point where bed is more attractive than the desire to tell the story, and you've lost. Thursday evening listening to F1 anecdotes at a restaurant seems an awful long time ago. The job is now a serious grind.

Spectators watch Kimi Raikkonen during the Monaco Grand Prix © XPB/LAT

Some can plough on through that and still do a decent job. For others, 19hrs straight is about it and they find themselves devoid of inspiration, staring blankly at the laptop screen and even nodding off. There's no option but to pit, get up at 4.30am Monday, shower and resume refreshed, relatively speaking, to hit the deadline.

Some races are relatively straightforward. Others, like Monaco, less so. Mark Hughes was scratching his head by 10pm Sunday night. Too much information, he reckoned. It was going to be difficult fitting it into 2500 words. Obviously he needn't have worried, but I know the feeling.

But what Nick Fry and Ross Brawn are talking about is that none of this gets transmitted to the majority of mainstream media followers, which is badly wrong. And you can't say it's the fault of the individual presenters/commentators, it's merely circumstances, allied to the fact that if information was known in advance, teams strategies would be blown.

By all means transmit a Grand Prix live, because there's nothing quite like live sport, but what F1 is crying out for is a well-constructed analysis follow-up programme.

It wouldn't have to be dry. It could actually be all things to all men. By all means include the lifestyle features - expand them even - but why not have the major players in the studio discussing the finer points so that the intricacies of each race are properly understood.

It just seems like common sense. Deeper understanding, after all, is what fosters real interest. If the mouth breathers don't like it, tough. Let them watch Big Brother.