Drivers get the totty but the cars are the stars

The pilots in Formula One may be glamourous playboys but in reality the races simply come down to manufacturing excellence

THERE ARE two things no man will admit to being – a bad lover or a bad driver. Stirling Moss came out with that. He wasn’t a bad pedal jockey in his day, quite the swordsman too, apparently. And Stirling’s line works because it acknowledges the rather primal link that exists within the male psyche between cars and sex. And it is mostly male. Chicks don’t get it in the same way at all, contenting themselves with merely draping themselves over the bonnet in a decorative manner. There it is again, you see, cars and sex. Whoever titled that gas-guzzling penis substitute the “Hummer” was inspired. And there’s no betting at all that it was a bloke.

Actually I’m with the girls on this one, in an ‘I’m so comfortable with my masculine prowess in the other half of the equation kind of way’, naturally. I’ve never got the petrol-head deal. Maybe not to the extent of choosing a car because its colour goes with my eyes, but that’s because none of the sad, banal, non-souped up crates that passed through my hands has ever even got that sort of minimal attention. The only requirement has been to start when ordered and to get from A to B without demanding attention: a treat ’em mean and keep ’em keen kinda guy.

But there are brethren out there whose idea of heaven is to be locked into a garage with a Quattro Turbo 1.8L, fiddling with its fuel-pressure pump, kneading the gearbox, pulling on the primary engine harness, coaxing that throttle position sensor into uncovering its gleaming piston glory before gently easing the ignition key into that hot, purring piece of throbbing machinery.

To such men, watching Formula One is like tuning into the Playboy Channel. Expeditions to Silverstone to gawk at the “brmm-brmm” mob are like pilgrimages to the gates of Hefner heaven. Getting to actually touch one of the cars is a free pass into the grotto, a burbling nirvana of oil, grease and pneumatic air pressure.

All that was alien to this corner, until tuning into the recent Canadian Grand Prix, a race that got the grease monkeys all-a-fluster. It rained in Montreal, Lewis Hamilton’s car tried to do Jenson Button’s a mischief, Michael Schumacher led for a bit and another German led for longer until going for a skid on the last lap which allowed Button in to win.

Apparently this was drama on an unprecedented scale, a first night Hamlet, enough to make serious motor-enthusiasts reach for the smelling salts. And then, just as the rain turned into damp Canuck drizzle, it dawned. The allure of Formula One was laid bare like a stripper doing the splits.

The whole Formula One gig isn’t about the people; it’s about the machinery. Just as movie actors get all the headlines but film resolutely remains a director’s medium, so it is the drivers get the flashing cameras, the incessant attention and as much exotic totty as their tongues can handle while all the time knowing they’re dispensable because motor racing is ultimately about the constructors.

Formula One is about excellence in building a vehicle that can do a lap a third of a second quicker than its competition. The old crib that it’s boring because the cars aren’t all the same misses the point – insisting on equality is a socialist conceit in this most rampantly capitalist of arenas. And in a world where billions worth of digital technology is developed so that touchpad wielding pervs can focus their increasingly squinty vision on a greater high-definition money-shot, there’s plenty to be said for the clear-sighted, no-nonsense technical expertise needed to make one engine go half a second faster per lap than its competition.

There is one problem with this, though. It may be the pursuit of excellence, a never-ending advance in technological expertise, an oily expression of the human need to keep pushing the envelope, but it can also be eye-wateringly boring. To those of us not in thrall to the pitch of a whining engine at the limit of its capability, there is a limited scope of appeal to being flooded with facts about the torque to inertia ratio. Holding a microphone close to a rear-wing doesn’t really work, although there is a metronomic quality to many of the drivers that sometimes makes their machinery a more enlivening interview.

On its own merits, the mechanical brilliance that is taken around the world every year in a circus of garish glamour, dodgy politics and Bernie Ecclestone’s lifts is perfectly worthwhile. Certainly the cocktail of money, petrol and danger is cat-nip to a sizable proportion of the world’s males whose only infuriation seems to be that that same cocktail results in many of the world’s top lingerie models consigning their knickers to the Balanciagas while in hot pursuit of the top drivers.

Sometimes, though, humanity and engineering can dovetail. Getting to Grand Prix level demands prodigious levels of skill from all the drivers but financial dynamics usually result in the absolute very best getting into the very best cars. There also remains the reality that no matter how well padded a cockpit is, hitting a wall at 200mph remains an intrinsically high-risk thing to do. It’s little wonder, then, so many drivers can calculate the rate of risk and reward in the fractions of a second it takes to approach a corner and yet talk afterwards as if they’ve spent a day at the desk at the passport office.

“The secret is to win going as slowly as possible,” Niki Lauda once famously explained. The Austrian legend knew better than most the danger of a car out of control. That he returned from terrible burns to become a world champion told you everything about what kind of man he was.

But my guess is he was speaking in purely engineering terms when he came out with his near-profound statement. He also knew better than most that nobody scores anything unless making the finishing line, and you don’t do that by over-doing the spectacular stuff on the engine or the tyres.

You see, you need pedal-tappers in the cockpit to point the things, but also to baby-sit their capabilities. And that requires that most human of attributes – judgment. It might not be the main thing in Formula One, but it’s still important. And any driver disappointed with his place in the greater scheme of things gets the not insubstantial consolation of wall-to-wall rumpy-pumpy – the poor bastard.