Sporting formula running on empty

What is about boys and their expensive toys? The Formula One road-show has always teetered unsteadily along the dividing line between sport and show-business, but as the bandwagon rolled in and out of Japan last weekend, it reached a gaudy and tawdry climax. The inevitable focus in this part of the island was Eddie Irvine and as the spotlight fell on him, it illuminated the vacuity of the whole sorry business.

Sports generally get the stars they deserve. The easy grace with which DJ Carey carries his prodigious gifts could only be part of hurling's rich tapestry. The vainglory of Naseem Hamed is tailor-made for his boxing world, while only the cash-rich English Premiership could provide a platform for the bloated talents of someone like Paul Gascoigne. And that is why Irvine fits so comfortably into the unreal and artificial world of Formula One. The cosseted environment is a place where the drivers' egos can run free. It is one big adventure playground where all humility and any sense of responsibility are left at the front gate.

Formula One is also a place where the normal value systems do not apply. The protracted saga of the disqualification and then successful appeal by Ferrari following the Malaysian Grand Prix was the epitome of that. In an environment of such technical precision, the primacy of the regulations should be beyond question. But any such pretence was conveniently shunted to one side when it became clear that enforcement of the rules might mean that the final race of the season was not the customary television-friendly show-down.

Morality and modern international sport are uneasy bedfellows at the best of the time, but in Formula One not even lip-service is paid to any notion of "doing the right thing".

Perhaps that is why it is the pre-eminent global sport as we near the end of this century. Everything that has fuelled the development of sport over the last 100 years - the cult of the personality, the single-minded pursuit of profit, the promotion of entertainment at the expense of ethics, the pre-eminence of television coverage - have come together in the lumbering beast that is Formula One. Maybe we ultimately get the sports we deserve as well.

Formula One is sport for those people who have no time for the commitment and emotional engagement that football, GAA, rugby, golf or countless other disciplines might require. Most people can drive with a certain degree of competence and Formula One exploits the boy or girl racer in many of them. Newspapers and television love it because it represents a way into a captive and docile audience without having to worry about such outdated concepts as rules, value-systems or fair play. Everything, it seems, is fair game.

Eddie Irvine's pursuit of a world title was lapped up here by a supine local media over the last few weeks. The journalistic shorthand became that this was our local boy doing good and that any reservations about the murky world of Formula One were to be shunted to one side. Irvine's success had unequivocally to be a good thing and after that decision had been made, there was very little room for any other discussion.

The hype that was generated was a fascinating thing to behold. Formula One left its uneasy home in the sports pages and bulletins and was slotted into the entertainment and show-biz slots where it sat much more comfortably. Everyone, it seemed, had become an expert on the whys and wherefores of winning a world title and no journalistic stone was considered too banal to be overturned.

There were also those classically lazy filler stories where a wide-eyed reporter is dispatched to the subject's home town - in Irvine's case the Co Down village of Conlig - to interview the residents about the chances of their local hero in this or that competition. The reports were filled with all the usual platitudes about how confident everyone was, how proud they were of "their boy" and how the biggest homecoming party ever was being planned. Commissioning editors love this kind of stuff. They are journalism's version of the Chinese take-away meal - easy to digest and so insubstantial that you're ready for another one in an hour or so.

The way in which we were shamelessly encouraged to get swept along on some fanciful wave of Irvine emotion also reveals a lot about public attitudes to sport here. Formula One was very much this week's thing, particularly because there was a convenient local peg on which to hang it. And with attention spans so short and so changeable, this sort of transient hype is very typical of the way in which sport is consumed here.

Twenty years ago, the World Cup achievements of the Northern Ireland soccer team were the story of the moment and every detail was hungrily devoured. More recently there have between the boxing shooting stars of Barry McGuigan and Wayne McCullough and earlier this year it was the European Cup-winning run of the Ulster rugby side. Now all of them are virtually forgotten. The footballers are manager-less and direction-less. The boxers' stars burned brightly before defeat led to boredom. And the rugby team has been so sidelined in public affections that last Friday's hammering at the hands of Munster raised little more than a murmur of interest.

Irvine was this year's model, but, like all those other flavours of the month, his time too will pass. We like our sport in small, manageable chunks here and there is no structure or bedrock of tradition to support anything more permanent. Formula One slips effortlessly into all of this because it is the classic modern sporting product, the final triumph of style over content. But if you take the trouble to scratch the surface just a little, you come to the inescapable conclusion that it's not about Eddie against Mika or whether Michael really did enough to help Eddie. Those overblown personalities are merely the window-dressing. When all the frippery and all the bluster is stripped away, the harsh truth is that in Formula One the car is the only star. And that is the biggest indictment of all.