The element of danger is central to the increasingly obscure appeal of Formula One. Although safety precautions have grown more stringent over the past decade, there are few things so eye-catching as the high-speed crash and the glamorous violence involved with witnessing the disintegration of one of the iconic cars.
And when the drivers, now packaged in a manner as sleek and lightweight as the machines they control, step from the wreckage and walk away with a casual wave, so much the better.
For a while at yesterday's Grand Prix in Melbourne, it appeared as if Jacques Villenueve had achieved the perfect crash. The velocity at which his car careered through the air before cannoning into the reinforced meshing was breathtaking and shocking and, of course, captured from every conceivable camera angle. It will probably feature on many news pages around the world today. In the minutes after the incident, the driver himself was interviewed as he walked back to the pit.
"Yeah, I'm okay," he said nonchalantly. It was, he explained, down to a simple overtaking manoeuvre gone wrong: he went for the outside option, Ralf Schumacher second guessed him and the cars collided, causing a scattering of debris and tyres.
His poise and composure were enough to provoke a dam-burst of admiration from F1 veteran Murray Walker, who decided, in no uncertain terms, that "these men are indeed supermen".
Walker is, of course, the irreplaceable voice of Formula One, his commentaries coming in a continuous high-pitched whine that sounds not unlike the engines that he so clearly loves. Indeed, the legend, who has oiled his larynx for his last season, spent the build-up to the Melbourne race on a sort of nostalgia lap.
"I first spoke to you at Spa back in 1991," he told Michael Schumacher while the world champion smiled awkwardly and tried to look as if that decade-old, scheduled three-minute interview was also a moment that he treasured.
For those who follow the race game from the living room, though, Walker is among the best things about it. He gets his facts gloriously wrong, but the great thing about F1 is that it is anchored by a limitless library of facts, almost all of them incredibly boring. But Walker's enthusiasm makes them acceptable.
As this season begins, it is difficult to know whether Formula One is chiefly concerned with races, cars, people or tyres. The suspicion is that it is essentially about tyres. On RTE, Peter Collins could be found deliberating on "the great war between Bridgestone and Michelin". We could expect, he assured us, "a fantastic battle between the two tyre companies".
It seems a dubious premise on which to base a sports season, but nobody else seems to mind. But this season, the old rubber spheres were spoken of with religious fervour.
It may have escaped your attention, for instance, that off-season design changes mean all front car fenders are 15mm higher and the rear wings have fewer elements, which results in a decrease in the overall down force. But the superb form of this season's star tyres has compensated for any potential lack of speed, and the cars are faster than ever.
The Ferrari and McLaren motors are still, of course, fastest. Dress F1 up with the finest hyperbole in the world and it remains, at best, a two-horse race between the pale and permanently unhappy looking Mika Hakkinen and the more dashing, heroic Schumacher.
The rest are just support cast. Eddie Jordan, we were informed, cancelled the team Christmas party as a draconian gesture designed to get his squad to shape up a bit for this year. Definitely harsh, but it showed signs of having worked.
The first grand prix of the year was like so many of the others we endured last year: a (reasonably) high-speed procession of expensive cars, with two significantly faster than the rest. The viewer was asked to share in the delicious excitement of imagining what could happen should one of the leader's fuel stops prove three seconds too slow. And even this failed to come about. Formula One had something when the cars were flawed and unpredictable and more or less the same speed. Now, it is little more than a global billboard, a season-long nightclub for Eddie Irvine, a high-tech pantomime.
But because humans still steer and make mistakes, F1 can still loosely declare itself a sport. The drivers at least believe there they are in a race, and when they fly off the track as Villeneuve did, they prove that there is blood and heart and some sort of soul behind all the polish and money.
The spanner in the works was, of course, the death of an Australian race marshal, hit by a tyre seconds from the accident. The winning drivers, looking genuinely shaken, did not celebrate with the customary flow of champagne and passed condolences on to the man's family.
It is hard to fathom that in a sport so heavily defined by precision, in which millimetres and tyre pressure and rules are everything, an official could lose his life through something as random as a flying tyre. Formula One is supposed to carry risks, but only for those highly paid to avoid them. This was the second such fatality in six months. On the repeat broadcast yesterday afternoon, the marshal's death was made apparent only at the end. It made all that had gone before seem cheap to the point of being grotesque. The inference was that while it was regrettable, such incidents are acceptable. And that's probably how it is. The road show will move on. Only when the next casualty is a star will loss of life become a serious issue.
