What Is F1 for a Common Man?

(Photo by Steve Tee-Pool/Getty Images)

What is F1 for a common man?

Let us come to a question, which has been forgotten by FIA, FOTA, FOM and all others who claim that that they are the saviors of Formula One. It is the question of what F1 means for a common man.

F1 is a medium, a source, an option, which helps them to get relieved from their daily routine of life.

It is something different for people who are employed either with the federations or those with the participants/who make a living out of them, who are a very small percentage, maximum one or two percent of the whole base and for their benefit the industry is run currently.

Who has built F1: Is it the common people like us who have fancied the super fast cars, the teams, the tracks, the glamour,and the great racing drivers?

Have we championed and stood behind the great names of Lotus, Brabham, Ferrari etc. and turned them into their present iconic status? It is one very high end show business and we hold the keys for their fortunes.

The various groups who claim that they are acting in the goodwill of saving F1 should understand the sacrifices that we make to watch when it on (either on the track or on television).

We make sacrifices to see the sport. How many of us would have lied to their girlfriends for watching F1, how many would have fought with their wives, parents, siblings, saved money religiously to watch the sport in person or on television?

We need to have participants from the fans, who need to be present across these federations to make the sport livelier and make it worth for the money that we pay.

We people, the common people across the globe, have helped built the massive empires of Bernie, Dietrich Mateschitz, Flavio Briatore, CVC, Michael Schumacher, the legacy of teams etc.

We are the ones who buy their sports cars, road cars, buy products of their sponsors, pay the ticket fee, the fee on television and probably all tangible and intangible monetary components associated with the F1 showbiz.

Does it really matter to us in our day to day life whether a V12, V10, or V8 runs in the car, the tires are grooved or have slicks, whether any particular personality sits on the pit wall or not?

All we need is the spectacle, a worthy spectacle, which is worthy for the hard-earned money that we pay for this wonderful F1 circus.

But the sport has been very successful over the last few years in providing a wonderful off-track action, which even any scriptwriter/soap opera could not beat. Championships being argued in the court, teams having to spend a massive budget for lawyers and off-track events, millions of dollars thrown in flop technologies like KERS etc, the list goes endless without creating anything to improve the spectacle.

Even the new rules of the 2009 and the countless man hours of OWG haven’t provided us any improvement in the spectacle, all we have is a former Scuderia man running a Ferrari kind of show albeit a white car and a British driver with one similarity, poor o Rubens in he usual No. 2 spot.

In this kind of tough global economic scenario, it is said that “Cash is King”. We still pay the same money for the F1 circus and our returns in the form of the spectacle haven’t increased.

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