Formula One 2016: Yas Marina

Ultra Softs, Super Softs, and Softs (sounds like I’m describing bathroom tissue, I know).

Hamilton substantially ahead of Rosberg in Qualifying (his 11th of 21) and it won’t make a bit of difference unless Rosberg manages to finish worse than 3rd. Froth and bother about the Mercedes crew rotation policy (which happened to coincide with the beginning of Hamilton’s equipment failures and is merely another example in case you needed one that correlation is not causation no matter how much commentators try to hype the rivalry within Mercedes). I happen to think Hamilton is a nicer person and a better driver than Rosberg, but he’s not without flaws on either front.

Red Bull will try to prove they’re competitive, but they’re not, and the B Team, Toro Rosso, didn’t make it out of Q1 for the first time in a long time. Ferrari has had as long a streak of haplessness as I can remember (going on 7 or 8 years now) and shows no signs of improving.

Everyone who is not Mercedes is going to hope the extensive rule changes for 2017 will make them magically better or at least Mercedes worse but what in fact will happen is the same thing that always does, which is that Teams with big development budgets will hardly notice and everyone else will suffer because the Formula One recipe for cost containment (supposed to help the little teams) is the same Neoliberal Austerity logic to limits resources and testing which are the only way they will be able to improve.

The reason they keep changing the rules is that groups like Force India start to learn enough after a few seasons that they might become contenders, and we can’t have that.

About the only favorable augury for 2017 is that Bernie Ecclestone is being treated by the new ownership like the senile idiot he’s been for at least a decade and his delusional ravings ignored.

Next year we will have at least 1 less race and unless some kind of miracle happens it will be the German Grand Prix in Nurburg and there is no guarantee that Hockenheim will ever come back either. Why is that? Formula One is boring. It’s about the most boring sport there is outside of America’s Cup Yacht Racing, Throwball, and Football. Allow me to explain.

Football is boring because there is constant action, very little of which ultimately means anything at all but always with the potential that something could. After 90 minutes of it the most likely result is a 0 – 0 tie and the referees will add a random amount of time (called stoppage) that usually doesn’t change anything. If it is a meaningful game (and most aren’t) they’ll make it impossibly easy to score and the first team that doesn’t loses (yawn).

In Throwball almost everything is significant but most of the time you’re standing around plotting and scheming (they actually have designated intervals called ‘time outs’ for this) and after every 4 or 5 minutes of ‘action’ there are 6 minutes of beer and car commercials, most of them indistinguishable from each other and many of them exact repeats of the one you just saw (yawn).

With America’s Cup Yacht Racing the start is somewhat exciting but then you’re just waiting for the wind to change. I like it just fine, however I’ve been known to amuse myself by watching clouds disappear (yawn). Shortening the races doesn’t help, there’s simply less time for the wind to turn.

Formula One is like that. You get a lead early and hope your tires don’t go off or your engine explode. It is somewhat more civilized than Turn Left Bumper Cars because you’re not actively hoping fo someone to perish in flaming hunks of twisted metal.

Now somewhere, someone got the idea that Formula One could be as big a deal as Football, Throwball, Turn Left Bumper Cars (oh, it’s exciting, I’ll give it that) or even America’s Cup Yacht Racing and that they could make an astronomical amount of money by charging the tracks and TV Channels more. Well, that hasn’t worked. Viewership is down and attendance is down because the product is boring and the grand idea now is to make it as exciting as Turn Left Bumper Cars (where viewership and attendance are also down).

This is mistaken. Football and Throwball also have this problem and it’s not that they’re fundamentally more boring than they ever were, they are exactly the the same amount of boring.

What has changed is the audience. They’re poorer.

The expectations of the Plutocrats who skim the money has also changed. They want more.

Mammon has not decreed that you’re entitled to 10% annual returns, or any for that matter, and unless you invest Capital in producing a product all you’re doing is gambling and while that’s very addictive the House always wins.