Permutations for 2014 are just as fluid, to the point where few would suffer a
jolt to wake up on Saturday and see Max Chilton on pole.
“It’s going to be very complicated,” Martin Brundle, normally such an astute
technical brain, admits. “We’re all going to need a little patience.”
Complex for race engineers, perhaps, but exhilaratingly uncertain for fans
alienated by the metronomic supremacy of “The Red Bull Years” – a book
which, if ever it was written, would fire the popular imagination about as
much as John Major’s memoir.
For F1 flourishes upon its caprice, its capacity for launching surprise stars
straight out of left field. Valtteri Bottas qualifying third for Williams
amid the downpours of Montreal was about as thrilling as it became in 2013,
but the landscape from Melbourne to Abu Dhabi is nothing like so level after
this torching of the rulebook.
Cars will putter to a standstill, half the field might fail to finish, while
even the sound of the engines will be all but unrecognisable in light of the
switch from full-throated V8 to a more mewling V6.
The sport seeks to be more ‘environmentally friendly’, we are told, although
any enterprise that hauls its bedraggled foot-soldiers across 25,000 miles
for the first three races alone cannot be unduly preoccupied by its carbon
footprint.
No wonder Hamilton counsels that “this is going to be the most exciting year
for any fan currently watching or who wants to start”.
Turbo hybrid engines, fuel limits, reductions in downforce: it all constitutes
the most thoroughgoing reinvention of F1 in a generation, and it could
hardly have arrived at a more opportune juncture.
Sebastian Vettel’s streak of nine straight wins might have engorged his
groaning floor-to-ceiling trophy cabinet at home in Walchwil, Switzerland,
but the monotonous purgatory was “destroying” the spectacle, in Hamilton’s
words.
So, after DRS and KERS, F1 has chosen to inscribe ABV among its recent ruses.
Anything But Vettel.
Unfair, maybe, but the quadruple world champion accepts as readily as anybody
that this is a world where one must innovate or die. The casual follower,
disillusioned at seeing Vettel eclipse the opposition in the same fashion as
Deep Blue dealt with Garry Kasparov, cares not for seeing whether he can
overhaul Alberto Ascari in Australia with a 10th victory in succession, but
simply for a rekindling of the show.
The unreliability of the Renault engines, coupled with the mighty advantage of
Mercedes in pre-season testing, promises to deliver just the right
intoxicating concoction.
One must merely hope that the revived Silver Arrows do not do for this
campaign what Dietrich Mateschitz’s energy drinks company have done for the
last four, by streaking into the sunset too soon. The FIA’s move to award to
double points to the finale in Abu Dhabi, desperately contrived though it
is, at least aims to avert that outcome.
Any fairweather fans spooked by the profusion of fresh faces – in McLaren’s
Kevin Magnussen, Russian starlet Daniil Kvyat at Toro Rosso, and Marcus
Ericsson at Caterham – can equally be comforted by some nostalgic echoes of
the past. Take, for example, Dennis’s pronouncement upon the fortunes of
McLaren: “The company was a little unfit, it needs to get fit and there is a
pain to getting fit.”
From the man who once told us that Fernando Alonso helped make
“car-developmental progress more linear”, this was a prime example of
convoluted ‘Ron-speak’, itself assumed to have become almost as much of a
dying art as a competitive race.