Doubling the bounty in Abu Dhabi serves only to devalue the endeavours of
every driver in the 18 races before. In 2014, with the switch to V6 power
plants promising at least a challenge to the Red Bull supremacy, the onus is
more pronounced than ever upon consistency and yet the FIA’s latest novelty
would effectively decide the world champion based on some manufactured
shoot-out in the Gulf. The desire for a perfect conclusion is so insatiable
that the suits in Paris are content with warping the very spirit of the
competition.
Such false scripting is, alas, becoming endemic. I blame the Americans, for it
seems as if sports the world over are misguidedly embracing the concept of a
post-season. Take golf, for example, where the European Tour have waxed
endlessly about their ‘Final Series’, only for Graeme McDowell, one of the
prime contenders, to skip the penultimate event in Turkey because he wanted
to spend more time with his family. Likewise, the FedEx Cup in the US
remains a horribly over-complex postscript to the majors, complete with an
unfathomable points system and a £7.5 million winner’s cheque out of step
with every other prize fund.
The sense of an ending made a wonderful title for Julian Barnes’s Booker
Prize-winning novel, but its application to sport is dubious at best.
Tennis is the ultimate travelling circus – indeed, the first scheduled WTA
event of 2014 begins, misleadingly, in Brisbane on Dec 29 – and yet both
tours are determined to confect the feeling of a denouement by their tour
finals in London and Istanbul. Why? The finest climactic acts in sport are
always the utterly unexpected – Jean Van de Velde’s hapless unravelling at
Carnoustie, the Boston Red Sox’s recovery from 3-0 down to vanquish the New
York Yankees in 2004 – rather than the ‘buzzer-beaters’ that are 10-a-penny
in basketball after 48 minutes of shadow-boxing.
Orson Welles would say that “if you want a happy ending, then that depends on
where you stop your story”. In the case of the Formula One campaign the
story ended, definitively, in India, where Vettel’s genius prematurely
snuffed out any hope of a twist. And if you want an unexpected ending,
perhaps go and watch The Usual Suspects. Do not come to motorsport, where
Vettel and a certain Michael Schumacher have proved emphatically over the
past 13 years that drama can be doused by relentless Teutonic dominance.
The ambition to invigorate Formula One with a few extra permutations is a
sensible one, yet in its Solomonic wisdom the FIA has merely compounded the
problems, making a farce of the 2014 contest from the very start.
In the richest, most technically sophisticated sport of all, ‘double points’
is apparently the best innovation the powerbrokers can concoct. Their
uncanny ability to nobble themselves has been taken straight from the manual
of Curly Howard, the famously limping vaudeville star who, while cleaning
out his rifle one day, ended up shooting himself in the foot.