“Complete nonsense,” was Max Mosley’s retort. “People will get used to the
noise. Those cars were becoming dinosaurs.”
On one level, this is evidently a matter of personal taste. Perhaps spiked
with a strong dose of nostalgia: the sport of Moss’s imagination was
smaller, more personal, more visceral, more difficult to convey to a global
television audience (although Sky is believed to be offering the smell of
engine oil as a red-button option from 2015). It is easy to dismiss the
debate as so much navel-gazing, an internal discussion about internal
combustion, a load of car buffs talking about cars.
But I think it has a wider significance. Fundamentally, this is a question
about what sport should sound like. So much of the intangible emotion
generated by sport is bound up in its acoustics, and as F1 is swiftly
discovering, you tamper with them at your peril.
Be very clear that we are not talking about crowd noise here, but the physics
and phonics of matter on matter. The British springtime is a fiesta of
pleasant sporting noises: the first optimistic crack of willow on leather,
the clean pock of snooker balls at the Crucible, the dull clumpety-clump of
hooves at Aintree, the plasticky clatter of water bottles being kicked in
the dugout as Newcastle United concede yet another late winner.
Part of the instant charm of the Winter Olympics is its uniquely captivating
audio profile, its scrape of ice and scratch of snow. It explains, too, why
grunting in tennis and vuvuzelas in football generate such disproportionate
irritation. Sport is music; adulterating it is like taking a sharp
fingernail to a favourite record.
These days, the sound of televised sport is as artificial as it is real. It
may surprise you to know that rowing and horse racing are just two of the
sports in which prerecorded sound effects are often played over the top of
live broadcasts. Both rugby codes now routinely attach microphones to
referees, offering viewers an insight denied to spectators in the stadium.
So maybe the more pertinent question is where we are all going, sonically
speaking. This is a society where music is increasingly something
experienced on mobile phones and laptop speakers, where acoustic innovations
are priced beyond the means of all but a privileged few, that is above all
obsessed with talking rather than listening.
Perhaps the sport of the future will sound like one extended press conference,
a discordant audio-collage of rambling commentators, inexhaustible expert
opinion, endless advertising slogans, a bottomless ocean of words and words
and more words.
Which is why, whether you prefer six cylinders or eight, or are scarcely
fussed either way, it is possible to regard the Formula One noise debate
with a certain cautious optimism. It reminds us that sounds unlock the
emotions like nothing else: evoking times and places, moments and memories,
passions and promises, perhaps even the point of life itself. It reminds us
that at its simplest level, sport is not a conversation, but a symphony.
And more than that, it reminds us that enough people still care.