It was with great expectation that I watched the Singapore F1 Grand Prix on Sunday. The scene was set for a great experience. Fresh in our minds was the debacle of Crashgate when in 2008 Nelson Piquet jnr, evidently under team orders deliberately crashed to help his team mate's prospects. This disgraceful episode cost Favio Briatore and Pat Symonds dear and didn't half help Renault either. Would 2009 throw up similar drama? Well it did - sort of. By one of those extraordinary coincidences one sees in motor racing a Renault crashed in almost the same place, but in practice. However the scene was still set: night race, on a fairly physically gruelling circuit; last year's champion on pole and this year's putative champion back at tenth on the grid.
But to me the race delivered very little. I found it curiously uninvolving and anodyne, boring even. The night setting produced a spectacle that was more like a video game than a motor race. There was little sense of speed (street circuits seldom look fast) and the race soon became one of those dreary processions that nowadays typify F1. Once more victory seemed to be won by the best race strategy and the slickest pitstops. Where was the drama? Where was the nail biting tension as the aspirant champion diced with the reigning champion finally overtaking him under brakes on the last corner of the last lap to win the race and the crowd.
I have been following F1 since the halcyon days of Moss, Stewart, Clark and Brabham and whilst it gets bigger and bigger in commercial terms it seems to get less and less exciting. The problem is there isn't enough racing! So the next FIA President needs to think long and hard about how he can make F1 once again the most exciting sport on Earth.
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