Chequered Sport

Cars. Ever since Henry Ford’s legendary quote about the Ford Model T, telling people to bugger off if they didn’t like the car in black, cars have been the stuff of legend. Over the years, people have devoted their heart and souls to cars – writing about cars, making cars, fixing cars, reading about cars and driving cars. The thrill of the wind blowing in your hair as you zoom around in an open-top convertible, the sudden surge of raw adrenaline coursing through your veins as you hit pedal-to-the-metal and let the engine take over, the feeling of freedom as you power that beast down an inviting highway away from civilization – this is the sort of stuff that has driven people to heights of orgasmic delight. People wait in anticipation, drool dripping down their tongues, as Bugatti unveils its latest supercar. Debates punctuated with apoplectic rage do the rounds of the media and online circuits regarding Porsche’s latest off-roader. National pride gets linked with cars, personal self-worth is intrinsically connected to the type of car your own, entire eras have been defined by the kind of cars made…ah, the joy of cars. 

Sadly, though, I’m not much of a car person. This means that:

• My car is not an extension or a reflection of my personality (to be fair, I suppose small, functional and Korean would not be an extension of too many people’s personalities!).
• My car is not something I use to make a grand statement to reinforce my machismo.
• My car is not something I use to make a grand statement to offset any perceived lack of machismo.

Don’t get me wrong, I do get excited and exclaim “Whoa!” at the sight of a two-door convertible that just zipped by – but it’s more of a distant appreciation, along the lines of “Sure, that’s a cool car – but it’s not like I’m going to give up an arm and a leg to own it. And neither will I feel like I haven’t amounted to anything in life if I don’t end up owning that car”. If one fine day it turns out that junk mails don’t lie and an obscure person from a strife-torn African country deposits a truckload of money in my bank account, there are probably a lot of expenditures that would make the list above “buy a super-fancy car”.

Which brings me to Formula 1. I’m not exactly sure what to make of Formula 1. Even though I’m not much of a car person, I do follow a lot of sports, and Formula 1 happens to be one of them. I have absolutely no idea why. I’ve always had a complex relationship with Formula 1 – love-hate would be too simplistic a term to describe it. There’s something very odd about Formula 1. It combines the primal, unadulterated thrill of racing with the robotic, mechanized dullness of technology to create an utterly perplexing proposition. Five minutes after a frantic, incident-strewn start where 20 cars almost crash into each other, a typical Formula 1 race degenerates into lap after lap of mind-numbing monotonicity. Yes, there are pit stops where a clumsy mechanic might add a touch of excitement, or the odd spectacular car-crash – but beyond that there’s very little to hold your attention. In essence, a Formula 1 race is 2 hours of excruciating dullness interspersed with judiciously rationed portions of edge-of-the-seat action. Rarely do 20 people putting their lives at risk contrive to look as tedious as they do in Formula 1.

There are two dead giveaways that Formula 1 is actually rather boring:

1. Presence of hot women: While I’m not complaining about this, the presence of hot women in Formula 1 betrays a lack of confidence shown by the organizers of the sport – they’re worried that enough people may not bother with the sport and so they feel the need to bring in loads of hot women to just stand around and look pretty. Think about it – the only other sports that use hot women are American sports, which are packaged as this ultimate male fantasy extravaganza and geared towards boosting TV ratings with all their timeouts, or the IPL that is anyway made-for-TV and tries too hard.
2. Fake excitement displayed by commentators: If you ever listen to an F1 commentator speaking, it always sounds like he’s right at the edge of his seat. You’d think he might fall off any minute, but he manages to stay at the edge of his seat for 60 laps without falling off. At first, this might fool you into thinking that there IS actually something happening, until you realize that what he’s saying is something fairly mundane like “Ooh, Fernando really needs to look after his tyres. Sure, there’s no one within 20 seconds of him, but with the sun beating down on the tracks there’s always the chance that his tyres will turn to jelly. Maybe that’ll happen in another 20 laps, but we’ll keep saying it every two laps so that you think this is all very exciting and his tyres will turn to jelly any minute.” It just feels like they’re trying to overcompensate. Even in the case of cricket, which is another sport that has its fair share of boring passages, this doesn’t happen. Cricket commentary is infused with generous doses of complete gibberish such as “You can tell that Praveen Kumar is serious about his bowling whenever his shirt is no longer tucked in”. This immediately indicates that there’s absolutely NOTHING in the match worth talking about; the commentator simply picked out a card from a hat that said “Random comments to spew that cannot be proved or disproved in any way and is too innocuous to result in any controversy” and read what was written on the card.

Another problem with Formula 1 are the teams – the teams are all named after car companies (or an energy drink company). How can you cheer for a company? In which other sport would you say, “Oh, I’m cheering for Accenture. I’m a big fan of theirs!” or “How could you cheer for Coca Cola? Unilever is so much better!” It just makes you sound like a complete sell-out.

Perhaps that’s the problem. Even though we’ve jettisoned our college dreams of never being a sell-out and changing the world for the practical reality of paying the rent, it’s not something we like to be reminded of. And when racing is turned into an elaborately complex, big-companies-spending-millions spectacle, a little bit of that simplicity that we’d like to cling on to is lost.