Schumacher killed the F1‏

Formula One teams are warming up before the new season, and I thought that this funny title was cool although the story is not as funny !

"Video killed the radio star" were singing the Buggles in the early 80's, an era when the Formula One car championship was still an uncertain and thrilling competition between pilots, mechanics & design, and sometimes even nations. Each race was a new departure, surprizes could come from any of the hundreds of parameters that were followed and somehow managed but not 100% under control. If the weather was turning bad, the team with the best strategy and the smartest driver intuitive capacities could overdrive the one with the biggest engine and the richest bank account.

Nowadays, when one of this $-designed-plane-car is just passing another one it is already a big event. And if ever the leader of the championship fails because of the breakdown of the engine or the slip of his car out of the track it is a so big disappointment that this becomes the hit of the championship.

With the rise of the Michael Schumacher generation, and at the end of the Senna-Prost-Mansell one, Formula One has become an industrial market, involving so much money that any of the craftmen of the past were able to stay around the table. By the way, reliability (and fortunately security) increased so much in the framework of very strict rules, that all cars looked about the same. And so it has become with their performances. Unfortunately the shows on track lost interests...

Talented drivers but still blossomed, like MS of course, Alonso or Raïkkönen, however the mega-machine of the big teams swallowed them in the yoke of a framed and savourless annual competition, organized by associations & companies looking for money (see how expensive tickets became) and not enough for mechanical shows.

The domination of Schumacher on the driver side (and his enrollment at the Scuderia) , and the supremacy of the Renault engine just some years after, were thus sort of triggers for a lot of non-ferrarists/-renault fans to take a step back from F1 and to forget how exciting this could be before them; even if a lot of this was driven through industrial adaptation of technical rules. It is anyway a symbol of how sport can lose its fascination, and moreover its sensitiveness.

Let's hope that the new season that is going to start will forecast of a positive change in this field.

Ciao
MfS