Formula One Hits The Skids

The headlines being written about Formula One and Motor Racing these last few days have not been kind to the image of the sport. The withdrawl of Honda from the competition, due to the economic downturn in the car manufacturing industry, had the sport splattered all over the front pages of the newspapers for all the wrong reasons. The obscene amount of money required to take a team through a season, estimated around $250 million, may yet force other car manufacturers to rethink the necessity of having their name associated with the Formula One brand.

In a year when we have a British driver win the Formula One Drivers Championship, you would have thought that Lewis Hamilton would have been hands-down favourite to walk away with the BBC’s Sport Personality of the Year award. Not so! It seems many of the public now prefer our sporting hereos to be of the underdog variety and not of that surrounded by elitist engineers, spending fortunes tweaking parts of a motor cars chassis. We want to think of them pounding the streets, Rocky Balboa style, at 4am in the morning, pushing themselves through new tolerance levels and achieving that dream of Olympic Gold.

I feel that until Formula One considers serious cost-savings at every level of the sport its fall from grace with the public will continue. Its difficult to envisage the future of Formula One at this critical time and it is hard to believe that one day the thunderous roar from a Formula One race may just be a distant memory.