Doug Nye: ‘If Verstappen keeps dominating F1, its appeal could fall off a cliff’

Set against the background of a wildly unstable world any competitive endeavour that can be fought out for fun, achievement and promotion –rather than for basic survival – can expect to thrive. But the ever-present enemy of such success, regardless of how unpredictable the wider background might become, is for the sporting endeavour itself to become frozen – a boringly stable island within our unstable world.

If – and of course this early in the new World Championship season it’s a big ‘if’ – the Red Bull Racing/Max Verstappen juggernaut’s domination of the Bahrain and Saudi GPs continues, then the game’s appeal to a Netflix generation brief-attention-span public really could fall off a cliff.

Stability prevails in two forms, one advantageous, the other desperately damaging. For the technical and racing regulations to have stability is undoubtedly good – but for the racing itself to prove stable can quickly become a promotional disaster.

“Sheer technological quality has removed the destabilising factor”

Stability is in fact the enemy of healthy competition. Glorious instability instead should be the actual aim, and in truth it is sheer technological quality which has removed the greatest destabilising factor from modern motor sport. As one fellow curmudgeon grumphed to me recently “these damned cars are too reliable, unless they fall over one another there’s nothing going to swat ’em”.

Way back in the early ’80s Bernie Ecclestone complained “I don’t know why you blokes seem to think old-time racing was so great. If you’d actually been there you’d have seen that each race lasted forever with cars trundling around, most of them breaking down and Fangio usually winning by minutes…”.

As the years rolled by, Juan Manuel Fangio and his margin of “minutes” in Formula 1 gave way to Clark, Stewart, Lauda etc, and the margins whittled down to seconds, and fractions thereof. Now Bahrain 2024 just saw the GP won by the reigning World Champion by a margin of 22 whole seconds. Stability reigns.

Of course, for years preceding this current Red Bull domination, that death-grip fell to Mercedes-AMG. In many ways it was perpetuated by regulations, not least the allegedly cost-saving restriction upon testing and in-season engine development which was intended to level the playing field between hyper-funded top teams and the cash-strapped downfield cannon fodder. But such restriction allowed whoever introduced a major technical advance at season’s launch to maintain that advantage ’til season’s end. When Brawn had so brilliantly stolen the F1 World Championship in 2009 it was the team’s early-season winning run which gave it the points cushion to keep ahead until season’s end. When Mercedes’ early-season engine advances proved superior, no rival could truly overcome its deficit until season’s end. Stability ruled – at the cost of racing instability.

Against this really rather dispiriting background, the growth of Formula 1’s American-style marketing succeeded in papering over such tedious cracks. The loss of boring old fart support as those fondly recalling the knife-edge times in the ’70s and ’80s of Hunt v. Lauda or Jones v. Piquet lost interest and moved on to support something really exciting, like golf, crown-green bowling or watching paint dry, has been more than made up by rampant celeb culture for the Netflix generation. Some kept the faith – and still do – but even their extraordinary tolerance is being sorely stretched – by boring stability.

The dearth of meaningful on-track tension surely allowed the demeaning drama of the Christian Horner texts to unfurl which provoked such a major media feeding frenzy that the coverage far outstripped any positive press from Red Bull Racing’s victories on track. Was this pandering to a gossip-hungry Netflix audience – because the on-track racing itself lacked tension and had instead become just so predictable?

The brighter part of world-class (ahem?) motor racing that same March weekend came at Qatar’s Losail circuit in the most peculiarly-chosen 1812Kms (10-hour maximum) race opening this year’s so-called World Endurance Championship. While the winning works-backed Penske Porsche 963 co-driven by Laurens Vanthoor, Kevin Estre and André Lotterer led for over seven hours the unpredictability of a late pitstop to fix body damage at least demonstrated the racing drama which Formula 1 had failed to provide. That damage had been accumulated from a series of brushes with back-marker minor-class racing machinery and despite Porsche going one better than Red Bull – in scoring a 1-2-3 whitewash race result against Red Bull’s mere 1-2 – Qatar’s sports car enduro seems to have been infinitely more interesting than the fleeting F1 farrago taking place just 84 miles away. Roll on a fresh Formula?

Back in the late 1960s/early ’70s I covered more great sports car races than Grands Prix, and adored both types. But the frontrunners in great cars were much the same star drivers. There’s a moral there somewhere.

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Doug Nye is the UK’s leading motor racing historian and has been writing authoritatively about the sport since the 1960s