Doug Nye: When the wheels fall off
“Back in the 1960s, the challenge was to make a tyre to last an entire race”
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Over long decades major manufacturers and their sponsors have invested colossal sums of money and expertise in what used to be called Grand Prix racing.
Lucrative payback has come from the mushrooming media audience captured. But while positive brand promotion has been claimed by most, just occasionally, and in some cases literally, the wheels have come flying off… Instead of selling more production cars, beverages, cigarettes, computer software, or tyres, the F1 spectacle could instead persuade many consumers to buy any brand other than the one they have just seen spectacularly fail.
An old German friend of mine – who sees motor racing as “…a boring zum-zum-zum silly little cars, bunch of guys chasing one another round in circles for 90-minutes…” – also offers this insightful comment: “Listening to the TV commentary; all about tyres doing this, and tyres needing that. To care about that stuff you gotta be some kind of rubber fetishist…!”.
