Matt Bishop: 'Skill, courage and V10s: Albert Park's first GP showed what F1 used to be'

On Sunday, Melbourne will awake to the particular buzz that only a Formula 1 race day can generate — and, as I write, and as the F1 circus readies itself for the running of the 2026 Australian Grand Prix, it is worth our pausing to note that three full decades have elapsed since F1 first strutted its stuff in Albert Park. The 1996 Australian Grand Prix marked the beginning of a new era of top-tier single-seater racing Down Under, for it was the first grand prix in Melbourne’s long and fruitful romance with F1. As it turned out, we saw a race that encapsulated much of what the sport was then about: skill, courage, mechanical simplicity, and a kind of raffish unpredictability that seems almost antique now.

Qualifying belonged to a fresh-faced rookie who wore overalls so baggy that he looked like a boy-band star disguised as a plumber. I am referring to 24-year-old Jacques Villeneuve, who placed his blue and white Williams on the pole for his maiden grand prix, as though F1 were merely another rung on a ladder that he had casually decided to continue to climb. It was a remarkably impressive performance, and, amplified as his profile already had been by his being the son of an F1 legend, Gilles Villeneuve, it instantly made him a megastar.

The race will for ever be remembered for the initially terrifying lap-one cartwheel performed by Martin Brundle, whose Jordan made contact with David Coulthard’s McLaren and Johnny Herbert’s Sauber, was launched skywards into a barrel roll, then disintegrated on contact with the Turn 3 barrier with a level of violence that made even hardened mechanics wince. By the time the plucky Brundle had jogged back to the pits to jump into the spare Jordan, and the dust had settled — or, more accurately, the debris had been swept up — it was Villeneuve’s team-mate, Damon Hill, who eventually beat him to the chequered flag, kicking off the F1 drivers’ world championship campaign that would define his career.

Thirty years on, the same sport returns to the same parkland with the same number of teams — 11 — yet the similarities largely end there. The entry list in 1996 comprised outfits whose names still resonate with anyone who was already in love with F1 back then, and yet time, that most ruthless of team principals, has been selective in its mercy. Of those 11, only three have endured in unaltered form: Ferrari, McLaren, and Williams.

They are F1’s trio of ageing aristocrats who have weathered all the ownership upheavals, all the commercial storms, all the regulatory revolutions, and all the technological convulsions of the three chromatic decades that separate the then from the now. Five other teams have survived, albeit by shedding skins and assuming new identities, like particularly ambitious reptiles. Benetton has become Alpine, swapping an Italian fashion house for a brand that marketing friends of mine who are not petrolheads tell me sounds more like a Swiss ski-wear supplier than a French sports car marque. Jordan, once the cheeky Irish disrupter rejoicing in yellow paint and rock ’n’ roll swagger, now answers to Aston Martin, wrapped in a metallic shade of British racing green and struggling to make its Honda power units perform properly. Tyrrell, the garagiste stalwart of an earlier age, is today’s Mercedes, a works behemoth whose resources would have seemed like science fiction in Ken Tyrrell’s Surrey timber yard. Sauber has evolved into Audi, also emblematic of the increasingly manufacturer-heavy landscape of modern F1. And Minardi, once the F1 paddock’s favourite underachiever, has metamorphosed into Racing Bulls, the junior partner in Red Bull’s F1 empire.

Three teams from the 1996 grid have vanished entirely: Ligier, Footwork, and Forti. Of the three, Ligier is the one that still tugs at the heartstrings. There was something glorious about those cars: the beautiful bleu de France livery; the odd flash of race-winning brilliance; and the sense that genius and chaos cohabited the same cramped design office, out of which emerged through a mist of Gitanes or Gauloises smoke the occasional masterpiece. Footwork and Forti were brave but brittle presences, emblematic of a time when independent teams could still dream of punching above their financial weight, even if that dream often disappeared in a haze of blown engines and unpaid invoices.

In 1996 the paddock felt smaller, more intimate, and more human than it does now. The motorhomes that were driven to European grands prix were recognisably just that — motorhomes — not the palatial three-storey paddock mansions that the teams inhabit today. The distance between mechanic and team principal, between journalist and driver, and between fan and anything a fan might like to see or even touch was measured in paces, not passes. Today’s F1 is a global entertainment colossus, a travelling metropolis of technology and marketing in which data flows as abundantly as champagne. Back then — granted — telemetry was present, but it was not sovereign. Now it is the invisible hand guiding strategy, set-up, and even driving style. The modern F1 driver is as much data analyst as athlete, poring over traces and deltas with an intensity that would have confounded his 1996 counterpart.

The aces who raced in Melbourne in 1996 are now, inevitably, part of the sport’s extended family rather than its competitive core. None still races in F1 — unsurprisingly — although several remain conspicuously visible. Brundle, Coulthard, and Villeneuve have become television commentators and/or pundits, jettisoning their race suits and helmets for designer jeans and broadcast headsets. Their opinions, sharpened by years of experience, lend nostalgic context to a sport that sometimes seems in danger of accelerating away from its own history. Hill joins Herbert in the increasingly congested podcasting sphere, where their anecdotes flow more freely than ever they did when I used to interview them back in the day.