There’s a story about Keith Moon, legendary drummer with The Who and general god of rock ‘n’ roll excess, which involves a hotel room in Mombassa and a girl.
Now in the general scheme of things, there’s nothing there to rival the discovery of alien life for new value but there was a problem. Just as tings were, warming up nicely, Moon discovered there was something that wasn’t quite right. The girl had something missing, or rather something added. You’re probably ahead of me now but cutting to the chase, this was not a lady this was a bloke. The result; huge anti-climax and Moon escaping through the nearest window.
Disappointment is really all to do with expectation. There are few things worse than the feeling of disappointment, of being let down. But it happens and the greater the expectation the more intense the disappointment.
Disappointment is hard to handle but sometimes it has to be put down to one of those things. Life sucks sometimes. It’s nobody’s fault but things go wrong; people just don’t deliver.
It’s different though when there’s money at stake - if you buy a ticket for a show you expect a show.
You don’t go to opera and expect the chorus and a couple of leads to be missing. If 76 trombones are advertised in the big parade, then 76 trombones is what people will expect. By the same token, if you buy a ticket for a football game you expect a proper contest, not a five-a-side kick about.
But this is the real world, not the vaguely surreal universe that Formula One appears to inhabit.
F1 should be one of the kings of sport with its combination of human skill, mind-numbing bravery and mould-breaking technology. It’s a truly international sport that provides a marketing link for some of the most powerful and best-known brands on earth.
“Ever thought you’ve been cheated,” snarled another old rocker Johnny Rotten some decades ago.
Well the 100,000-plus US motor sport fans that coughed up to watch the US Grand Prix last week certainly did and had every right to.
No matter what it might have said in the small print, the fact that only six cars took part was a disgrace and has made a laughing stock of the sport.
This week we’ve been treated to 101 conspiracy theories about what happened and why, but it seems clear that somebody, somewhere lost the plot and forgot that professional sport – all professional sport – is part of the entertainment business. Fans, sponsors, TV networks and advertisers on those TV networks suffered, as has F1. If you were trying to devise a cunning plan to sabotage F1 as a global sport this might have been one of the ruses you considered. But don’t bother. F1 seems hell bent on self-destruction.
While accepting that it’s easy to be wise after the event and that from a distance of 4,500 miles there’s absolutely no first-hand knowledge at play here, there are still a couple of points which are worth making.
First up, driver safety is and must remain of paramount importance. Too many lives have been lost in motor sport and nobody wants to add to the tally.
But when you’ve an appointment with 100,000 or more fans and a date with the world via television, the show really does have to go on if it’s humanly possible.
So somebody screwed up. It happens, and Michelin have publicly said they got it wrong.
But we’re told that creating a chicane into one particular bend would have reduced the speed of the cars sufficiently and that all of the teams would have been happy to race. So why wasn’t it done?
Surely if there was a solution it should have been adopted. Any other issues could have been dealt with afterwards. Had the authorities wished to punish teams on Michelin tyres for being insufficiently equipped for the conditions, they might have done so through fines or the docking of constructor championship points after the event. But the show would have gone on and integrity would have been maintained.
Yesterday, FIA president Max Mosley was squarely blamed for the fiasco by Paul Stoddart of Minardi who pulled absolutely no punches.
The long and the short of it appears to be that there was a solution within grasp but that the opportunity was lost. Through a bizarre intransigence that has no place in sport today.
There is, of course, a requirement to be unbending with regards to most sports’ rules and regulations, particularly in areas such as doping. But here we had a situation where the majority of participants in a world-class event, in front of a worldwide TV audience, felt they couldn’t compete without risking the lives of their drivers.
Just when you felt it was safe to back into the water of F1, this has to go and happen. All the progress which has been made during this far more open and exciting season has been wiped away at a stroke, credibility has been dumped and may never be restored in the United States - a key market which F1 has never entirely cracked. Now it may never do so.
Isn’t it ironic that motor racing old-timers say that one of Bernie Ecclestone’s great achievements was to take a motor racing series - in which nobody knew exactly who would be on the grid for the next Grand Prix - and instil order, discipline and certainty. According to observers including Stoddart, Ecclestone wasn’t to blame for Sunday but it seems that some of his good work may have been undone.
