Five years ago, with Michael Schumacher on course for a fifth successive drivers’ championship and the sport’s most glamorous marque, Ferrari, growing cocky about their ascendancy, fears that formula one had become boring and would lose its glitz abounded. Sure, there was still Dannii Minogue, halfway between being a failing singer and her rebirth as a talent show judge, but the pit lane in general was devoid of the characters that had given the sport its A-list magnetism throughout the preceding four decades.
Glamour, a staple of formula one’s appeal since the wingless, cigar-shaped and astonishingly dangerous cars of the post-war era were driven by daredevils with the pluck, impudence and life expectancy of Battle of Britain fighter pilots, seemed to have been replaced by ugly machines with dour professionals at the wheel. The drivers were no less courageous but they came over as intellectually constipated, so focused on winning and preoccupied by technical minutiae that they seemed like aeronautical engineering students with uncommonly large egos.
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In the decade when flair wore flares, racing was still thrilling on an elemental level, one that existed, according to George Harrison, “right on the edge of do or die, where there is nothing left to spare”. Those lines come from Faster, Harrison’s tribute to the drivers with whom he spent much of the 1970s, along with Ken Hensley of Uriah Heep, who now laments the way the sport has changed. “You don’t get that rock ‘n’ roll vibe any more because it is so corporate.”
That F1’s most ritzy race is always scheduled for the weekend of the Cannes film festival is no coincidence and the winners of the Miss Motors pageant will be rubbing shoulders with Hollywood stars queueing up to pose by the front wings of the cars. Such behaviour has given the sport more column inches in the front of newspapers than it has enjoyed for a while, and it is a phenomenon that will only escalate if Nicole Scherzinger, Lewis Hamilton’s girlfriend, continues to choose her outfits with such a keen eye for tabloid editors’ tastes. Hamilton is thus doubly important to the sport - even Kiss saw him as a suitably attractive proposition for a photo opportunity when they were on tour in Melbourne last year.
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The kind of celebrities who frequent formula one reflect the state of the sport and prevailing cultural trends. But they also serve as a mask - the average fan is the sort of person whose ambition is to appear in the audience at Top Gear. The sport itself, however, will always retain its allure.
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