Post by Kasey Kagawa

This week’s lesson is the metaphor, a common literary device, often used with great effect by skilled writers and even more frequently horribly abused by mediocre writers; I’ll leave it up to the readers to decide which we fall under. As an example, this footage of David Coulthard’s spin out and fire during practice at the Turkish Grand Prix is a perfect metaphor for the massive flaming failure that is year’s Formula 1 world championship. We’ve had wonderful era of earnest competition between the top tier teams in F1 the last couple of years, starting with the rise of Renault and McLaren in the 2005 F1 season. It continued into the 2006 season with the return of the Ferrari-Renault dual, the return of Honda and their win at the Hungarian Grand Prix. The 2006 season ended on a high but somewhat sad note, with the retirement of Michael Schumacher and the promise of major changes in the F1 team balance, hopefully leveling the playing field and promoting competition within the sport.

Instead, the constructor’s championship has become a one-and-a-half-horse race, with the unstoppable duo of Fernando Alonso and Louis Hamilton laying waste to all that stand before them when they’re not going at each other’s throats in the pits. In the Ferrari camp, Kimi Raikkonen has spent his season completely blowing his big chance to finally get with Ferrari after all those years of bitching about not being with Ferrari, and Felipe Massa has been spending half his races showing the amazing level of skill that only comes when incredible talent is shaped by the very best in the sport (see Brazilian Grand Prix 2006, where he blew the entire rest of the field clean off the track) and the other half spinning in circles and showing the kind of amateurish impatience that keeps him from being a serious contender for the driver’s championship.

Rant continues below the jump.

There aren’t any other serious competitors for the title, with Renault suddenly taking a serious turn for the worse, suspiciously soon after Fernando Alonso left the team and forced an now-obviously unprepared Giancarlo Fisichella to shape a green Heikki Kovalainen while trying to figure out how to lead a team with what has to be a new car of questionable quality. Honda’s fancy new RA107, weighted down by all that environmental responsibility brought on by their ridiculous new livery, has consistently failed to keep the team even mid-pack when their performance last season had them looking to be serious 3rd or 4th place contenders this season. Toyota and Spyker have been completely useless, one because Toyota wouldn’t know how to run a racing team if Colin Chapman rose from the dead, joined up with Ron Dennis and Flavio Briatore and the whole lot were placed in charge of their F1 team, the other because no one’s managed to figure out why on Earth Spyker would buy an F1 team when they’ve been in existence for a grand total of seven years and only make one car. The only bright spots in the constructor’s championship has been the improvements in the performance of the Red Bull-Renault, Super Aguri, and Williams-Toyota teams. Some improvements are a bit more suspect than others, such as the allegations that the Super Aguri team is merely using the successful RA106 chassis that Honda ran last season, in violation of FIA rules, but at least they’re having good seaons, even though not good enough to challenge McLaren.

The media hasn’t helped out much either, focusing their attention in a paparazzi-like fashion on Louis Hamilton. Sure, he’s turned in an impressive early performance, winning 9 consecutive podiums in his rookie season, but if you look a little closely, you can see that he’s not quite the heir to the Schumacher legacy nor Jesus Christ resurrected as the sporting press is claiming. Every race he’s actually won he started from pole, he has only made the fastest lap of a race once while his contemporaries have two or more under their belts, and he has never gained more than two places from his qualifying position in a race. We’ve only seen him under serious pressure once, at the European Grand Prix. He started from 10th and within minutes of the start of the race, a signature Nurburgring downpour drenched the track to the extent that the whole race was brought to a temporary stop. He aquaplaned off the track before the red flag, and even though he was given a free pass to make up his lost lap, he only managed to make it from 13th to 8th before dropping down to tenth in the pits. He finished more than a lap and a half down on the 1st and 2nd place duo of Alonso and Massa, and while Hamilton floundered about, Alonso and Massa put on a spectacular show in exactly the kind of environment that a driver of Schumi’s talent would have thrived in. Hamilton definitely has a bright future, but I don’t know if it’s quite the supernova that people claim it will be.

All of this and a few other issues, including the FIA’s waffling over the alleged purchase of old Honda chassis by Super Aguri, the childish feud between McLaren teammates Alonso and Hamilton, a mysterious bit of something that looks suspiciously like industrial espionage by McLaren against Ferrari, Bernie Ecclestone’s efforts to prostitute the F1 schedule to anyone who pays him a lot of money and his determination to eliminate North America and the US in particular from F1, make this probably one of the worst F1 seasons in the last 10 years. All I can hope for is that maybe Alonso and Hamilton stop bickering like married Hollywood celebrities, Raikkonen pulls his head out of wherever he’s got it stuck, Massa decides to act like a big boy and drive the car properly all the time instead of just some of the time, Honda’s RA107B redesign manages to not drive like it’s weighted down with lead, or some other miracle comes along. Any one will do, just let it happen before the season ends and I completely lose interest in F1.