So Timo Glock has become the latest casualty of F1 financial turmoil, losing his seat at the Marussia team despite having a contract for 2013. He joins a growing list of notable drivers, Heikki Kovalainen, Kamui Kobayshi, Vitaly Petrov, Adrian Sutil and potentially others whose chances of appearing on the grid at Melbourne are finished or look to be in trouble.
The reason for this has nothing to do with these drivers’ performances, indeed most of them have demonstrated more than enough to keep their seats; it all boils down to money. With the world economy in such a fragile state, teams simply can’t afford to pay their drivers anything like they used to. In fact many drivers are only going to get drives if they bring money to the table in order to keep financially parlous teams going. This is either going to be through personal sponsorship and corporate backing such as Carlos Slim’s Telmex backing Sergio Perez or Venezuela’s PDVSA backing Pastor Maldonado, or through personal or family wealth – think Charles Pic or Max Chilton.
The first thing to note is that this is not a new phenomenon. ‘Pay drivers’ have been with us for a very long time; think back to the very dawn of motor racing where most of the drivers were wealthy aristocrats or ‘gentlemen drivers’ on a bit of a jolly. In the 1980s and 1990s pay drivers were common on the back of the grid; notable drivers from this period include Pedro Diniz and Jean-Denis Deletraz, derided by many as one of the worst drivers ever to take part in the sport. They seemed to disappear in the 2000s as the world economy boomed but now they are back with a vengeance. Indeed while you might expect the backmarker teams to rely on pay drivers, the concerning thing is that for many of the midfield seats, traditional feeders to the top drives are now being decided by financial considerations.
This is leading many to become concerned that F1, the pinnacle of motorsport, is in danger of becoming a rich man’s plaything, attainable only to the privileged few, unrelatable to normal people. We are in danger of the entire driver recruitment structure becoming so skewed towards the financial than driving standards throughout the grid are likely to suffer, as top F1 teams will have an ever decreasing pool of good midfield drivers to recruit. Perhaps the most obvious example of the negative aspect of pay drivers are the Williams team who produced a good car in 2012 capable of winning races, but their pay drivers, Maldonado and Bruno Senna, utterly failed to make use of it and Williams ended up eighth in the constructors championship. Moreover it could be argued that the traits we like to associate with champions – tenacity, drive, determination and an unbending world to win – are unlikely to be found in a driver whose daddy has effectively paid for his drive.
However in reality this argument is outdated and incorrect. The connotations surrounding pay drivers are stuck in a 1990s Deletrazian timewarp. It should be remembered that some pay drivers turned out all right, Niki Lauda paid for his first drive, and he ended up a three times world champion. Indeed in F1 today there are very few drivers who are clearly not good enough. The minute differences between the cars are simply too small to allow that to occur. Pay drivers who aren’t good enough such as Bruno Senna are still swiftly shown the door, it’s still a results driven industry.
Indeed on the grid there are very few, if any, F1 drivers who have got there without any backing from commercial interests. Sebastian Vettel had backing from Red Bull, Lewis Hamilton from McClaren and going even further back the huge French presence on the F1 grid in the 1970s was guaranteed by lucrative backing from the Elf oil company, who incidentally unearthed four times champion Alain Prost. Fangio was on the grid thanks to money from the Argentine government; the list goes on. These drivers could in many ways be described as ‘pay drivers’, they couldn’t have made it into the sport without backing; they got this backing because they were special talents and corporate interests recognised this, all this does is to show the shallowness of the ‘pay driver’ term.
Today many of the top F1 teams such as Red Bull and Ferrari are running ‘driver academies’ to find the most exciting young prospects and mould them into the champions of the future. Admittedly this is partly a recognition of the failures of the current system which is in danger of letting potentially good drivers through the net but also shows that the cream is still likely to rise to the top. It’s likely that whatever the financial constraints facing F1 teams, highly talented drivers such as Vettel, Hamilton and Alonso will till get the top drives, simply because they are too good to be ignored. This doesn’t mean the system is fair, I’ve despaired at the replacement of Adrian Sutil last year and Williams dropping Hulkenberg in 2010. Some promising careers have been stillborn by a lack of funds and some plain undeserving drivers have occupied seats, but who said life is fair? Motoracing has always been a cut-throat business, the list of unfulfilled talents over the sixty years of F1 history is endless, and in the current financial crises putting up with Pastor Maldonado’s crashes may be worth it in the long run if his money is able to propel Williams back to the top of the grid once more.