Formaula One 2008 Season

What a stunning conclusion to the season.  It was all shaping up to be quite a dull finale, but Mr. Glock, your name will be sung loudly and brightly across all the world by those who felt sure that this year belonged to the rightful champion, Lewis Hamilton.  Unless of course you are a Brazilian.

Love him or hate him, you gotta give the kid the credit he deserves.  Lewis last year came in for massive criticism, which was perhaps unfair given that it was his rookie season.  We all sat with baited breath on Sunday afternoon to see if the ghosts of repetition were to descend once more.

Coincidentally, the day of the grand prix season finale coincided with the anniversary of the M1 opening back in 1959.  I know this because I was sat on it merely an hour before the race was due to start.  And perhaps that is my personal yardstick for just how much the level of wide-open spirited competition in F1 has escalated this year;  I really wanted to get home to see the race.  I make it with ten minutes to spare, albeit with due allowance for the obligatory four-pack of Holsten Pills collected on route.  It would seem that I made it by one skinny little point too.

F1 Viewing Figures

For this year marked my hallowed and triumphant return to formula one.  Watching it, I mean.  For years I shied away from spending any of my precious Sundays watching a processional formality led by Heir Schumacher.  Forgive me if my elation over Sunday’s result has marred the cohesiveness of this article, but more to the point this is the first time I have ever felt compelled to put pen to paper and write anything about F1.  Previously I would instinctively have just hit the freeview button and chose What Not to Wear or Ray Mears Survival.  Or anything.  But I’ve followed proceedings incessantly this year, partly because I was afforded free tickets to the British Grand Prix, and partly because whilst there I met Lewis Hamilton’s brother who really is a lovely bloke. So is his dad, and so also is Lewis.  Surely the whole point of the Formula One international spectacle is getting behind a real character, and whatever criticism you may have regarding Lewis’s maturity, he is a big personality and delivered when it mattered.  It all added up to make one hell of a show.

Formula One Season Opener

To be honest, the season did not begin in a promising fashion.  My first glimpse of F1 this year was seeing a pre-race interview by Brundelfly in Australia, who was discussing track and tyre temperatures.  And who did he choose to brief us on this most crucial and technical aspect of the sport?  Danni Minogue.  Apart from this rather bleak introduction, I personally feel that this year’s competition has been an absolute cracker.

I don't know a lot about year-on-year lap time erosion and I don't much care which Sugarbabe Vettel is screwing, but an effective barometer as to the improvements in excitement levels delivered by F1 this season came at the end of the race, when my mum (who is 63) called to ask if I had watched it.  This has never happened before.

There must have been something in the air before the season even started, because I popped down to Mark Jarvis and put a tenner on Lewis for the title, and another ten pounds on Ferrari for the constructors.  My accumulator has come good at just the right time, as Lewis has, because I could really do  with the cash at the moment, as my Rover is fuelled light this week due the Credit Crunch^TM.

FIA Formula One 2009 Season

I am concerned then that next year’s rule changes and the need for the FIA to at least appear Green will have a detrimental effect on my new found love.  Ferrari’s team captain Stefano Domenicali said back in the summer of the forthcoming eco-friendly changes to the sport as being welcome but not paramount.  If the F1 circus can grasp this concept, then there’s hope for the rest of us.  When will the Eco-bunch learn that compromise is a forerunner of universal acceptance?  Perhaps we should all follow the example set by F1 of this open-minded mentality, and of how we are able to move things forward without doing untold damage to the core of the beast.  Now all we need is some confirmation that next season’s rule changes will not render the sport completely unintelligible from this year’s spectacle, because I for one have enjoyed it hugely.

Personally, I'm not massively concerned about Global Warming because I live in a country where the weather is a constant fifty-five degrees and rainy.  I'm no Eco-warrior, and I definitely have a carbon hoof-print, but I try and balance this with a non-carbon-based system of Karma instead;  I buy fair trade coffee, but sometimes I run my central heating just to warm my shoes in the hall;  I recycle glass bottles and cardboard, but I've also removed the catalytic converter from my car for a further five horsepower.  Maybe the faster we warm the planet, the less often we will need to heat our homes and  the sooner we will not have to buy gas.  As much as I would love to drive out of Asda with their fuel line still attached, I know when it is time to conform and behave and just get on with things.  The F1 website suggests that there will be little in the way of drivers switching teams next year, and assuming that the FIA doesn't insist on all teams running G-wiz’s, I think next year’s championship could be just as spectacular as 2008.