Grand Prix racing can be a bore without the glamour of danger, writes Emma John
Formula One enjoyed a season of high drama in 2007, but this season had started quietly - for everyone but Max Mosley, anyway. So the rain in Monaco at last weekend's Grand Prix was a perverse pleasure. The Monaco GP can be a dull event in the dry; because the track is too narrow for overtaking, the race can become a parade, a catwalk of designer motors.
Just add water, however, and the same confined circuit is transformed into a frenetic two hours of did-you-just-see-that carnage. With all the spins, skids and spills, this year's race had more position changes than a bumper edition of the Kama Sutra.
And if we're honest, that's what most of us watch it for. The aficionados will say, of course, that we should be marvelling at the skills of the drivers. But they will also tell you that great driving is smooth, effortless, imperturbable, making a high-speed chicane look like a lane-change on an empty M25. If that's good television, I'm Simon Cowell's eyebrow stylist.
I'm pretty sure that Formula One has only three appealing traits - danger, glamour and the glamour of danger. Ever since its early days as the weekend hobby of retired fighter pilots desperate for a fix of adrenalin, motorsport has been about holding your life as naught and looking damn fine while you do it.
But since the death of Ayrton Senna, and then during the era of the Teutonically dull Michael Schumacher, F1 drivers haven't exactly helped to keep the sport sexy. Even the bad-boy behaviour of the Finnish playboy Kimi Räikkönen, or the antics of the diva-ish Fernando Alonso, seem a distant and distorted parody of the devil-may-care attitudes that used to be the sport's allure.
So motorsport has tried to compensate, in terms of its image, with techno-porn. F1 is, of course, powered by technologies so advanced that they could probably change world history, if they weren't so busy propelling a carbon-fibre shell around in a circle.
The cars, we are often reminded, are supercomputers more powerful than any in Silicon Valley, and the technical expertise on an F1 grid has only one equivalent, the Nasa space programme. (Although it hasn't yet come up with anything as useful as Velcro.)
The more sophisticated the sport gets, however, the more specialist and remote it seems. I was taken around the ING Renault team garage before the Monaco Grand Prix and it was an amazing privilege to be given an insight, amid all the complexities, into how F1 really works. On the other hand, if you need an engineer to explain to you what's cool about a sport, it's a decent indication that that sport is no longer all that cool.
Pat Symonds, engineering director of the ING Renault team, and a veteran of Formula One since the days you tinkered with spanners rather than analysed data, says that the future of the sport is about working in new materials.
Unless he's talking about PVC and leather, I suspect that the mainstream public will fail to get excited about this. The technological advances I care about most are the safety ones, because they mean that the cars can bump, spin and crash while keeping their occupants relatively unharmed.
And, for me, there is nothing as exciting as seeing those pieces of highly engineered, hugely expensive motor wizardry scattered across the tarmac.
Emma John is the deputy editor of Observer Sport Monthly
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