Some thoughts on the news in F1

I took a look on the Web this morning, to see if there is anything interesting out there relating to Formula 1 and found very little. OK, we are heading towards the holidays and in “the real world” things are moving towards the traditional “duck on skateboard” silly season, but F1 is still flat on the gas for another week or so. But what do we have? Ferrari set to launch attack… Di Resta hopes for better luck… Ferrari want Hungary repeat… Chandhok hoping for another race… Button, Hamilton relish Hungary return… Mallya confident Force India can build momentum… Heidfeld aims to impress… A bunch of non-stories being used to drive traffic to a vast clutter of websites that may (or probably not) have some vague connection with the sport.

Think of it this way: there are only about 300 proper Formula 1 journalists in the world – in all different language groups – and less than 50 of these are writing in the English language. There must be 10,000 fake ones, who believe that they qualify for the status because they sit at home and rewrite the work of others, using Google Translator and adding their own “take” on stories, or playing Chinese whispers with quotes and press releases and presenting themselves as being F1 insiders when they have never been near an F1 paddock and in many cases have never met anyone involved in F1.

There is nothing wrong with fans blogging about the sport – I am all for it – but it is the fraudulent behaviour that I find offensive as it misleads and confuses the audience. It creates problems for the real F1 media and ultimately achieves nothing, because very few of the people doing it are making any money.

This is not even citizen journalism, in which normal people use modern technology and the power of the Internet to do what proper journalists should be doing. Everyone can have an opinion, but it is the trained, professional and seasoned journalists, who have access to the people involved, who will produce the best (and most balanced) stories. The problem is that thanks to the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his undesirables, the trust in the media has been damaged and there are some who believe that a tyranny of experts is worse than a tyranny of ignorants.

There is a certain blissful irony in the fact that Murdoch and his goons have become their own reality TV series and are being gobbled up (and will soon be spat out) by the very system that they created. The phone hacking scandal that has rocked the British establishment has damaged pretty much everybody, giving a bad impression of the media, politicians, policemen, you name it. It shows that the ends do not justify the means and that ethics are important. Murdoch’s newspapers also went too far and blurred the lines between doing things for the public interest and doing things for profit.

Yes, titillation, scandal and gossip will always sell, but so too will good journalism. Without public support the media is lost. Good journalism relies on contacts and trust. When a media outlet loses the trust of its readership it dies.

The Formula 1 world does not make it easy to obtain first-hand information, the PR departments basically trying to “buy off” the media with free lunches and five-minute interview slots with the stars so that the hacks get the few quotes they need and then churn out dull stories, often working with their colleagues to write similar articles to protect themselves against being scooped by a rival. Others simply rely on the power of their particular publication to accept leaks that are given to them by people with an agenda. It is easy to look good when the news comes to you… but few of these people ever question the content they are being given for fear that it will stop happening.

The only decent headline I have read in recent days is Adam Cooper’s “Ferrari engineers examining nuts”, which grabs the attention and leads to a serious assessment of what went wrong with Felipe Massa’s pit stop in Germany. OK, that may not be earth-shattering subject matter, but it is the sort of thing that the fans want to know. Otherwise most of the news has been he-said, she-said journalism or rehashed press releases and Q&As. It has never been easier for the team PRs to get their point into the public domain – and yet most of them do it without any imagination at all (although there are exceptions).

Right now, there are lots of interesting things happening in F1 that need investigating and lost of funny little stories that deserve a mention. There is an understated story lurking about that links the winner of the green jersey on the Tour de France (which goes to the rider with the most points). This went to Manxman Mark Cavendish on an S-Works bike that was developed by the US manufacturer Specialized, in league with McLaren Applied Technologies, which provided its knowledge of composite technology and aerodynamics to improve the efficiency of the bicycle by 10-15 per cent.

There are plenty of bigger stories worth investigating as well: which teams are going to which engines in the future: which circuits will get which races, which car manufacturers might come into the sport. We should be reading stories about secret engine projects that have been going on inside Volkswagen and what McLaren is going to do to match its philophical problem of selling road cars with its own engines and racing others with a power unit supplied by a rival car manufacturer… The team HAS to build its own F1 engines at some point or other. Could they do so with PURE? Or is it better to expand the partnership with Ricardo into the sport? Or bite the bullet and create an expensive in-house engine division?

And if there are no new manufacturers coming into F1, we should be asking why they not coming when the new regulations are so well-suited to the automobile industry…

There is never a dull moment in F1, but looking on the Web, you can see why some folk think the F1 world is boring.