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Single seater racing is clearly in trouble, at least in the UK. I’m now involved in the organisation of single seater racing, but I’m also an active competitor and this post is a purely personal one.
I think the undoubted current problems in UK single seater racing stem from both historical and current causes, which are certainly multi-faceted and complex. Simple ideas about what’s wrong and how to fix it are unlikely to help much.
Look at Formula Ford – a category I was lucky to know well in its hey-day. FF1600 did not start principally as “progression” formula. It was born from the idea that it was possible to provide an exciting single seater that the man in the street could afford to race and had the technical ability to manage. This idea proved to correct and the formula grew. As it grew its participants (who were often poor but very quick!) succeeded in developing their racing “careers” and this meant that the perception of the formula evolved to one where the idea of racing for enjoyment, and the idea racing to progress up the steps of a career ladder, co-existed in people’s thinking about FF1600. At the same time pressure on the manufacturers who had got into the business to make and sell cars meant that they tended to have “works” teams to help them gain racing success. So the idea of “teams” and rent-a-drives started to gain strength, as compared to what’s often now called the lad & dad approach. Another way of looking at this contrast between teams and individual driver/owners is often referred to as amateur vs professional. Actually this is nonsense – no drivers are genuinely professional at this level of the sport. They may pretend to be because it supports their career aspirations but they, or (most likely) their families are paying for the drive. It is the teams who provide the kit that are the professionals.
We never found out where the team vs individual; amateur vs professional, career vs enjoyment dimensions would take FF1600 because in the mid 90s Ford completely forgot or misunderstood the basis of FF1600s success; and via Zetec, Duratec and now most horribly Ecoboost, they evolved the formula squarely along the Teams, Career, Professional axis – diametrically away from the basis of its success. Because Formula Ford had then moved into a different, but fairly crowded arena of competing categories, without knowing why it had done this and what its market now was, the inevitable happened and it has pretty much failed. Six cars costing about £65000 each…fantastic.
Although I do lay the blame mostly at Ford’s door for this, the fact is the causes are more complex still. For example; during the time FF1600 has been around the man-in-the-street has lost much of his mechanical experience and ability, because modern road cars don’t go wrong and so these skills aren’t called for much these days. The man-in-the-street to longer knows how to tinker with the car, and doesn’t want to. At the same time there are many more options now for him to spend his money. And as teams stretched their wings they found that they could justify a higher cost base if the cars they ran were more complex, and so they went down this route, and consequently rent-a-drive prices tend to rise across the board. So the man-in-the-street now does track days, or goes on holiday to Turkey. On so on.
In the same way complex causes lie behind the decline or success of all the single seater categories that exist today. But I do think one theme, or dimension, does stand out. We do not seem to be able to understand how to manage the tensions between amateur vs professional, team vs individual, simple-car vs complex-car, career vs enjoyment. Today the most often proposed solution is to polarise the sport along these axis and treat the resulting parts separately. So it appears that currently the “influential” people in the sport seem to believe both the problems and the solutions are to be found only within the “top-level” categories of single seater racing.
I think they are wrong.
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