“These black overalls are fucking hot.”
So said Formula 1 driver Valtteri Bottas during the Spanish Grand Prix on 16 August 2020.
This was the final year to-date of the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 team’s total dominance of the world’s most elite sporting franchise, going on to win both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships for the seventh consecutive year, and some might see this change of fortune as significant – while perhaps not causal – for 2020 was also the year that the team went completely woke.
But to be fair, 2020 was the year pretty much everything (including Formula 1 itself) went completely woke.
Something happened in May of that year – do you remember? Something that seized humanity in a violent form of religious zealotry, and focused world attention not on the gross abuses of human rights that were being enthusiastically piloted by every Western government, and many more besides, but on the death of a career criminal and junkie named George Floyd.
The ins and outs of the George Floyd thing are not my concern today. It has been debated ad nauseum, and the arguments have delineated along the predictable partisan lines, and so my views on his death should be obvious to anyone already familiar with my thinking, the provocative language of the previous paragraph notwithstanding – but to make my position crystal clear (and I say this as someone who has absolutely no love for the police): George Floyd was responsible for George Floyd’s death.
Floyd’s manifestly unsavoury character and the fact that he was overdosing on fentanyl at the time of his death however, did not stop the entire global establishment from lionising the man, and along with Hollywood, the news media, and the sombre black squares that suddenly replaced the profile pictures of millions of Facebook and Instagram users, the world’s top sporting franchises scrambled to signal their virtue by aligning themselves with the radical Marxist organisation Black Lives Matter.
We all remember the utter cringe of the take a knee phenomenon, and the sports stadiums and uniforms bedecked in BLM insignia, but perhaps no other sporting luminary embraced the ‘cause’ like Lewis Hamilton.
As the golden boy of the Mercedes F1 juggernaut, and six-time world champion, the team, and the sport as whole, really had no choice but to fall in line behind him, and even his co-driver Valtteri Bottas – the icy Finn, not known for lavish displays of progressivism – took a knee during the 2020 season when the heat was on.
But as spring melted into summer, the heat was on not only politically, but in practical reality too. Driving a Formula 1 car around the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya for 66 laps in August is a scorching enterprise under the most clement conditions (like light coloured overalls that reflect heat for instance). It was therefore unsurprising to hear Bottas’s radio message on lap 27, “These black overalls are fucking hot.”
To show its solidarity with BLM and George Floyd, the Mercedes F1 team took the decision at the end of June 2020 to switch its livery, including drivers’ overalls, from silver to black.
I can’t speak for Valtteri, but as someone who tends to run hot himself, and does not perform optimally unless sufficiently cooled, it would not surprise me if a bloke from the frozen north had a similar thermostat. Bottas finished third in the 2020 Spanish Grand Prix, an entirely respectable result, but could the black overalls and the overheating they caused have impeded Bottas’s performance enough to deny him the plaudits of second place as he achieved in the Styrian Grand Prix a month before? Or even the race win, like he snagged in the opening round of the season?
We shall never know. Most of the time there are simply far too many infinitesimal variables in a precision sport such as Formula 1 to be able to put a top-ranked driver’s performance, or lack thereof, down to one factor or another on any given day.
But herein lies the point I wish to make. When you start messing around with the moving parts of any highly precise machine you run a serious risk of impeding its function, detracting from its brilliance, and thus diminishing its value.
Three years on and Formula 1 has not gotten less woke. The focus has shifted and, oddly, for an organisation that was so fiercely committed to battling ‘racism’ during the summer of the BLM riots, there has been no recent mention of Black Lives Matter or the performative theatre of the take a knee charade.
But this is the beauty of wokeism – it doesn’t need to be consistent or even sensical, it only needs to conform to the principal issue of the day which, as we will soon examine, is no longer racism, but a far more existential threat!
Valtteri Bottas and several other drivers dispensed with the kneeling farce after 2020 (and some, including current world champion Max Verstappen, had refused to kneel from the start), though Lewis Hamilton and others, with the formal backing of F1 itself, continued to incorporate the woke ritual into the pre-race build-up until the end of 2021 at which time they quietly pulled it, choosing instead to extend a funding commitment to the Formula One Engineering Scholarship programme for underrepresented groups until 2025.
“Now is the time to move on and take some other action,” said F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali. “The action is the focus on the diversity of our community, and this is the first step.”
The fruits of this program are now beginning to ripen, and fans will have noticed in the last year or so a proliferation of women in front of the cameras. For me personally, this was not a deal breaker, and the chicks they’ve rather clumsily slotted into what was always a high testosterone environment are all knowledgeable and well spoken. Naomi Schiff, Danika Patrick, and Bernie Collins, who’ve all recently joined the commentary team, do hold their own with the guys, though they’re still conspicuously absent from the race commentary itself, which remains 100% male – a step F1 bosses are not quite brave enough to take… yet…
As a keen follower of the sport for over 20 years, I rolled my eyes when they vaginafied the race weekends, but it’s one of those things that you let pass, because the brilliance of the spectacle is not diminished by their presence – on the contrary, most of them are very easy on the eye (although why it’s so easy to find half-naked pictures of such serious, strong and empowered career women on the internet is anyone’s guess…)
But this past weekend it went a step too far, and not only with the chicks in the paddock – but let’s start with them: During an interview with Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, Danika Patrick, when it was her turn to ask a question, uttered probably the most tone-deaf thing I have ever heard an F1 presenter say: “So, Christian, how are you doing?”
You know the question – it’s the same thing sycophantic corporate media ‘journalists’ used to ask our tyrannical politicians during lockdown. “So, Premiere, you’ve talked an awful lot about healthcare workers, and Covid cases, but how are you doing? Are you getting enough sleep?” I clearly remember one of our craven local reporters saying this to Daniel Andrews in 2020 and as much as I hate the man, at least he had the PR nous to brush it off with a comment amounting to ‘It’s not about me’ or some such.
To his credit, Horner’s reaction was in the same vein. With a somewhat perplexed smile he responded “I’m fine thanks. But thank you for asking.” Patrick’s question is the epitome of gynocentric talk-show bullshit, and has absolutely no place in a high octane, cut-throat environment like F1. How do you think he is Danika? He’s Christian Horner for God’s sake. Moreover, his feelings don’t come into it, even if he isn’t doing okay – that’s the whole point of Formula 1.
But again, it doesn’t really detract from the brilliance of the sport. It does make the build-up less watchable (and it should be noted that this is indeed a potential problem), but it’s not something I’ll cancel my Kayo subscription over.
Danika Patrick’s airheaded question was not the only woke carbuncle on the rear end of this past weekend’s grand prix though. In perhaps the most cringey piece of fluff ever to be trotted out by F1 since it went public in 2014, they interspersed the weekend’s coverage with maddeningly contrived appearances by the ‘F1 Juniors’ – three smarmy little brats whose presence was evidently intended to complement F1’s burgeoning brand of family-friendly inclusivity and kindness, and who were so over-coached I’m surprised they didn’t lapse into a rote recital of the sporting regulations.
These kids oozed the type of glib precociousness that the corporate world mystifyingly believes is endearing to the average man on the street, yet which was so nauseating that I had to hit the mute button every time they appeared. Zac, a young go-kart racer, and Braydon and Scarlett who present Sky Kids show FYI, were undoubtedly the worst part of the Hungarian Grand Prix and indicative of a myopic corporate machine attempting to humanise itself, as well as scoring some woke brownie points along the way as was painfully evident in the black kid – Zac’s – constant gushing over his hero Lewis “the absolute GOAT of F1”, and parroting of tired progressive talking points about the representation of people of colour.
But again, this was not what really concerned me at the end of the day.
In a bold move to make F1 more ‘sustainable’ in line with its commitment to the UN’s Agenda 2030, by which time the sport aims to be ‘Net Zero’, the teams’ tyre allocations were reduced from 13 sets to 11 (thus reducing the total number that Pirelli manufacture and transport and reducing the associated carbon emissions).
This had the immediate effect of reducing track action in the practice sessions and limiting the strategic intricacy of the qualifying session – key drivers of spectator attendance both at the event itself and on TV and streaming services.
I could write another two thousand words analysing this but the problem here is quite clear and quite simple: Less track action makes the sport less commercially viable.
Right now, Formula 1 is slaying it. Its stock is at an all-time high and thanks to peripheral marketing wins like the Netflix series Drive to Survive, there has never been more interest in the sport – so they can afford to shake things up a bit, try some new approaches, make some bold moves… And I’m sure the reduced track action this weekend won’t hurt F1… yet.
This is how it starts. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if they keep this up, Formula 1’s days in the sun are numbered.
It is difficult to damage a franchise of such immense popularity and so rich in legend, but nothing lasts forever – especially finely tuned machines that idiotic and incompetent operators have been tinkering with on a whim.
For this reason, the plight of Formula 1 in the face of woke ESG is an all-important case study in ‘get woke, go broke’. As the pinnacle of merit-based enterprise worldwide, how much ideological tinkering can it withstand before something breaks?
To be sure, it will take more than tyre allocation restrictions, annoying female commentators, and the horrendous F1 Juniors, but the process has begun. Stefano Domenicali has already made it clear that he wishes to see female drivers in the near future – something that basic biological fact all but guarantees can never happen without the kind of quota system upon which all Marxist redistribution relies, and which would seriously damage both the functional brilliance and the prestige of the sport.
What happens when they reduce the tyre allocation further? Or what happens if they decide each team must have one female driver for the sake of diversity and inclusion? What happens if they decide the sport must go 100% electric to save the planet? I can’t speak for everyone, but either of the two latter outcomes (and many more potentialities aside) would mark the end of my many years as an F1 fan.
Here is where the average person may begin waking up to ESG. Such an ideological matrix of control has little effect on institutions which already have mediocrity and quackery baked into their DNA – government departments and NGOs for example – or at least, the effects take longer to become apparent. But an organism as complex and grounded in excellence as Formula 1 does not cope well with arbitrary, ideological adjustments. When things go wrong, they will become very apparent in very short order, and they will not escape merciless critique.
The more intricate a mechanism and the more reliant on pure excellence its proper function, the smaller the ideological interference needed to send it badly off course.
This is the reason Formula 1 is treading so carefully with its ESG program; why Martin Brundle and David Croft still have the main commentary spots; why take a knee only lasted two seasons; and why they’re only trialling the new tyre allocation restrictions – they know they can’t afford to get it wrong because the PR disaster will be so acute if they do.
But I don’t see how they can get it right.
Formula 1 is the very embodiment of 2 + 2 = 4. And ESG is the embodiment of Orwell’s 2 + 2 = 5. The two are mutually exclusive and as one of the corporate superstructure’s most fanatical adherents to the ‘sustainability’ program, F1 may soon face the stark choice between committing suicide and thumbing its nose at BlackRock and the rest of the ESG mob.
And yes, I did check – BlackRock owns 4% of Formula 1.
Astute observations JJ. Corporates are tying themselves in knots with wokery and some starting to look very silly, others like Budweiser suffering big losses. ESG is damaging some large companies and we will see more of this. Ah, the days past of common sense............................
Just changing the tyres. Goodyear in those days. One of those jobs which hoovered up travelling Aussies who wanted to see bits of Europe and get some pocket money. Lot of fun for the irresponsible.