Achievement no longer relevant

Friday, 18 March 2011 11:00

Ok, so the headline is a little exaggerated, but only a little. I’ve tried to remain upbeat over the last couple of years, I really have.

Writing about racing has been the closest I’ve come to actual racing since September 2009 (apart from a single foray in April 2010) – a time when my penny-pinching, flighty, day-to-day existence had allowed me to take a class championship at club level in the UK, where my joy was tempered by the fact that my car was by now an unusable wreck, and a lack of prize money and prestige had rendered the whole exercise largely pointless. My relationship with motor racing has become a love/hate affair, and I have often mused about what drives me to compete when the odds are so stacked against me, especially when what I may be able to achieve as a driver seems less and less relevant with every passing day. Competent racing drivers are disappearing from the top championships in the world more and more frequently; F1, WTCC, WRC, IndyCar – the upper echelons have lost stars aplenty in recent times. Now, it’s unreasonable for me to class myself among the best of the current generation, but this trend accelerated massively over the last couple of years and it worries me that series organisers seem not to bat an eyelid.

10th March 2011, and my infamously ‘scratty’ 1988 Vauxhall Nova GTE is close to being ready to hit the tracks after a long lay-off. I’m starting to get excited again, and the strain of working on and paying for the repairs begins to lift from my shoulders. Me and this car went through a lot together at the circuits, and through even more in a torrid 2010 where not a single wheel was turned. Now it’s all coming together, and the international racing season is underway so with all the coverage I’m immersed in everything I love. And then I pick up the new copy of Autosport Magazine and there, page 22, lies a decisive knock-out blow.

It’s an advert for AutoGP – yet another single-seater championship in a highly-saturated market. Putting itself in that hole between F3 and GP2 (so alongside World Series by Renault, Superleague, GP3, F2...) and offering a large wedge of prize-money to its victorious driver (€700,000). So far so good, this lines up with the American racing-scene philosophy – reward good drivers so that they may progress. A.J Allmendinger’s family famously sold their house to put their offspring into Champ Car Atlantics, and he NEEDED to win races to be able to afford the next race entry fee! (He won 7 of the 12 races in 2003 to take the championship, and after a 3 year stint as a contender in ChampCar, he is a highly-regarded NASCAR driver). Although I never much cared for A.J’s personality, his story is a good one – the kind that keeps the sports’ romantics going. So... prize money = good. It was the next line that killed me. “GP2 TEST FOR THE UNDER-21 TROPHY WINNER.”

Demoralised? You should be. Even in my teens I often lamented the sport for pushing towards younger and younger drivers. It was jealousy – I was already counting the days until pro racing drivers were younger than me. That day had already come and gone with football – 16 year old Wayne Rooney made sure of that – and it coincided with me losing interest. This allowed me to focus on motor racing, and it became an obsession. I was never naïve about racing; I always knew that money ran the day and that my dreams that “knights of the road jousting with no thought of personal gain” was a long way from the truth – but watching certain events over the years there were always flashes... Colin Edwards and Troy Bayliss in the 2002 WSBK “Showdown at Imola” is my favourite example – two of the sport’s best, racing hard, passing and re-passing with the utmost respect and with the ultimate prize on the line. And more recently Kamui Kobyashi has had me yelling at the TV in F1, his determination to always be progressing has been a refreshing change. But these are isolated events. In 2003 I went with my dad to Rockingham to watch the BTCC. My favourite driver, Anthony Reid, was the main draw for us – straight out of the battle-hardened-warrior mould that I loved to see. The racing was fantastic all day, apart from one race – the Porsche Carrera Cup race. It was the longest race, with the smallest grid, and was tedious. Indeed my dad slept through it, and I would have done the same were it not for the announcement that one of the drivers, Jonny Cocker, was just 16 years old.

16? Driving a Porsche? HOW?? Jonny Cocker was born less than 1 year before me, and despite being obsessed with the sport I was still yet to try my hand! How was this kid racing a Porsche at that age? Well he started in T-Cars at 14 – T-Cars being that notoriously expensive championship that opened the floodgates for under-17s to race cars (I’ve never seen so many double-barrelled surnames on a list of champions before...). He then progressed straight to Porsches, before moving into GT racing. I have no doubts that Jonny Cocker can pedal a car, but sadly only one thing can open that kind of door. Money.

It was that day that I realised the futility of my racing dreams, that racing at the highest level was further from my reach than I could possibly have imagined. I started my first race in August 2008, aged 21, in the same Vauxhall Nova I still intend to use this year, having used a mixture of life savings and money from my birthday to buy the car. At the same time Sebastien Vettel, just 3 days my junior, had been racing for 12 years and was halfway through his first full season of Formula 1.

Is it just me, or are there too many rich people? The demands put on families to support children from 8 years old to make it as racing drivers is crazy, but I suppose the demand must be there. Motorhomes pulling trailers all over the country attest to that, and it was a fact I always accepted. I mean, the Moore family can afford to keep all of their offspring in racing cars at the same time! At least at the top, I thought, a driver who makes it is above all of this – any driver who can fight their way to the top level of competition has surely proved their worth?! Until last year I still clung to that belief, but the turnover of drivers in the major championships has shown that my most bleak of theoretical scenarios had been realised - Money is now the primary factor even at the top. The recent drivers in and out of F1 tell their own story. No room for Hulkenberg, but a seat for Narian Karthikeyan? No Priaulx in the WTCC? No Giovanardi, Turkington, or Thompson in the BTCC? No Wheldon or Kanaan in Indycar? GB still only represented in rallying by Matthew Wilson – the Ford boss’ son? (here’s praying for Kris Meeke’s Mini to go like a dream!). In fairness, all racing championships have been susceptible to this, but the situation has worsened dramatically in the last couple of years – you know it is bad when even F1 isn’t sacred.

So I return to this advert; “GP2 TEST FOR THE UNDER-21 TROPHY WINNER”, and I find myself feeling very detached from the sport I love so much. The obsession with age seems be getting worse, and I can’t shake the feeling that the reason is this: the sport doesn’t want established stars; it only wants more young drivers willing to pay their way. Drivers who have achieved success are no longer the ones the championships want – those guys expect to be paid! No, we only want the rich youth of the world, the ones who can afford to race regardless of success. If they’re no good, they’ll move on to a lifetime of racing GT cars instead. Or they’ll quit for a few years to concentrate on the family business, and resurface aged 42 in a year-old ex-works car in Touring Cars.

I’ve come too far and spent too much (by my modest standards) to back out of racing this year, but it will be bittersweet. You can only beat your competition – something I managed in 2009, and the racing world didn’t bat an eyelid. Some of the people I raced with have moved up, some; like Josh Cook and Ryan Bensley (both from the same championship but a different class) are racing successfully at higher levels, and these are talented guys. But I’m seeing more of them racing at a higher level without success, and they’ll always be there regardless of whether they win or not. I have my ideas as to how the world should work, but don’t we all. It’ll never be right, but I’d settled for a concrete definition of ‘affordable racing’ – just so I could laugh at the ridiculous figure presented to me. I don’t set goals because progression is impossible anyway, and the only enjoyment I get from racing is the ‘lone gunslinger’ mentality that I need to validate my competing. It’s ‘Custer’s Last Stand’, standing up to fight against impossible odds, because there is nothing else I could do anyway. And I’ll happily beg for anyone to explain to me why I’m wrong. I’ll be 24 at the end of this season. By Pip Hammond

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