The question of whether two or five or ten years will undo that freedom is what's on everyone's mind when, in late October, Formula One announces that an American Grand Prix, run on a street course in New Jersey just across the Hudson from Manhattan, has locked up a ten-year deal beginning in 2013. This on the heels of F1 committing Austin to ten years on the race calendar beginning next November. It was happening whether we knew it or cared; a bet had been wagered.
If you're like me (until recently), though, you've retained only the vaguest information about F1 over your years—fragments that when downloaded in full are sort of haikuish in their elusive density:
Enzo Ferrari
Stewart Senna Schumacher
Monaco Grand Prix
I'd always comprehended that those words stood for something larger than I could quite fix in my head, a sporting universe that blended the most talented of (foreign-sounding) driver with the most imaginative of (foreign-sounding) engineer—a mix leavened with billions of dollars provided by the sort of borderless enthusiasts who tend to have more in common with one another than with their own countrymen. I'd nonetheless relegated F1 to a place of deferent ignorance. Then, though, this spring, I experienced a 105-minute piece of conversion footage. It was a documentary on the racing life of divisive, transcendent Brazilian F1 champ Ayrton Senna—whose on-track death in 1994 was the sport's last. It worked me over and left me suddenly wanting, the way a language does the first time you register its meaning thoughtlessly. I started reading about Grands Prix on Monday mornings, Vettel's dismantling of opponents in the 2011 season. Historic, weighty races on circuits called Spa (Belgium), Monza (Italy), and Silverstone (England)—the same grounds that saw F1's first champions, fifty years ago, crashing into spectators like cyclists in the Tour de France. I read books about drivers, tuned in to podium ceremonies. I was ready for Austin, though it would be a long wait. Then I got an email: How would I like to see Sebastian Vettel do his thing up close?
In the garage of Red Bull Racing, F1's top team, I'm less than a car length from Vettel as he prepares for the qualifying hour of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The qualifying hour: I mean that literally. For sixty minutes, at precisely timed intervals, the field of 24 drivers (who are two to a team, each team lined up by order of season success—Red Bull, therefore, in the leading garage—right on down the pit lane) participate in a shootout that will set the starting positions for tomorrow's main event. We're about fifteen minutes out from the green, and shrill pneumatics occupy the volume of the garage the way the sound of a dentist's drill fills an open mouth.
Vettel is sitting at the back of the garage, which after several days of practice runs and expensive tinkering, is still clean and bright, the floor white and wetly reflective, like ice after a zamboni pass. The garage is split into zones, some off-limit sectors near the back, obscured by plastic barriers, and then an invisible line that cuts the garage in half dividing the two Red Bull drivers, Vettel and Aussie Mark Webber. (Webber, eleven years Vettel's senior, has been a consistent top finisher during an impressive, abiding career, but I get the sense over the course of the weekend that few things must make one more aware of one's limits that sharing a team with a precocious champion who might become the best of all time.)
The crew, roughly 30 in all, works for both drivers, but during Qualifying, they are split. Vettel's team is made up of guys with names like Bal and Ole and Gareth. They handle the equipment expertly, if a little passionlessly. An exposed patch near the tail of Vettel's car divulges some of the truth of the insides: gold tin foil and silver tape that I've only ever seen in pictures of the lunar module from the '60s. The mechanics each go about their business, and while the roles are surely imperative and distinct, the guys also seem (by these untested eyes) kind of interchangeable, like machine parts. They are of varied age and weight, and some have lost their hair.
The same cannot be said about the drivers, up and down the pit lane, who for the most part, look uncharacteristically welcoming of the race-car-driver stereotype. Go to Google and do some gazing: Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button, Fernando Alonso, Webber—they are often shot with their girlfriends on golden-banistered boats, sort of like world-famous soccer players, but more formidable, somehow, more handsome: better jawlines, better hair.
Vettel, it should be said, doesn't look so much like the others. There at the back of the garage, he's taking counsel from an older Austrian called "Dr. Marko" who is blind in one eye (its plug was pulled by a stone thrown from a rival's tire during the '72 French GP) that lingers in middle-distance. Vettel is only 5'8" (most racers are on the shorter side; the lighter the driver, the quicker the ride), but his hunch—the shoulders of someone much less accomplished—shaves off another inch or two. His hair never looks like it's been cut recently, even when it has, and it's curly and falls off all edges of his head like a hanging garden. His mouth seems filled with extra teeth, and though he smiles easily, the expression he slips with little thought is a sort of mouth shrug. When he's listening to anyone—questions from the media, instructions from Red Bull's team manager, advice from Dr. Marko—he mouth-shrugs and flickers his eyebrows as if to say: "Ah, I hadn't thought of that before, but now that you mention it..."
Vettel is wearing his racing suit, an orderly work of red and blue Red Bull things, and other affiliates who pay millions of dollars for mere square inches of real estate on his chest. He hops onto a scale behind one of the opaque dividers (drivers are weighed before every stage of competition), and swigs from a water bottle designed to look like an extra-extra-energizing can of Red Bull. He pulls the fire-retardant head sock over the mop, yanks some expensive communication wires around, works his helmet down to his shoulders, and lowers himself into his seat. The mechanics shift into positions like dancers just before the music. One sticks a long prod up the rear of the car and manually fires it into a teeth-melting idle. (It should be said that all the things anyone has told you about visceral closeness to motor sports is true, and that's not just—but especially—the case with F1: If you've never heard a race car except through a television, it's tough to shape the resonance with description. But, for the game of it: Think of the loudest concert you've ever attended, and maybe a moment when the guitarist and drummer were both getting primal; now take that noise, and expand it by proximity (if you were, say, onstage between that guitarist and that drummer), and then layer in the kind of woman-howl associated with curly Brits like Plant or Daltrey—and then maybe you'll have a sense of what it's like when the cars whip out of the garage for Qualifying.)
The way it works is all 24 drivers get 20 minutes to post a lap time to their liking. After 20 minutes, the slowest seven drivers are knocked out (and ranked on the grid in starting positions 18 through 24 for the main event), while the remaining drivers return to the pits for a timed seven-minute recess, fuel up, change the tires, address concerns from the driver, like: "I've got limited control on the rear right tire in both the entry and exit of turn seven." And then the mechanics, each wearing "Gives You Wings" belts, translate that downloaded "feel" from the drivers—combined with computer readings that look from a distance like heartbeats—into tightening of bolts and the reduction of tire pressure.
Which all sounds unnecessarily complex, I know. Foreign gearheads indulging in the exponent of their mechanical passions, for an audience who's merely responding to the speed. But remember, this is all on the clock, and it all matters imperatively. The Abu Dhabi track is tough to pass other drivers on; your starting position affects your race destiny more than any other factor. We're talking about hundredths of seconds separating top slots.
Before long, Vettel and Webber return to the track for "Q2," the second Qualifying session, during which the 17 remaining drivers will be reduced to the fastest ten. As a worthy side note: It's astonishing to me how quickly the top five drivers distance themselves from the others. Vettel, Webber, Hamilton, Button, Alonso. Only twice all season has any other driver finished on podium (in the top 3), the five battling each other incessantly at the front of every race. In Q2, they post the five quickest lap times—and do it almost instantly.
At the conclusion of Q2, Vettel and Webber return to the garage for one final tune-up. Cloth bags of dry ice are placed in the drivers' laps. One of the mechanics, a vaguely Wayne Rooney-ish type, blasts a teammate in the face with AC. The cars are running well; everything's cool.
At once, Hamilton and Button, teammates on Red Bull rival McLaren, are on-track in the final qualifying round, and they're pushing lap times to unmatchable lows. I hadn't noticed at first, but Vettel and his team have rigged it so that his is the last car out of the pits for the final lap. Button is in front of Hamilton is in front of Vettel, as the hour ticks down to zero. The crew watches from the garage on the television, crossed-legged right over left, as Vettel seems to clip thousandths off of Hamilton's lead at each timed marker. Suddenly, within the span of no time, Button crosses the finish line to post the low lap of the hour, followed seconds later by Hamilton who posts the new fastest lap, leaving only Vettel on the track.
The Red Bull crew barks coaxings at the television. Vettel cuts wide off the edge of the last turn and appears to the camera that's fixed at the foot of the home stretch. He blisters a line that pulls him into the center of the track, over the stripes of the starting grid, and across the sensor that makes the clock stop.
Later, a former F1 champion who was calling color on the Qualifier for BBC told me that Vettel didn't detectably blink the entire lap, not once. Nearly two minutes of hot focus, and then at the instant he hit the mark, his gaze directed not toward the lap time on his steering wheel, but rather to the enormous digital display above him on-track, which though appearing too fuzzy with body vibration to make out details, would flash either yellow (too slow) or green (fast enough). When green, there was a staticky animal sound from Vettel over the radio, and his engineer replied, impossibly cool: "Fantastic, Seb, you delivered under pressure. You've matched one of the all-time greats"—a reference to the fact that Vettel had just tied the all-time F1 record for most pole positions (14 in just 18 races) in a single season. He would break the record this past weekend during the year's final race in Brazil.
It was just the Qualifying run, but it spoke directly to the American sports fan. Vettel, after all, won on a buzzer beater. He had already claimed 11 of the season's 17 Grands Prix to that point, and finished runner-up on another four occasions. He'd relegated his four closest rivals to a season-long battle for second. Here, in Qualifying, the door had slipped open, just a crack, for mere seconds, and he'd shut it swiftly, at the last possible moment. It had gone this way all season; Sunday felt already half-written.
***
There are other things that happen on Grand Prix weekends. During one of the practice sessions, I go for a walk along the corniche that separates the track from a man-made marina. Docked there are big yachts, as big as any I've seen, most populated by a dozen or fewer people who have the same complexion as the others on their boat. One yacht is from Australia, one from India, another from Qatar, just up the Gulf.
As I turn a sharp corner, I come to a previously concealed pocket of the marina, where the yachts seem twice as large. It's still early afternoon, and so the obligatory speaker sounds are pulsey, but half-hearted. One boat, called "Moonlight," has a pair of velvet ropes, and six or so hand-assembled shoe racks propped on the dock. "No shoes allowed"; this is where the biggest crowd is hanging out. Across the marina is a Cipriani (yes) that looks like a product of Ferran Adria's post-Bulli experimental kitchen. And then another ninety-degree corner, and this is where the really big boats are. The ones that beg the question: Why spend $150 million on a ship when you could buy an island? To which the response—you need something to transport you to the island you already own, obvs—is probably rhetorical.
One of these yachts, on which a captain-servant buffs a silver entryway column, is glugging gallons per second from somewhere beneath the waterline. I wonder if it's sinking, this small floating city. It turns out this is "Moonlight II." I fixate on how lowly and gauche those first yachts I'd seen seemed now. In the face of "Moonlight II," even as it possibly sits there slowly sinking, too large for anyone to pay mind to the effects of a hole on the starboard side, I know that no one here to watch the Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi would rather be anywhere than aboard the biggest boat in the marina. That "Moonlight" is nothing so long as there is "Moonlight II," until I turn a corner and see, there across another inlet, where the truly big boats are docked...
I'd registered this feeling before. Two summers ago, on the flats of the middlemost Midwest, I attended the Indy 500 for the first time. The engines rattled me in those powerful, important ways that they do during your first time; the speed of the straights I couldn't stop talking about for weeks. I stood there ten feet away as eventual-champion Dario Franchitti pitted, and then rolled into the winner's alley of America's most storied racetrack. Franchitti, to me, was this confirmed ideal of a motorsportsman—handsome, accented, married to super-cool-chick Ashley Judd. And then I heard about Vettel. That Franchitti was fine, his race car plenty quick—but that the top global series was so far advanced that Franchitti, a Scotsman, could hardly get a tryout. There was a reason all those half-talents at Indy were stuck spending weekends in Iowa and Kentucky, while Vettel and company stamped their passports in Singapore and Bahrain. I'd turned the corner, seen the bigger boat.
And so at night, from the marina the enthusiasts spring to the clubs. For plenty on Saturday evening, the first stop is the edible-seeming Cipriani, where there are two red ropes, followed by an elevator check, enforced further by a black rope, before entrance is granted to the inside. If you've ever been in a place that's overly-indulgent in its own mystique of serious pleasure, this is not quite it. It's too early, I think. Britney Spears performed somewhere last night; Paul McCartney's not till tomorrow. But in the meantime, people are laughing plenty, horsing around. Telling pretty, young acquaintances, "Well, I own fifty companies," and then taking shit from their older wives for saying so. There's a guy who looks like that blonde '80s actor who was always beating up the Jewish and Italian high school nerds. (You know, the one from Cobra Kai...) Most of the people embrace one another the way old college buddies do at reunions.
I had assumed beforehand that an appeal of Formula One was its geographic diversity, its global variety, but it was quickly my impression that the greater fact, the truest appeal, for those pursuing these interests is that the Grand Prix experience is exactly the same at every stop, all season long. There is a sense, in the quality of clothing and the dismissiveness toward the help and the strange familiarity—this shared sort of easy-flowing, yet never-quite-proper English that must be the working language of sub-oligarchs—that many of these people, even if meeting for the first time tonight, will get along quite well together. In this way, F1 seems to summon rich people to the playground like a recess bell.
Someone has ordered a glass container of champagne that can hardly be called a bottle because it's even larger than the ones the race winner will shower his fans with on Sunday night. When a notable order is placed, a procession of lycra dresses and the girls they're half-concealing fire up sparklers and lead the purchase to its new owner. During each sparkler session, the dark goes light for a moment, the eyes of most men trailing one of the marching women whose ass looks as though it was conceived by a balloon artist. On one such occasion, I spot something across the room that's familiar, un-mistakable, from my neighborhood in New York: Adrien Brody's nose.
He's all alone, black blazer and black V-neck, thumbing his phone like a twelve-year-old whose friends are late meeting him at the movies. He looks around every few minutes, sadly, until finally a table of what appear to be rich, local Emiratis invites him to drink with them. Like me, he sips wordlessly, probably a little unsure. But then we are saved: a troupe of cross-dressing pirates appears. We can relax in our silence, and watch.
The pirates, mostly women with mascara mustaches doing a sort of Beaux Arts Jack Sparrow thing, assume a ballet dancer's fourth or fifth position atop scattered booths, and one, suitably flexible, arranges herself in a chandelier that's affixed with champagne bottles. The pirates are all clearly waiting for something to happen, for someone to start. But the DJ carries on aimlessly, sparking a fellow on the other side of the room, a pirate midget it turns out, to hop from his perch, commit to a short-legged sprint across the dance floor, and reprimand the DJ for his mis-timing. Then it happens: the music is cued, the dancing commences, the champagne-chandelier acrobat twists toward the ceiling. Adrien Brody looks happier.
Later that night, in a temporary, puffed-up performance tent in a parking lot that ends inelegantly at desert and nothing, Fatboy Slim is helicoptering his arms and his hands and everyone is having an even better time. Suddenly, it is quite late, and there are two 20-something Americans pulling my cocktail from my fingers, and stealing two-handed sips for themselves. He is from Kentucky, and she from Chicago, and they both work in Dubai. It's funny how quickly that composite foreign-English becomes normative, and a North Shore beeaathroom begins to impress as kind of downtrodden and distant. They are as uncertain about my presence here as I am. The guy starts telling me all the things he thinks I should know about the region, and before long he seizes on a point that is plagued by an echoey punchline: "...and the PAKISTANIS clean it up!" This bothers him. This disparity, which so clearly exists, between upper-class Arabs, expat whites, and the hidden scores of brown-skinned people from Asia and Africa who hold doors and sweep floors, etc. His volume is making the girl nervous. "The Pakistanis! White man... PAKISTANIS!!" he says. A guy in a striped shirt near me dances like one of those sand-bottomed inflatable clowns, and the kid from Kentucky gets right up inside my ear, grips my shirt: "The PakiSTANis, man. That's what you WRITE about. That's what you write aBOUT." It goes on until the girl becomes so visibly, facially upset that she drags him away by the shirtsleeve and starts lighting into him to get it together. He gives one of those "What?! What?!" heaving body shrugs, and then they're gone.
I don't meet another American for the rest of the trip, but I fall asleep that morning, race morning, with the paradoxical thought that, as on most days back home, Adrien Brody is somewhere close, lying next to someone beautiful, or no one at all.
It's probably the case that Abu Dhabi benefits from a major racecar event as much as F1 profits from a new regional market possessing of solvent oil wealth. It's trickier to pin down what good F1 and the U.S. will be for one another.
After all, we have NASCAR, a motorsport series that hosts events 38 weekends a year and seems to lead SportsCenter with defiant frequency. But any fan (or member of the opposition) will be quick to acknowledge the line in this country dividing passion and disinterest. It effectively scribbles itself around an easily-identifiable Red America, and for the near future, NASCAR in all its big and brash color, stands to keep on signifying that half of the culture.
And yet there is a habit, it seems, among foreign F1 types I speak with, to make no distinction between the two dissonant halves hashing it out politically and otherwise in the U.S. at present. The NASCAR crowd, they presume, is America, the whole of it. And so their reasonable move toward assimilation begins with borrowing from the proven, successful qualities of the oval racers.
"I've seen the fans of NASCAR," 2008 F1 Series champ Lewis Hamilton says. "And while I've never been to a race, the feeling is that it's very much a family sport, where families drive down in their RVs, park up, and watch the race from their motor home all weekend. When F1 comes to the States, that still needs to be possible. Additionally, by contrast to NASCAR, F1 is very private. There is no way you can get access to the drivers; I don't know how we in the sport can be more accommodating of that. But we are doing more signing sessions and that sort of thing outside the circuit so you can see the fans a bit more...." Mark Webber, Vettel's Red Bull teammate, builds on the bit about driver accessibility: "If we need to do anything better, it's what we do for the fans. Americans always do a huge amount for the fans, great interaction, especially in NASCAR."
It's my impression, though, after a weekend at the circuit, that F1 should be less concerned with mimicking the moves of NASCAR than standing as a clear alternative—in particular, for the politically blue sports fan who has long balked at the fuss surrounding NASCAR. Sure, it can be tough to stomach the Monaco-style vanity-glam of Formula One, but just as every NASCAR fan isn't taking a keg of Bud Light to the face while grillin' out in his camo trucker hat, not every F1-er is mustering strength to aggressively offend your sensibility with his popped polo (the one with the big horse), driving mocs, and extra-tall girlfriend. In the end, there are allegiances to the teams and drivers, and a reverence of the past that's not unlike our romanticism of, say, baseball. "The history is the attraction," Webber says. "Some of the tracks we've been racing on since the '50s. And it's amazing how many times you hear 'My grandson, my father, my grandfather....' The generations go through it. So obviously the new markets we're hitting are in a very embryonic stage; it'll take a little while to catch up." He considers this. "But then of course, if you have a driver of your own nationality..."
So the concern of how to roll out the new era lingers. "It's really a matter of getting the car in front of people," Hamilton says. "Once you hear it and see it, feel the noise—then maybe they'll turn out for a race. I don't quite know how F1 will play in Oklahoma and places like that, but every time I'm in L.A., I swear more people recognize me—genuine fans." Which begs the question: is Austin really the right play? Or to the coasts instead?
On Sunday afternoon, about forty minutes out from sunset, the cars in the starting grid take off to run through their warm-up lap. The sound is enormous, the work of the swarm. After the tense and thrilling conclusion of Qualifying, the scene is set for a 55-lap, day-into-evening Grand Prix that should last about two hours. The pits are stirring, the cars return to their hold on the starting grid. And once each of the noses have suspended their forward motion, the lights go green, and the pack of twenty-four are gunning for Turn One, a hard left that Vettel, from pole, takes easily. He has maintained his lead, and though it's only been three or four seconds, he seems to have picked up some thousandths on Hamilton in second.
But in the instant of a thunder-smack, Vettel is suddenly off-course, his rear right tire blown to pieces. There's a gasp in the Red Bull garage. From the runover grass, he throttles the car forward down the track, but his pace is slashed, and the full field is by him. It takes too long for Vettel to get to the pits; if he's to remain within a plausible length of contention, it'll require fast work by the mechanics. But after that rear right tire is removed, the mechanics bearing witness to the suspension damage slump in resignation.
Vettel does his part to remain cool. He resists throwing his helmet or his gloves. He runs his hands through his hair, and then makes a gesture that reads like: "The tire was perfectly round one instant, and then it came apart...." He doesn't yell at any of the mechanics, nor hang his head in near-tears. Part of the reason might be because there are TV cameras up in his space, monitoring the heavily-favored star of the series—knocked out of his first race of the season, and in less than five seconds. One cameraman just stands there, inches away, watching Vettel wonder what went wrong. Later, Vettel will say that he may have taken Turn One too sharp, that he punctured the tire because of an aggressive first move. All I know is that the moment meant something to me, serving as I was as this temporary steward to the gently curious American sports fan—charged with determining just how badly we really need Formula One. Here was the star, the lead reason to watch, and he was done already.
Imagine if this happens in Austin in November, if the best driver on earth crashes out in Turn Two. Sure, it's about as likely as Aaron Rodgers getting concussed during the first play from scrimmage at the Super Bowl, or Tiger Woods (rather: good, c.2000 Tiger Woods) breaking his wrist on the first hole Thursday morning at the Masters—but those events don't need for everything to go perfectly. F1, by contrast, has no margin. All the drivers I speak with are both right and wrong—we fans must be exposed to the cars, to the drivers, to the stuff surrounding the sport. But what we need more than anything is a great race. High-stakes competition, blood rivalry, the most exhilarating performances by the most skilled drivers of the most powerful cars in the world.
Instead of retiring to a locker room to sulk privately, Vettel catches his breath and then hustles over to the pit wall to join the team bosses while they direct Mark Webber through the remainder of his race. A mechanical issue during his first stop forces Webber to pit a third time, while the other leaders (three of those top five who always knock it out together) only pit twice. Lewis Hamilton wins, followed by Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, and Hamilton's McLaren teammate Jenson Button. It is a fine week for racing, except if you're Red Bull.
Then, as though to confirm my apprehension about the Vettel misstep, the week after I'm back in the States, the Austin race falls apart. They literally just stop building the track. No one knows for sure what happened, but the F1 brass keep alluding to a complex contract dispute with their stateside partners—the race's greater future uncertain. So we've got another year to figure it out, to get hungry. And isn't it just right that the new hopes rest on New York, then, the one place that could probably make it work. It's the right picture, isn't it? Yachts beating back against the summer Hudson current, sleep-eyed Upper Westsiders rising Grand Prix morning to the hornet drone of Vettel and co. revving for their practice lap on the New Jersey streets with probably the best view of the midtown Manhattan skyline. By then maybe we'll know his name.
To which it's worth pointing out that Mario Andretti won an F1 series in 1978, the last of just two champions from the States. Some other Americans followed him into the series, but few contended; it's just never seemed to stick. And yet the U.S. Grand Prix was a longtime stopover, run for decades in upstate New York at Watkins Glen, one of the drivers' favorites events (if only because it paid out an enormous purse). Later, attempts in Vegas and Dallas and Detroit predated a short, recent stretch during which they ran at Indy (where an F1-style segment was cut through the infield at the Motor Speedway)—before the event disappeared altogether. "I did my first ever race in Indianapolis, I loved it," Vettel says. "But surely Formula One hasn't always presented itself in a great way in America."
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