Anyone else think this stinks? I thought so.

If you cut through the bluster and navigate your way around the blasé attitudes of the battle hardened members of Formula One’s travelling circus, the underlying feeling among the stakeholders of the sport must be that events at Hockenheim on Sunday marked a dark day for its integrity.

Let’s disregard the fact that I have a vested interest owing to the fact that I attempt to make a living from writing about it. I am one of the millions of people around the world who share a passion for Formula One, and the question I have found myself agonising over in the wake of Ferrari’s antics is this: Does this passion outweigh all feelings of what is right and wrong? Does it blinker me in such a way that I shrug my shoulders, seemingly in unison with many paddock insiders, and accept that this is how it goes? The short answer is that no, it doesn’t.

I was annoyed when I realised that Ferrari were engineering a situation that would lead to a manufactured change of leader. I cringed while Fernando Alonso, Stefano Domenicali and the team’s press office treated the entire F1 world like fools with lie after pathetic lie as they squirmed in front of the media. These feelings were to be expected after what had happened, what I didn’t expect, however, was having to watch respected experts from the paddock, notable members of the racing fraternity, attempt to justify it. Yes, they said, the team had contravened article 39.1 of the sporting regulations by instigating team orders that interfered with the result, but it didn’t really matter. This is just the way it goes in the “business” that is modern Formula One. This ridiculous attempt to justify what in any other sport in the world would be called match fixing, was the aspect that disturbed me the most.

The BBC received a number of scathing emails from various members of the public on its F1 forum. David Coulthard, a man who I hold in the highest regard for his usual no nonsense attitude in the face of his excitable colleagues, brushed off the concerns of the correspondents by advising us not to get “all tabloid” about a situation that “has gone on for years”. Was he being serious? The overwhelming majority of fans of the sport felt that they had been cheated, the fans who not only pay the wages of the pundits, but also of every other person involved at any level of the sport. These people, if they felt anything like I did, felt as though Ferrari had violated their rights as fans to watch a fair battle between two evenly matched drivers. The viewers wanted the people who are paid to enhance their viewing experience to listen to these concerns and take note. What they got instead was a verbal pat on the head from a bunch of analysts acting as if they were telling their younger siblings that Father Christmas doesn’t exist. As for the ridiculous assertion that it is ok because it has been going on for years, so have assault and fraud, and yet I don’t ever recall ‘it’s been going on for years’ being used as a successful defence for either.

Somewhere else on Sunday, I was listening to another expert explaining the pressure that was placed on a modern day Grand Prix team to attract sponsorship. This was being cited as a justification for the Scuderia's actions, a statement which was both factually correct and ridiculous in equal measure. Of course, teams need to raise huge sums from sponsors to keep themselves afloat, but a “modern” company places huge emphasis on corporate responsibility, and aligning any brand with a team that have been labelled cheats, whether rightly or wrongly, has become a huge turn off for marketing departments around the world, just ask ING.

In terms of Ferrari, it is evident from the blank spaces on the car, that they are not an organisation which faces the sort of budget constraints which mean that they need to convey a squeaky clean image. However, surely even Ferrari cannot afford to alienate the whole of the watching public who reside anywhere but Italy and Spain. It seems that they have learnt nothing from the battering that their reputation took in the fallout from the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix, a race which saw Rubens Barrichello forced to move aside for the Schumacher express to take a similar hollow victory. Michael himself was on hand yesterday to offer his support to his beleaguered former employers, insisting that he would have done the same, as it’s all about winning the World Championship. Erm, yes, we know you would Michael, you already have.

The real irony of the day of course is that while one half of the team made itself look pretty pathetic, the other side, particularly Felipe Massa, covered himself in glory. The way that he handled himself in the face of an impossible situation was full of class. It would have been career suicide for the likeable Brazilian to have disobeyed the order to let Alonso by, but the way he conducted himself afterwards only strengthened the betrayal felt by the neutral observer, especially on a day which marked the anniversary of his horrific accident at Budapest.

I have always found Domenicali to be one of the more likeable characters in the sport, and whilst I’d like to think that Alonso’s incessant whinging had led to yesterday’s call, there is obviously a greater degree of structure around the arrival at such decisions at an organisation the size of Ferrari. How the decision was actually made is pretty immaterial, the whole team lost a lot of respect this weekend, and not just by the decision to make their drivers switch places. Their biggest mistake was thinking that the viewing public were stupid enough to believe that they had not just witnessed them doing it.

My seven year old son watched the race, he is mad about F1. Even if he doesn’t realise his dream of competing in it when he is older, he will at least be one of the fans who will be propping up the next generation of superstars with his hard earned. He asked me after the race why I was cross about Alonso winning, and he genuinely didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I thought hard about the best way of explaining the events without dampening his enthusiasm, and I couldn’t think of any way to dress it up. “Because they cheated, son” I replied reluctantly, and from the look in his eye at that moment, it was as if I had told him that Father Christmas doesn’t exist. That is why I will struggle to forgive Ferrari for this sorry episode, and also why I think that the members of the F1 paddock who shrugged their shoulders and brushed it off should be ashamed of themselves.

Formula One is not a business, it’s a sport, and while it is of course undeniable that teams must generate the revenue with which to operate, this should never come at the expense of the enjoyment of the fans. There would be no Formula One without them and make no mistake, the fans are angry about this, mostly because of the human element surrounding Massa. Not only were we deprived of a fair result at Hockenheim, we had one of the greatest feel good moments in the modern era of the sport snatched from under our noses and replaced with a stench of rotten stallion.

How it all began: Part 2

After Spa in ’86 (and having spent the early hours in tears after Mansell’s Australian GP puncture – where he lost the title at the final round), our next F1 adventure would come a year later with another coach tour, this time to Hockenheim, to watch the German Grand Prix. My recollection of this trip is even cloudier; I remember that it was won by Nelson Piquet and that we had watched from the stadium section at the end of the lap. When we returned home from the race and watched the highlights, you could quite clearly make me out, wandering around the concrete steps towards the end of the race, the stand looking remarkably empty, I looked bored, that was probably because I’d been spoilt at Spa and Mansell was not winning this one. In the years following on from this, we started to take a tent and then a caravan and make weekends of it; we did Silverstone in ’88, followed by, in no particular order, a few trips to Le Mans, some more visits to Spa, lots of British Grands Prix and lots of national racing at Oulton Park. I have some wonderful memories of our travels, seeing Senna dominate in the wet, both at Silverstone in ’88 and his now legendary drive through the field in the European Grand Prix at Donington, and was in the Silverstone paddock at a Formula 3000 meeting watching a visibly shaken David Coulthard being interviewed about a possible Williams drive on the day the great man lost his life. I was at the Northamptonshire circuit to see not just Coulthard, but also Mansell, Johnny Herbert and Damon Hill win their home race. I watched on a large screen at Pouhon as more than half of the cars piled up at Spa on the run down to Eau Rouge in ’98, allowing Hill to lead a historic Jordan 1-2, Halcyon days indeed.
Seven years prior to the Hill victory, in the days when F1 and its protagonists were accessible to its audience, my Dad and I were in the pit lane at Spa on the Thursday before the race, and my Dad called to Eddie Jordan, asking who would be replacing Bertrand Gachot, who had been incarcerated in the UK for a mace spray attack on a London cabbie, EJ replied that he wasn’t at liberty to say, but that it was a young German; we assumed it would be Heinz-Harald Frentzen, we were wrong, it was of course, Michael Schumacher, who went on to qualify seventh, only to succumb to a clutch failure on the first tour. I realise how this story may, to more contemporary F1 spectators, seem romanticised at best, but it was a totally different ball game then, Ferrari were seen as unfriendly because they had a tarpaulin over their cars in the garage. You could wander around the garages of most teams on a Wednesday and Thursday, I had many pictures taken sat in F1 cars of the era, in their pit garages. The paddocks were totally accessible, we would have to dodge the back of the trucks as they backed up to the garages, and then sit and watch them be unloaded and washed, it only really changed about the time that Bernie Ecclestone tightened his grip on the F1 purse strings with the ’97 Concorde Agreement. I didn’t realise at the time just how lucky I was, my Dad loved it as much as I did, we spent ten days one year between World Sportscars at the Nurburgring and F1 at Spa, we camped two years in a row on the outside of the Mulsanne straight at Le Mans, and joined the hordes invading the track to welcome Martin Brundle et al home in the Silk Cut liveried Jaguar. Looking back, if I had to pick a favourite memory, it would almost certainly be the first race I saw at Spa, I was only six, a year younger than Christian will be when I take him this year. My Dad was taken too young, just weeks after Christian was born, and I only hope I can do as much to help him enjoy it as my Dad did for me. Mansell and Hill have been replaced by Hamilton and Button, the tickets have seen inflation that the Zimbabwean Finance Minister would deem excessive, but the bond between a Father and his Son, is timeless.