Law & Order: FIA

I'm not a huge sports person, but I find as I get older and have more free time I pay attention to some games more than I used to. Appleton being next door to Green Bay, the Packers are a phenomenon around here that I've seen nowhere else. I think the combination of the team being owned by the community and the community not really being big enough to support a major sports franchise gives people an emotional investment in the team--in sheer, foamy-mouthed fanaticism--that other communities may be hard-pressed to match. I don't really give a shit about football, but it's hard not to pay attention when the Packers are playing. The whole state seems to go into football-zombie mode: streets and businesses are empty, bars are filled, and the sounds of the game pour from every open window. Even so, I find myself watching but not caring particularly how the team is doing. 'Round here, that's almost sacrilege.

All sport is, of course, about competition--competition between individuals or teams. Or, in some cases, organizations. I especially enjoy tennis, because it pits a single person against another with little external interference. A player can excel in physical prowess or psychological cunning (or both), and neither aspect is enough to triumph over utter excellence in the other. Players' strengths and personal techniques come in endless and subtle varieties, and it's just you against an opponent on the court for three or five sets. No bullshit, trumped-up drama is required: the drama is intrinsic to the sport.

Team sports are different, both from individual sports and from other team sports. What the word team even refers to is quite variable, with a baseball team having as many members as the basic structure requires, while a football or soccer team just settles on an arbitrary number. (Not surprisingly, I like team sports less than individual sports overall, and my enjoyment of a team sport is closely linked to my understanding of that sport. I know little about football, and virtually nothing about basketball, and not surprisingly I care less for them than, say, Baseball, about which I know a little.) It's interesting to contemplate whether America's Cup yacht racing is or is not a "sport," and in what sense the America's Cup organizations are "teams." However we label it, there is an ungodly amount of money applied to the endeavor.

My focus buried somewhere in all this is the latest season of Formula One car racing. I've followed F1 now for over a decade, and it's the one sporting endeavor I care much about. (An aside: while it's maybe a bit odd to talk of race car drivers being athletes--and it's an ongoing debate--the fact is an F1 driver needs to be in top physical condition to survive the rigors in the car, with drivers being subjected to 4-5 Gs of force numerous times on every lap, and heart rates running very high during the two-hour duration of the race. It's much more taxing than one would think. The driver who does not follow a rigorous diet and workout regimen is not going to win, simple as that, and the top drivers are incredibly fit by any standard.)

What interests me for the purpose of this post is this sense of F1 being a team endeavor. While a football team is considerably larger than the group of men seen at any given time on the field, this number is child's play compared to the staff needed to run a Formula One team. The top teams--Ferrari and McLaren and others--employ something like 500 engineers (five hundred! And that's just engineers; full staffs can run in the thousands) and have an annual budget in excess of half a billion dollars. Billion with a B. We tune in to watch our favorite particular driver match wits with the other drivers--in this sense it seems like an individual sport, kind of--but a simple pit stop gives a little sense that the driver plays only one role. It's a vital one, but it's not the only spoke without which the wheel would not turn. Moreso than other sports, the bulk of F1 is NOT what you see on TV, even if the car and its performance are the culmination of all the work.

What is not immediately obvious about this setup is all the ways which this huge budget influences things. And it influences every single thing about the sport. F1 is in a bit of a crisis this past month or so, as one of the top teams, McLaren, was found to have several hundred pages of proprietary technical data about the current car of another top team, Ferrari. Apparently a disgruntled Ferrari employee, now fired, saw his way to getting hold of this information for a fellow disgruntled employee of rival team McLaren (also now fired), though no one yet knows quite to what end. A third major team--Honda--were contacted by these rogues looking for employment opportunities, but they were curtly turned away. Along the line, phone calls were made between this rogue technical element and two of McLaren's drivers, and soon both McLaren and Ferrari were under investigation for spying.

I suppose you have to give a damn about the individual teams--or, at the very least, about the sport itself--to give a damn about this. But it's quite juicy, in a way that only things where hundreds of millions of dollars hang in the balance can be. The sport's governing body, the FIA, and its arm The World Motorsport Council, met a couple weeks ago to consider this industrial espionage case and to determine who is thought to be at fault and what course of official action is warranted. What resulted from this meeting is unprecedented: the team which is in receipt of the purloined documents--McLaren--were found to be in violation of fair play and were stripped of their constructor's championship points for the entire year. Well and good, since the points are granted by the FIA; it's their championship. But they took the additional step of levying a fine on McLaren of a hundred million dollars. A hundred million bucks! Jesus.

Interestingly (astoundingly, suicidally), no one actually seems to think the data in the stolen documents are of any real value nor that McLaren have benefitted from this data in any meaningful way. The team principal who is writing the Godzilla Check is thought to be himself innocent and of high moral fiber. Most teams concede that the business of designing a car is so highly secretive, and the potential advantages gained by the hundreds of millions of engineering dollars so incredibly tiny and incremental, that there just aren't really any BIG secrets to give away; and just in case, the teams take great pains to ensure that very, very few people at the team have the whole, big picture (like the Monty Python "killer joke" bit where people were allowed only to translate the joke into German in single-word increments in order to keep the translators from serious injury). If it all sounds other-worldly, it is. It's the money.

It turns out that the standing Driver's World Champion, Spaniard Fernando Alonso, who is spending his first season with McLaren, is frustrated this year that he is not being given preferential treatment by his team--a treatment which he might otherwise have expected as the winner of the last two years' championships; he is the Alpha of his sport. His frustration is compounded by a most unfortunate (for him) alignment of planets: he teammate and fellow McLaren driver this year is a rookie, one Lewis Hamilton, who in almost unprecedented fashion is actually leading Alonso in championship points with the season about 80% done. A rookie is legitimately beating the standing world champion. Who'da thunk? This situation caused Alonso to boil over and to attempt to blackmail his boss, Ron Dennis, into putting a leash on his newbie teammate and giving him, Alonso, the preferential treatment he feels he deserves. His blackmail weapon? That aforementioned phone call from the disgruntled technical element which was the source of the FIA's investigation and huge fine. Alonso threatened his boss that he'd go to the FIA with "new information" about the spying case if he were not given No. 1 status in the team. Team boss Ron Dennis immediately went to the FIA and said "there's more information." It's not known to exactly what degree, but certainly Alonso's "information" played some role in getting his team fined a hundred million bucks. Alonso had no role in the industrial espionage itself, but he played his part in getting the company slammed.

Teamwork. Hmmm. Alonso is being paid millions of dollars to drive a race car. And it's hard not to feel a bit of contempt at a guy who feels he cannot beat his rookie teammate unless that rookie is hobbled in some way. True, he never expected to come to the team and be paired up with his equal--what rookie is a world champion's equal? McLaren boss Ron Dennis has always been completely up front about not favoring either driver in any circumstances. But now, faced with the difficult situation, Alonso's solution is to try and leverage out an advantage for himself, even if it requires sticking a knife into his employer. He has contributed, unwittingly or willfully, to his team of hundreds of dedicated people being stripped of the championship points which constitute a mainstay of motivation for their working lives and careers. It's a wonder anyone at the company will stand in the same garage with Alonso.

Lastly, what makes it all so spurious is the fact that the various teams are quite open about photographing and scrutinizing and taking notes on every, tiny aspect of what every other team is doing! Spying, overt espionage, is absolutely routine. Photos fly back and forth, television footage is intensely scrutinized. Further, there is a huge amount of turnover in the sport, with people jumping from team to team quite readily. So while it does indeed seem wrong for McLaren to have 700 pages of Ferrari technical stuff, it's a sin by small degree in comparison to what everyone else has of the teams' information.

The whole thing is a neat idea--designing high-tech automobiles from scratch to get around a race track as quickly as possible--turned absurdly melodramatic by waaaaaay too much money.