good article from Automobile Magazine

[cdh]

LET’S GET IT STARTED
A formula 1 neophyte hits the Canadian Grand Prix to
find out why thousands of people pay to watch bad racing.
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The one race series I've always harbored a desire to see in person is Formula 1. F1 has history, outrageous cars, and a hated and feared megalomaniac running the show. So, when my friend Clay proposes making a pilgrimage to the Canadian Grand Prix, I decide this is the year. If I keep putting it off until those scalawags finish refitting the staterooms of my yacht at Monaco, why, I may never see a race.

While modern F1 is reputed to be boring, with infrequent passing and total domination by Ferrari's Michael Schumacher, that apparently isn't hurting attendance. Four months before the race, one bed-and-breakfast booking service tells me it has rooms in the city, but there's a four-night minimum stay. And, oh yes, the price is double the normal high-season rate. The best I can do is Quality Suites Oeust, which is a twenty-minute drive from downtown and has in-room coffee that tastes like dehydrated manure. This is what you get for waiting. We fare better on the transportation front. We need something fast, with room for four - another friend, Murph, and my girlfriend, Heather, have been recruited-and some connection to one of the Fl teams, since I have no one to root for. Enter one titanium gray BMW 545i with a six-speed stick, active steering, active roll stabilization, and gigantic wheels and tires. Retainer-wearing trunk lid aside, it's a fine tool for making quick work of a Boston-to-Montreal haul and a reason to cheer arbitrarily for the BMW Williams Fl team over the weekend.

Since I'm an F1 ignoramus and Heather asks if there will be mullets at the race, indicating that she has F1 confused with NASCAR, Clay tries to give us an F1 primer while the 545i devours miles on the Vermontobahn. He hasn't gotten very far when we come upon an M5 loping along, in the slow lane. I decide to pull the tiger's tail, and we exchange passes, each time increasing our speed as well as the expressions of displeasure on the faces of the women in our passenger seats. "That guy was minding his own business, doing 70 in the slow lane, until you came along," Murph says. "Now you've made him mental, and he's going to get divorced." The M5 guy ends up next to us in line at the border, and I break the ice. "Nice car," I offer. "I like the color of yours," he replies. "He just told you that you have a nice personality," says Heather. From now on, I'm only talking to 3-series drivers.

The next day, we drive to Circuit Gilles-Ville-Villeneuve for qualifying. I'm apprehensive about parking, since the track is situated on an island in the middle of the Saint Lawrence River, and once the lots are full, you're up a river of your own. Perhaps by locating it on an island best accessible by subway, the track's creators were trying to limit F1 fan syndrome: the tendency to develop a perverted idea of what both one's car and oneself are capable of after watching a race. Maybe I'll think I'm Juan Pablo Montoya and wad the 545i into a bridge abutment after qualifying, but for now, I’m just happy to find a parking spot, for $12 Canadian at that. Having recently choked down a $56 tab for twenty hours in a Boston parking garage, the equivalent of $9 U.S. seems like a deal of "These beads for this island you call Manhattan" proportions.

As we hike toward the track, I hear the roar of a distant fighter jet, but when I look up, the sky is empty. The rumble I'm hearing, the sound of air being rendered with severe prejudice, is actually coming from individual cars decelerating off the straightaway. By the time we're next to the track, I have goosebumps. Either I see dead people, or this noise is one of the most fantastic things I've ever heard. I'd expected the engines to shriek, but I thought it would be a smooth rev-shift-rev, the way it seems on TV: What TV can't communicate is the nonsensical undertone of bass lurking beneath the 18,OOO-rpm wail. It's an extraterrestrial vacuum cleaner sucking up strings of lit M-80s, punctuated by the booming clunk of the shifts as the engine catches its breath before taking another quick drag of atmosphere. You probably could get a Chevy Impala transmission to make a sound like an F1 shift -if you threw it off a ten-story building.

On our way to our seats, I get another Canadian culture shock: People are toting coolers, chairs, and anything else they can physically carry. There is no discernible security. If you're forced to buy food or beer from the vendors inside, you have nobody to blame but yourself Again, it's a nice contrast to American events, where security would frisk you and confiscate your insulin if Aramark sold it in the stadium.

Qualifying unfolds with each driver besting the one before. BAR-Honda's Takuma Sato looks the fastest as he pounds through the ess turn in front of our seats, and, in fact, he's setting the pole-position pace when he spins 360 degrees on one of the last turns, avoiding the wall by inches but ruining his run. "That's why Jordan dumped him;' says a guy in front of us, who's been offering unsolicited commentary throughout qualifying. "I know," I reply to Mr. F1 Knowledge, even though I don't know. I wish I could up the ante-"It's not surprising he spun, given that he was born with a cleft palate"-but until I looked in my program just now, I thought Honda employed a guy named Hakuna Matata.

When Michael Schumacher comes through and resets the pole, the crowd seems to love it. The Ferrari team is like the New York Yankees - they win all the time, and I get the feeling that a lot of the red-shirted devotees in the stands simply enjoy allying themselves with a winner. So I'm surprised when everybody goes nuts again after BAR-Honda's Jenson Button claims the pole from Schumacher. Maybe you've just got to like a guy named Jenson Button. By the time it's all done, pole position belongs to-cue dramatic music-Schumacher's younger brother, BMW Williams F1's Ralf Schumacher. (In my notebook, I begin to outline a screenplay based on Ralf and Michael's lives, entitled Hot Schues. It will feature David Hasselhoff as their father and will be huge in Germany.)

We arrive early Sunday morning to get a parking spot and to catch the Ferrari Challenge support race at 8:45. The Ferrari Challenge features a field of Ferrari 360s driven by their owners. There is no prize money involved, because, as the track announcer points out, these guys aren't exactly clipping coupons for Ramen noodles.

I expect the race to be a little dull, since I imagine the owner-driver set won't be too keen on rubbing six-figure door handles. Am I wrong. In this group of rich guys, there is a dangerous and entertaining combination of testosterone,

ego, and brazen disregard for the boundaries of the track. A yellow 360 is forced off the track at the corner directly in front of us, the driver using the dirt as a shortcut and flying back onto the pavement without losing position. Montreal Canadiens defenseman Patrice Brisebois gets black-flagged for unsportsmanlike driving. And on the last lap, the two lead cars pull out of the final comer in a drag race for the finish line. They're so evenly matched that the timing equipment initially flashes the difference between first and second place as 0.0 second. This turns out to be the best race of the weekend.

There's a three-hour gap between the end of the Ferrari Challenge race and the beginning of the main event. So it happens that I find myself at the Budweiser tent, drinking beer at 9:45 a.m. on a Sunday. Here we have an "armchair quarterback" game where participants try to toss footballs through targets from a bucking recliner; a big rig with the hood propped open; a NASCAR pit stop tire-changing contest; and, of course, more beer taps than you can shake a diseased liver at. It's a bit like walking onto an American military base in a foreign country: one minute you're strolling past vendors selling Fl apparel while cigarette-smoking girls in Ferrari-logo hot pants invite you to pose for une photo, and the next minute you expect to see Randy Quaid crushing a can on his head while eating Hamburger Helper. I'm happy here, but I feel the same twinge of guilt I get when eating McDonald's in Europe. I should have tried to find some poutine and Molson to consume while listening to Crash Test Dummies. Maybe next time.

We return to our seats to watch the F1 warm-up. After five minutes, I'm less interested in the cars than I am in mugging my fellow race goers for their comfort-enhancing accessories. I'd steal that old lady's padded camp chair to make the aluminum bleachers a little more comfortable; I’d jack that guy for his hat so my forehead wouldn't get burned; I'd purse-snatch that other guy's Igloo cooler and the thirst-quenching goodies inside it. Why didn't I think to bring these things myself? I hope I can ignore my cooler envy long enough to enjoy the race.

The green flag drops. Jarno Trulli breaks his suspension at takeoff; so Clay gets to cheer for his favorite for 0.3 second. Almost immediately, there's a tangle at Turn 2, which we watch on the JumboTron. By the time the pack makes its way around to our corners, the cars are a little more spaced out, but it's still a deafening racket, and I put in my ear plugs. On the first lap, Ralf Schumacher is in the lead, and he stays there for a while. But once people start taking pit stops, I completely lose track of who's leading.

Eventually, there's a lone car coming by over and over again, and after the first lap, there is no passing that I can detect. So, as with NASCAR, the entertainment factor is heavily invested in the possibility of calamity. Mr. F1 Knowledge turns around with a smug "I could've told you that would happen" expression when Sato auditions for Pistons Gone Wild and blows his engine in a spectacular cloud of smoke. On another lap, one of the evil-handling Jaguars goes onto the dirt, hits a bump, and gets airborne before cutting safely back onto the track. Of course, I don't have my camera handy. Or even turned on. To tell the truth, by mid-race, I am thinking about how good it would feel to trade my backless metal bleacher seat for the twelve-way adjustable throne in the BMW:

Even an experience as singular as watching a Formula 1 race gets old after an hour when there's so little head-to-head competition. By the time the final lap arrives, You Know Who is cruising to his seventh victory of the season, and I ever even saw him pass anyone to do it. Maybe it happened while I was fantasizing about Barcaloungers and air-conditioning.

Formula 1 is a great spectacle. Too bad it's not a better race.

Ezra Dyer – Automobile Magazine

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