F1, heels and faces

In theory, it shouldn't be embarrassing to be a Formula 1 fan. The glamour! The speed! The technology! The heroic stories of victories snatched from the jaws of defeat! The stewards enquiries into tyre pressure on the right rear during the second qualifying session!

OK so it's not 100% non stop high powered adrenaline rush. But as a spectacle, it's traditionally considered one of the biggest - attending a Grand Prix is supposed to be an almost otherworldly experience on the edge of daring.

The heart attack you might have looking at the ticket prices aside, it's a fact that that's not always the case - as with any sport, Formula 1 has its more pedestrian moments. Anyone who's ever watched any form of sport - from football to tennis to bog snorkeling - knows that not every meeting will be legendary and in fact you might get a fair number of dull ones.

Formula 1 is a bit different to a lot of other sport in that as a casual fan, even if you only care about one or two teams or drivers, you would still have to watch every Grand Prix to see them. In a sense, watching it is far more about the sport itself than whoever you specifically support - to go to all of Sauber’s races in a season you'd still also have attended all of Ferrari and Mercedes’.

So it helps quite a lot if the sport itself doesn't attempt to turn itself into a drama-reaching spectacle as a way to offset its actual excitement levels. No, I'm not talking about the wrestler-style driver introductions at the US GP, which at least gave you some idea who any of this lot are and clearly entertained Daniel Ricciardo enough to be wholly justified, I want to talk about the strange, stark cases of Max Verstappen and Daniil Kvyat.

Wrestling is actually a great comparison to F1 because every media narrative around the sport looks for faces (innocent good guys/heroes) and heels (the guys you love to hate) and is as keen to see the former succeed as it is to kick the latter. Most drivers change, according to media whim, between the two across their careers - Schumacher definitely started as a heel and ended as a face, for instance.

Maybe it's a bit of the acknowledgement that although F1 is in no way scripted on track, structural elements mean the wins are, if not quite pre-decided, then odds stacked in a way most bookies would call unethical. The top teams get the most prize money, giving them more resources to win with, while the bottom teams are literally given less to work with including the physical size of their garage space. An evenly cut astroturf is not F1's playing field.

Max Verstappen and Daniil Kvyat, whose careers have ended up weirdly intertwined, are kind of awful, modern examples of how F1 creates and breaks narratives around drivers.

It's worth saying neither of them has done anything especially bad as an athlete. One Snapchat video of them both smoking (legal) shisha in a club in Monaco is as controversial as either of them has really got - no drugs test failures, no being done for speeding, no sex tapes, no Vegas marriages, no failing to turn up for work, etc. At 20 and 23, Max and Daniil have been in F1 3 and 4 years respectively and neither of them has punched another driver or done anything worse than once saying “fuck” on Sky.

Compare that to Premier League players and you kind of have to think modern F1 drivers are a load of green smoothie guzzling, high performance goodie-goodies. Heck if most national athletics teams managed to get through a whole Olympics fortnight with only that much controversy then some officials somewhere would probably have a lot more hair left.

The US Grand Prix weekend saw both of them back on what could, since I'm writing this without an editor looking over me, be described as “F1's bullshit.”

Max has, for sure, the trillion-pound Louboutin crushing his face into the marble flooring whereas it feels like Daniil may have more had a load of old wellies thrown at him. But nevertheless there's some unique factors to the way they both show up not just the vagaries of the Red Bull driver academy’s “development” programme but the sport at large.

The story so far: both Max and Daniil are sponsored by Red Bull and have driven for Red Bull teams for their entire careers in F1. The Red Bull programme is, famously, brutal even by F1’s standards in terms of turfing drivers out on whims and recruiting more young hopefuls than it can promote.

From a sponsor’s point of view that makes sense, with the idea being to only bring the most competitive talent into F1. Red Bull are then even more unusual by having two teams in the sport, their main Red Bull Racing and the sort of locked twitter account where all the juicy shit goes down that is junior outfit Toro Rosso. All driver selection across both teams is done by Dr Helmut Marko, a name anyone in the Red Bull academy will feel a bit of panic about coming up on their phone - with either a chance at glory or sudden binning about to occur.

Marko is known to be whimsy and hard to please - Daniil earnt himself another year in F1, after a demotion last season, partly by turning his fortunes around himself and bringing good results but also at least in part because rival up-and-comer Pierre Gasly annoyed Marko with some over-eager press comments.

Which brings us to last year and what, for the sake of not turning this into an actual Norse saga, we'll call the beginning of all this. A few races into last season, Daniil was in the top team and Max in Toro Rosso, something a podium finish in the Chinese Grand Prix for Daniil couldn't stop being reversed, after his home race in Russia. Embarrassing, yes - even worse that then-eighteen-year-old Max went on to immediately win the Spanish Grand Prix but perhaps that really is just F1's so-called meritocracy in action.

Daniil struggled through the season, now in a much slower car, while Max’s star controversially rose among complaints about his aggressive driving style. A memorably worrying Sky interview with Daniil at the German Grand Prix showed the stress on his psychology - massive even in normal F1 circumstances - was doing him real harm and we all felt Concerned for the sporting implications for a bit.

But then he made a comeback after the summer break, including holding Max behind him for several laps in Singapore, which satisfied the sport's questions about what exactly it was doing to these kids.

Forward to the 2017 season and the apparent settling of both their accounts at the end of last season has been undone into something more closely resembling me trying to do my expenses invoicing after three large glasses of wine. Max has been plagued by engine failures and crashes that have only let him get to the finish line of 50% of Grand Prix this year, while Daniil has suffered a torrid season and been dropped, brought back and now dropped again.

Toro Rosso has had four drivers this season: the team began with Daniil and Carlos Sainz Jr, before a series of bad results caused Daniil to be ejected from the team but retained in his contract to let Pierre Gasly drive, then Carlos was sent to Renault as part of negotiations including the main team's engine supply for next year, so Daniil was brought back to fill his place.

Except - and sorry if this all seems bafflingly in depth - Toro Rosso’s own engine supplier next year is Honda, for whom Pierre was driving in another series, so he was called away for the US Grand Prix and Brendon Hartley, a former Red Bull academy member who’d been unceremoniously dropped from the programme in 2011, was brought in to replace Pierre.

So Daniil missed two races and was brought back for one, with Carlos’ engineering team (who actually were also his engineering team in 2013 before he was promoted to the main team) while his car from earlier in the season was driven by Brendon. Anyone who's ever had their role restructured in an organisation is probably aware of how delightful a working environment this sounds.

Nonetheless, Daniil scored points and seemed to perform well, citing he'd had the “perfect” weekend. But that he knew nothing about his future - had heard nothing from anyone during his benching. Now, it's confirmed Brendon and Pierre are in for the next Grand Prix - but nothing beyond that, so perhaps he's still gonna get dragged back for one last usage.

Meanwhile, Max has just been re-signed by Red Bull until 2020, so no uncertainty whatsoever hangs over his career. And yet he still doesn't seem to be all that thrilled about it, having an apparently trying time all weekend, culminating in the sort of embarrassing situation you'd more associate with Daniil.

Max came third on track, before being handed a 5 second time penalty for an illegal overtaking move, after he had gone into the room where drivers wait for the top three podium and was out of radio reach for his team.

Like a sly wink to the fourth wall, everyone watching the world feed to the “cool-down room” knew that he'd lost his podium - and that fourth place finisher Kimi Raikkonen was coming to take his place. The drama of their actual battle on track was immediately replaced by the soap opera of watching Kimi get closer and closer to the room with still no one apparently having been able to tell Max, despite there being FIA officials in the room.

So the first he heard of it was when Kimi walked in. Which is how the hammy storyline of a daytime soap opera plays out an affair, not how sporting moderation decisions are usually communicated.

F1 loves cloak and dagger. You're supposed to want it, to want to watch it, want to be in it, so badly that you will sit quietly and wait for it to tell you when and how it wants you. Which is the sort of trust exercise that gives a lot of people the hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck air of definitely being creeped on.

As a working environment, it sounds like the sort of hellish thing that still wakes me up sweating ten years later. And that was basic admin not driving at 330kph.

F1 embarrassed itself this weekend - not with pomp and circumstance but with the unsporting, ghoulish enthusiasm it has for embarrassing its drivers. Max is now being investigated for sounding off about his penalty but given the reality TV show setup he heard about it, I've seen Big Brother contestants physically fight over less.

Meanwhile Kvyat, thrown out of his car again, presumably still “remains part of the Red Bull family.” F1 talks a lot about “families” - and maybe it needs to work out if it's the Sopranos or the Kardashians. Neither of which, as far as I know although I'm not fully caught up on Keeping Up, are regulated sporting competitions.

F1 is incomprehensible to the viewer, a lot of the time - so technical you can barely grasp it if you're not willing to spend ages acquiring an engineer's level of knowledge and a lawyer's grasp of regulations. It's why people get so wound up about shark fins and the noise of the cars because to a viewer not thinking of undertaking a PhD in aeronautics they're the only detectable differences on the cars, so the only real discussion point below the level of Advanced God.

But it's now also incomprehensible to the drivers. And willing to play that for drama.

Drivers talk a lot about how important trusting the car is - and each other. You have to know the guy you're driving round isn't going to smash you into the wall.

If F1 wants to be taken seriously as a sport, it probably needs to think about how much the drivers have to trust it. You're not allowed to use more than four drivers in a season - but should Toro Rosso be able to continue to juggle theirs? And should a driver be beamed across the world, inter cut with his approaching rival, essentially being embarrassed by not having been told something decided about him by the sport?

F1 has drama, it needs to be better at explaining itself - and for the media circus to be on track action not off track assassinations. These aren't characters, this isn't a scripted narrative - if it's a sport, act like one.