“It’s an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem”. So said The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’ve no idea if its author Douglas Adams was an F1 fan, in fact I doubt that he was, but the words seem highly apt to that pursuit too, or at least how the sport’s followers are determined to interpret it. And I’d imagine that you don’t need me to tell you that we’re having rather a heavy round of claims that things are not what they seem lately, with Fernando Alonso’s testing crash, concussion and subsequent sitting out of the season’s opening round in Melbourne.
For what it’s worth, I am in the crowd who reckons there isn’t much to see here. A driver had an accident, hit a wall, got concussion. And even though he’s now physically fine he is required to wait 21 days before taking up again. This 21 day period is utterly standard, given the often devastating consequence of Second Impact Syndrome. So all normal. And I’m struggling to understand why a few seem determined to persist with the idea that there’s something fishy going on.
Part of the problem is ignorance of course, perhaps understandable given this caution over concussion is a relatively new thing in sport never mind just F1. Martin Brundle indeed spoke in recent days about after he was concussed in an accident in the 1994 season-opening Brazilian Grand Prix literally nothing happened – he walked back the pits, debriefed, flew home. Only a couple of weeks later did his family insist he was checked out. While as recently as the last football season in the English Premier League there were cases wherein players were out cold but – in acts of lunacy – were allowed to continue in the same game after coming to.
And this ignorance has to be waded through – ‘how can he miss a Grand Prix when he has no injuries?’ was a comment I encountered a few times after Alonso’s Melbourne absence was announced, and from people who should know better.
A few too have pointed to the apparently low speed of the crash (though there have been conflicting reports on this), and that the McLaren was hardly beaten up, as reason to think this is all unusual. Perhaps so, but as the former F1 doctor Gary Hartstein pointed out “we have to remember that the correlation between the force applied to the head and the severity of the concussion is quite…coarse. Every ER doc has seen patients with huge hits who are only mildly concussed, as well as patients who’ve only tapped their heads mildly and are totally in outer space!
“My conclusion? There’s nothing suspicious here…yet.”
The stimuli haven’t helped either. Sebastian Vettel who was further down the track when the accident happened said initially that the accident “looked strange”, a statement that got many an imagination going. Only later did he clarify that he “didn’t really see. I was a bit too late so I couldn’t see how the accident started, I only saw the last bit where he hit the wall”. But by then the truth couldn’t overtake the bum steer. Murmurings that the Spaniard suffered an electric shock, or another problem to cause the unconsciousness, before the impact refuse to desist. Brundle added in this vein that “I don’t think we’re getting the full story yet…why did he have the crash? Did he already have a problem?”
Bernie Ecclestone described the crash as “inexplicable”, though I assume he also didn’t witness it and it wouldn’t surprise me if his motive was his habitual one of getting F1 attention in the media. The most recent agitator is David Coulthard who on the basis of the three days Alonso spent in hospital declared that “it does not add up”. Quite why Coulthard’s medical opinion and from afar is more valid than those of the doctors who dealt with Alonso directly is beyond my naïve understanding however.
That it took place in testing, and as a consequence no moving footage and only a few photographs of the crash exist, hardly helps of course. Neither does that Alonso’s injuries and recovery is a medical matter and therefore by its nature private. Eric Silbermann for one reckoned that all of the speculation reflects the media stamping its collective feet at McLaren “not handing out copies of Fernando’s brain scan, news on the firmness of his stools and a rundown of what he had for breakfast…This sense of entitlement, the idea that teams have some sort of obligation to spoon feed the press with information or that they should be morally bound to answer all questions is frankly ludicrous.”
And while it’s easy to blame the mightily-irresponsible new media for such things, as outlined the wild speculation has by no means been exclusive to them. And over and above those examples I’ve mentioned plenty of outposts of the old established written press have run with similar stuff. But then again perhaps the new media gives more of a platform for such theories, and it’s possible that seeps into the more established sources too. It’s a common accusation against what’s often referred to these days as the ‘24 hour media’ that the desire to be first can overtake the desire to be accurate.
Ron Dennis hardly helped on the ignorance front though, when he apparently confirmed that Alonso had been unconscious but claimed too that there was no concussion, which in fact makes no sense. In my view the most likely explanation was that Ron was being sloppy with facts – particularly medical ones – rather than partaking in a cover-up. I can only assume what he meant was that Alonso had no concussion symptoms in the here and now, but that makes no difference to the 21 day minimum rest-up time. And whatever you may think of Ron, surely if he was going to make a conscious effort to lie to us you’d assume he’d at least come up with something plausible.
As Hartstein noted about the whole shebang: “The confusion, improvisation, inconsistency, and outright silliness of the various press contacts most certainly do not represent malign intent.”
I threaten to digress however. As I’m more intrigued by the general matter. That of why exactly do conspiracy theories persist? And particularly, it seems, in F1?
Well, in a general sense conspiracy theories have always had their attractions. They tend to purport to explain the unexplainable; imply human control over everything rather than allow the possibly more bewildering (certainly more accurate) concept that some things just happen, as well as that we all are fallible and err sometimes. They also tend to be more interesting than the often mundane reality. In Britain some like to say ‘cock-up before conspiracy’ (for the uninitiated, in Britain a ‘cock-up’ is a blunder), and it doesn’t seem like the worst advice.
And often conspiracy theories persist because the interpretations they provide seem more fitting to the subject at hand. To take one high profile example I’ve heard it said that the reason why outlandish theories about the death of Princess Diana linger is that to her supporters her being bumped off by dark forces seems a much more appropriate end to her tragi-heroic existence than simply dying in a car crash because her driver had a drop too many and she neglected to wear her seat belt. Perhaps similar is at play in F1 – that most clever and mysterious of activities – that its agents continuing to be clever and seeking to pull the wool over our eyes seems more fitting to it somehow than the thought that something just happened, or where appropriate that they simply screwed up.
Plenty of commonly-aired conspiracies pre-date the social media age, and not just in F1 (I’ve mentioned one already). And perhaps F1’s love of conspiracy theories reflects that is this game there have been so many of them going back over years and decades. The instances where it’s been suggested that things were not quite what they seemed roll off the tongue. To give just a few examples, did Pedro Rodriguez win the 1970 Belgian Grand Prix with an oversized engine? To what extent were the Italian stewards acting to Ferrari’s benefit when they rather dubiously threw James Hunt and others to the back of the grid for the 1976 Italian Grand Prix? In the 1975 Swedish Grand Prix Vittorio Brambilla took a surprise pole position in the March, but it might not have been all down to skill. According to legend the team’s pit was adjacent to the timing beam and the pit signaller swiped his driver’s board through it just before Vittorio himself went through. Turned out his team boss later became FIA President too.
On the subject of bosses, Bernie’s Brabham team in the early 1980s was quite the treasure trove for possible skulduggery. In early 1981 rumours flew that the team had a special ultra-light qualifying car, but that no one touched the squad as no one wanted to touch Bernie (Jacques Laffite was even quoted in L’Equipe saying as much). Then there is the team’s astonishing competitive upturn late in the 1983 season, an upturn which ended with Nelson Piquet as champion. The reasons for it have had a few, um, interesting theories attached. On a lighter note, Bernie admitted that one time when Brabham’s number two driver refused to commit to ceding his race position to the title-challenging number one, the team resolved the situation by not putting enough fuel in his car to finish the race…
Was Nigel Mansell correct that Honda diddled him out of the 1987 title when it became clear that Nige and the Japanese concern wouldn’t be together the following year? Was Alain Prost similarly correct when he later alleged that he suffered similarly and to Ayrton Senna’s benefit at the hands of the Japanese concern?
Then there’s Benetton in 1994 and its ‘launch control’ that it may or may not have used in the San Marino Grand Prix that year at least. As well as it removing the safety filter from its fuel rig, leading to the massive inferno in the Hockenheim pits in that year’s German race. And broadly the team got away with both, a turn of events that in itself has interesting theories attached to it. And then in 2001, when traction control, previously-banned, was made kosher again on the explicit grounds that the authorities admitted they couldn’t police it after years of grumbling about who might still have been using such systems.
Last year we entered the realms of farce however. After a summer in which Lewis Hamilton’s persistent run of unreliability was interpreted by some as the German Mercedes team seeking to ensure a German world champion in Lewis’s stable mate Nico Rosberg, come the Italian race which Lewis won – crucially for championship momentum as it turned out – after passing Nico when the latter made a trip down an escape road, plenty reckoned that also was a team-orchestrated move, but this time to Lewis’s benefit. ‘Retribution’ they said for a collision in the previous race for which Nico was at fault but which impeded Lewis far more.
Nico’s Monza error has a simple explanation – he braked too late just as has been done for as long as cars have been raced. Particularly when under pressure. From a faster team mate. In a title battle. It was an error too that Nico had replicated earlier in the race as well as had done similar more than once previously that season. But all that it seemed cut little ice with some.
Yet it is the case too that F1 likely has peculiar recent reasons – more so than in most activities – for its followers to assume that little can be placed beyond its participants. Most obviously Singapore 2008, and ‘Crashgate’. There were always murmurings about it in the year between Nelsinho Piquet’s notorious crash and the lid being lifted on it all; some even insist they knew all along. But that the idea of foul play didn’t really fly in the meantime I suspect was that it seemed a bit outlandish even for F1. So when it turned out the outlandish theory was in fact the accurate one perhaps a few concluded never to rule anything out when it came to the F1 lot.
And of course just before that we had another notorious controversy of ‘Spygate’, where again after general incredulity it transpired, according to the FIA’s investigation anyway, that the truth was stranger than what we could come up with in our imaginations.
That more recently it was revealed that Ferrari had for years (and is still thought to have) a technical regulation veto – curiously kept quiet from its contemporaries – perhaps also is contributing. Heck, we even found out late last season that Williams needs the permission of a Mercedes engineer to use its overtake setting in a race (as every team does with its respective engine supplier engineer). And as Motorsport’s Mark Hughes noted someone in the team suspects the permission is curiously less forthcoming when the Williams is battling a Mercedes… So it’s little wonder plenty these days feel the need to be vigilant. Once bitten, twice shy and all that.
Add to this also that F1 there seems generally more potential than in most pursuits for the conspiracy to take place. If the conspiracy theory usually is complex then also few sports can be said to be as complex as F1. Plus transparency in it is near non-existent – much goes on behind closed doors and inside the various black boxes that most of the rest of us know next to nothing about. The potential ways and means of getting up to no good are never-ending.
You can further add into this particular intoxicating brew that many – perhaps most – F1 operators do so with an amoral outlook. As Eddie Irvine, typically blunt, noted after Crashgate came to light: “Formula One has always been a war and in war all is fair. When I was in various teams you would do anything to win. Back in the day it was normal. This [Singapore incident] is probably slightly on the wrong side of the cheating thing but in days past every team have done whatever they could to win – cheat, bend the rules, break the rules, sabotage opponents…”
The list of examples above – both historic and recent – demonstrates that. It was likely this too that led Pat Symonds to comment post-Crashgate: “I never expected it to blow up as it did…There are instances in F1 when things as bad, or worse, have gone unpunished.”
So totalling all this up: we have a sport that is apparently fertile territory for conspiracies to take place, watered by a few high profile cases recently and fertilised by a media age that’s rather big on such things. Perhaps with this it’s no wonder that that for F1 observers the idea that things are not always what they seem is thought an important and popular fact.