The Best American Sports Writing 2014(100)

The course itself looked magnificent, rising out of a dusty field, southeast of the airport, that the city council had voted to annex less than two weeks before the race, in order to boost property-tax rolls. Those not arriving by helicopter had the option of taking a shuttle bus from downtown or parking in cow pastures along the access road, for $35, and using the two- or three-mile walk to get acclimated to the grinding whine of all the engine noise—the “glorious assault on the senses,” the official race announcer later called it—as the 133-foot ascent to the first turn came into focus. “Turn One,” I’d been told back in Milton Keynes, was “going to be epic.” It was a blind hairpin to the left, and would require drivers to downshift to first gear after a furious sprint up the hill. Hermann Tilke, the Robert Trent Jones of Formula One, was the architect, and I gathered that he’d given the undiscerning American audience of 115,000 an international sampler of sorts, borrowing an S-curve and a horseshoe bend from Interlagos and Istanbul, respectively, and alluding elsewhere to the swift Becketts Corner of England’s Silverstone.

Through practice and qualifying, the drivers’ times steadily improved as the track was in effect rubberized when the burned residue of the tires formed a smoother surface. Because of the circuit’s newness, oil was still being released by the settling asphalt, and the competitors used words like “shiny,” “icy,” “slippery,” “wet,” and “green” to describe the conditions. “Green, yeah, dirty,” Newey said, sipping a cup of coffee a few hours before the race, and dismissing as an “occupational hazard” the nuisance of shutterbugs who had gathered for a shot of the wizard at rest. Newey had been vindicated in the wing-flexing controversy, which the FIA race director, in a press conference, attributed to an optical illusion, and Vettel and Webber, benefiting from still further tweaks to the front wing angles and the ride height, had secured the first and third spots on the grid.

Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, meanwhile, placed a disappointing eighth, which he deemed “logical,” a result of inferior machinery. Even worse, this left him on the “dirty,” or less rubberized, side of the track. Ferrari officials then made the cynical decision to sabotage their other driver, Felipe Massa, to help Alonso. With less than an hour to go before the ceremonial parade lap (in classic American muscle cars, naturally), they broke the seal on Massa’s gearbox. Massa, who had actually been faster than Alonso in qualifying, was automatically penalized, and forced to drop back five spots. The newly configured grid placed Alonso in seventh, back on the clean side—and tough luck to those drivers from Force India, Lotus, and Williams who in turn were shifted from clean to dirty, as collateral damage. My Twitter feed filled with concerns from Formula One partisans that this might not sit well with an American audience obsessed by questions of fairness (“Yanks like sport over tactics”), ignoring the larger problem of widespread confusion.

Was Turn One indeed epic? There were no collisions or spinouts, so I’d have to vote no, although I was informed, after the cars had disappeared from view, that Alonso had managed to squirt past a driver or two. A veteran race observer once described for me the conversational rhythm among spectators in terms of 90-second intervals, or roughly the amount of time it takes a car to complete a three-and-a-half-mile lap. That is, you talk for 90 seconds, and then pause out of necessity when the cars whiz by again, trying in vain to hold a thought as your teeth vibrate. I found that this held true only for the first few laps, when the cars remained bunched together, and before any drivers had stopped for a change of tires. Soon enough, the interruptions were more frequent and intermittent, and it was easier to understand the proliferation of champagne as a desensitizing device.

I was fortunate to be watching from Red Bull’s section of the Paddock Club, above the pit lane, with the high rollers who had paid $5,000 each for the full experience: gnocchi, booze, and even a DJ from Miami, named Erok, whom Red Bull flies around the world to perpetuate its image as the brash upstart of the scene. Some helpful representatives of Infiniti, one of Red Bull’s subsidiary sponsors, distributed handheld video screens that allowed you to shuffle between camera views from each of the cars, and after some experimentation I concluded that the best way to watch the race was from the perspective of McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton, who had been made to obscure the painted letters “HAM” on his helmet after race officials learned that they were a reference not to his name but to the song by Kanye West and Jay-Z (and meant “hard as a motherfucker”).