The Best American Sports Writing 2014(99)

Obama did not turn up, though the idea was perhaps not as far-fetched as it sounds. During the next several days of walking the paddock, I spied Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, Texas’s governor, Rick Perry, and Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man, among lesser dignitaries such as Ron Howard and George Lucas. The journalist Joe Saward, whose racing blog I’d taken to reading regularly, assured me that one of Princess Diana’s exes was roaming about as well. Saward then began pointing out some of his fellow motor scribes: one kept a jet car in his garage, another was an uncanny juggler, and a third spoke nine languages. Saward himself is a historian of the French Resistance. “Even the motor-home girls have master’s degrees,” he said, referring to the hostesses at the teams’ hospitality suites. “I always wanted to run off and join the circus, and in a sense I have.”

Bernie Ecclestone, whom Saward described (more or less approvingly) as “stark raving bonkers,” wore Texas-appropriate jeans and cowboy boots to the track, and took a break from his daily backgammon game one afternoon to speak with the local media, who wondered if he was concerned about the fact that his big event happened to fall on the same weekend as the finale of the NASCAR Sprint Cup series, in Miami. “I’ll let you know on Monday,” he said, and granted that the customs official who’d greeted him at the airport had never heard of Formula One. “He seemed quite reasonable,” Ecclestone added.

“Away from the venue, what do you look forward to doing in Austin?” one reporter asked, in a deep Texas twang.

“I may go to LA tomorrow,” Ecclestone replied.

The ace driver Sebastian Vettel, speaking with me before his first practice session, attempted to parse the differences between NASCAR and Formula One in terms that he thought I might understand. “Maybe, you know, baseball and tennis,” he began. “Just because you have a racket . . .” I furrowed my brow in confusion. “Okay,” he said. “Baseball, you don’t have a racket. But something that’s maybe similar? Doesn’t mean it’s the same thing. You know what I mean?” He thought for another moment, and added, “I actually wanted to say golf and baseball. Both times you have a stick, right? But you can’t really compare. Obviously, Formula One is much more sophisticated. The cars are high-tech, whereas in NASCAR they are low-tech. But I don’t mean there are only stupid people working there.” Vettel’s personal manager murmured something to him in German. “She says I’m talking too much,” he said.

Vettel has curly blond hair, blue eyes, and an impish charm. He should by rights have been the media darling of this spectacle. At 25, he was already the two-time reigning world champion, and poised to become the youngest driver ever to win three titles. Scattered around the track were posters drawn up in the Wild West style. WANTED: A WORLD CHAMPION, they said, and featured mug shots of Vettel and Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, who were leading in the individual driver standings, with two races to go. Back in the summer, Vettel had visited New York and appeared as a guest on The Late Show with David Letterman, where he talked about the “big balls” you need as a Formula One driver. But the more success he had, it seemed, the more credit went to Newey—Alonso himself spoke of “fighting against a Newey car”—and Vettel was getting defensive. “I don’t see Adrian or myself being more important than any other,” he said. “I mean, when I’m on the track, I’m alone in the car, and if I steer left the car turns left, and I steer right the car turns right, so whatever I do is extremely decisive to the whole project.”

I made a habit of following herds of cameras wherever they went, and thereby learned to connect faces with some of racing’s legendary names. The elfin man dressed all in plaid was Sir Jackie Stewart, a three-time world-champion driver in the 1960s and ’70s. (“He’s too good,” Stewart said of Newey. “He’s a very clever man.”) The extremely tanned and perfectly coiffed fireplug who looked as if he’d just climbed off a yacht in the Mediterranean was Mario Andretti. The guy with a monocoque of a proboscis was Emerson Fittipaldi. The awesomely dressed man holding court in front of Ferrari’s hospitality suite? “Oh, he’s just an asshole,” Saward said. “He represents what you might call the indolently wealthy.”

But the real paparazzi of Formula One—the guys with the thigh-size lenses that could zoom in on an Ecclestone daughter from two blocks away—are not interested in people-watching. They stalk the pit lane, where the garages are arranged in order of success, and cluster at the front end, among the McLarens, Ferraris, and Red Bulls, hoping to catch an unobstructed view of the cars as they’re reassembled each morning. A mysterious bit of film had emerged from the previous race, in Abu Dhabi. It showed Red Bull mechanics fiddling with Vettel’s front wing and nose cone, which appeared supple, as if made of rubber instead of carbon. Was this another bit of Newey-inspired alchemy? Or was it a violation of the rules restricting wing flexibility, as some rivals charged? Flexing wings improve grip in high-speed corners without increasing drag on straightaways. Might it explain Red Bull’s late-season surge to the front of the paddock after an inconsistent start? All I was able to discern while spying on the Red Bull garage is that its mechanics blast dance music that must be intended to drive the fussy neighbors from Ferrari mad. (You can “check out what the garage are listening to today” via the team’s Spotify playlist.) Also, to judge from the open Red Bull cans in view, they may be overcaffeinated.