The Formula by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg
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The Formula:
How Rogues, Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reeingineered F1 into the World’s Fastest-Growing Sport
By Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg
Mariner Books 2024
On far too many occasions, sports authors have presumed their readership to be as zealous and invested in their subject matter as themselves. So it is refreshing to see two writers who recognise that more people beside awed youngsters and squabbling fellow hacks can be reached if their book is replete with narrative intrigue and revelatory razzmatazz. And though Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg’s The Formula keeps the jobless devotees and oil-blackened experts of Formula One satisfied, it also pleases a newcomer with a clever and concise series of anecdotes and fiery disputes from the history of the world’s premier auto racing circus.
It is the avaricious megalomaniacs, demur specialists and savage competitors peopling our writers’ text that makes it so relentlessly flabbergasting. This consortium of subtitled ‘rogues, geniuses and speed freaks’ include engineer Colin Chapman, whose Lotus cars roared through the silence of post-war British airfields with scant regard for driver safety as he trousered considerable sums from the tobacco industry. Then it’s the stint of truculent bloviate Enzo Ferrari whose company used “a visceral mix of speed and noise to fuel generations of teenage fantasies,” making the Ferrari brand, its skeuomorphic ‘prancing horse’ emblem and its thronging ‘tifosi’ fanbase an unmissable F1 package. Generational talent Ayrton Senna and his “wheel-yanking, seat-of-the-pants style” in the cockpit baffled the analysts and crazed the spectators. Robinson and Clegg utilise the poetic license appropriate for anyone covering Senna’s masterful driving in 1988 by calling him “one dashing Brazilian who was floating some thirty feet above the track…deep in the throes of an out-of-body-experience.”
It’s with their scathing treatment of the vulpine business tycoon Bernie Ecclestone that The Formula really begins to speed along the surface. The second-hand car dealer turn political lobbyist and billionaire bully is initially applauded as his “purpose in life became to grow Formula 1 away from the track on a planetary scale” before censuring him for staging the sport within the foul jurisdictions of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Readers are pleased when their villainous Ecclestone (having been fattened by our dramatists to a juicy extent) finally lands on their plates after being sidelined in the twenty first century for his narrow perspective on Formula 1’s future.
All of these discussions would have their verve heightened and their acuity confirmed if The Formula wasn’t chugging a miasma of inept rhetoric in its wake. Terrible partnerships are said to be “mixing like Motor Oil and Perrier”, controversies “[hang] over the Brickyard like the stench of exhaust fumes and light beer”, team factionalism goes bad “faster than a tuna sandwich in the sun” and some Grands Prix in America are marked out as “duller than the card room at a Florida retirement home.” This reviewer knows as well as any that some of the finest works suffer lapses in concentration, but it is only pity and the restriction of a word count that omits seven other sandpit similes which cheapen Robinson and Clegg’s appearance.
The most engaging chapters come at the book’s denouement. A booming Netflix series, typified by concocted storylines and shameless manipulation of snippets has bulked F1’s numbers and diversified its audience. The sport is now being rapidly redefined as a peripatetic gala for millennials as opposed to the engineering competition for the statistically-minded petrolhead. “F1 had begun to resemble,” our writers opine “a post-sport sport. It was perfectly possible to call yourself a fanatic of Formula 1 - with all the engagement, emotional attachment and financial commitment of a lifelong supporter - without watching a single race.” Other than this argument thrust out at random, they coast above the clouds of debate and never weigh in with the sagacity expected from syndicated journalists. Thankfully they acknowledge, through gritted teeth, that the dandified chintz of modish race weekends grates on the majority of F1 fans who miss the “politically incorrect monomaniacs…genuine hatred between the drivers” and “a winking disregard for the rules.”
The Formula is fierce and inquisitive. It is candid when noting the technological innovations that have stripped the human element out of the racing process, and it is intensely forceful when addressing the moral dubiety of races hosted in the backyards of oligarchs and oil barons. Newbies will not feel out of their depth in clinks and clunks of engineering minutiae, they won’t find their hands smothered in brake fluid, nor will they feel patronised by a clique as monitors hold their hand. The circuitous corporate debacles and throttle-happy madmen that get the book up to speed has readers flooring the accelerator pedal before vacuous similes and timid coverage of controversy sends them skidding inescapably into the barriers.
Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston Upon Hull.