“The racing’s so boring nowadays, why can’t we have it the way we did in the good old days?”
“The sport’s best years are behind itself, it’s no good anymore.”
“The cars are too easy to drive, take out all the technology so we can see some real racing!”
“Bring back the fucking V12s.”
At one point, some of the above statements were considered legitimate criticisms. Now they just seem like cliches which I just scroll past whilst saying “okay, boomer” in my head. I envision those who parrot these statements to be no younger than 35, middle-class suburbanite men who work dead-end jobs and no longer derive fulfillment or joy in their life so they needlessly infect comments sections of auto racing posts to bemoan its “depreciation” in recent years. There’s evidence backing my claim on the NASCAR side of things, so I’m glad to be right on that front.
37%. That’s the percentage of NASCAR’s audience that is made up of women.
Only 9% of the overall NASCAR audience fits into the 18–34 age demographic.
1 in 2 people who watch NASCAR on a regular basis are above the age of 55. 3 in 4 people in the NASCAR demographic are 35+.
The average NASCAR fan earns between $40k-$75k per year.
The average NASCAR fan is twice as likely to live in rural areas of the South or Midwest.
Brandon Gaille — 1/17/2015
Well, maybe the dead-end job portion is somewhat misleading but I’m near enough to the mark that my point stands.
Some racing series are reaching younger audiences, like Formula 1, thanks in part to Drive to Survive, as I touched upon in my previous blog post. Unfortunately, some are pessimistic about what racing in 2020 will provide. For NASCAR fans, the generally agreed consensus is that the best seasons were somewhere in the early 2000s, with many commenters in this thread listing 2005 as the cutoff.
In a more recent Reddit thread, as compared to the previously linked one, Formula 1 fans generally agree that the most entertaining F1 seasons were in the late 2000s/early 2010s, however, that could be recency bias affecting the feedback since there’s little to no mention of 90s seasons or 80s seasons by comparison.
Speaking of the Formula 1 subreddit, it’s common to see fans posting photos and videos of F1 cars, drivers and races of yore, gaining thousands of karma in the process. The fondness these fans hold over this time period is forgetful of all the flaws back then which were arguably just as, if not more detrimental to the racing back then compared to where it’s at now, namely driver safety, the vast chasm between the fastest and the slowest teams, not to mention the immense talent disparity amongst those racing at the time, oftentimes just between teammates.
I think the outspoken Andre Harrison, host of the Motorsport 101 podcast, said it best in a video he uploaded to his channel a few years back with then-panelist Adam Johnson. The video, entitled “Dre and Johnson’s Formula 1 “Motorsport Mythbusters” is spent by the two men debunking the overwrought “fan” cliches which are continually pointed to as F1’s shortcomings.
At one point, around the 16:30 mark, Harrison delivers a point which, the first time I heard it, basically re-evaluated my entire outlook on fans of F1 and motorsport in general: “We wax lyrical about the past, nitpick the present and get excited about the future.”
In the same vein, my friend and former Jalopnik writer Elizabeth Blackstock posted an opinion article with essentially the same question I’m asking: “Has Formula One Ever Actually Been Good?” She started out the article by tweeting the question, linking answers which said “yes”, “yes, but only so-and-so season”, “Largely no”, and my personal favorite from Hazel Southwell, “Absolutely not. I say this as a diehard fan of 26 years.”
Blackstock mentions the same points in her article as I do here, mostly about the racing being boring and how the engines are glorified eco crap. The main thesis of her article is how Formula 1, at its core, is a development race; it’s a matter of which team can build the fastest, most technically impeccable car, and what they’ll do to get both drivers of both cars to finish as high as they can in a set number of races across a season, at which point the winning driver and team will be rewarded with the World Driver’s Championship and the World Constructor’s Championship respectively.
The racing has always been an afterthought, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the competition between drivers was generally dull. In the article, Blackstock also points out her own fascination with F1 racing from the 1970s/80s, whilst also remarking the major shortcomings from those eras, namely driver fatalities and the notoriously unreliable cars. See further: Ferrari’s gearbox in 1989.
There is a trump card to this statement, however.
Speedhunters.com alum Jonathan Moore posted an article in 2013 that describes all of the innovations that were introduced into racing in the 1980s, especially the mid-1980s. Moore specifically looks to the booming manufacturer participation in endurance series like the World Sportscar Championship and its North American counterpart IMSA, inspired by Porsche’s combination of prototype aerodynamics, naturally aspirated engines and ground effect skirts. Referred to as Group C sportscars, the way they remained stuck to the tarmac while reaching the insane mid-200 mph straight-line speeds they did, they were essentially life-sized Scalextrics.
On the F1 side of things, he alludes to the graduation from naturally-aspirated ground effect racecars to turbo-powered, horsepower overloaded beasts which generated insane grip through the corners, yet that was all to be made redundant when McLaren began their relentless assault for dominance with Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, returning to turbo power and upping the electronic integration within their cars.
While I can vouch for the points Moore touches upon in his article, it hasn’t deterred me from Harrison and Blackstock’s points either. So to answer my titular question, I say no.
There’s no one singular golden age of automobile racing to tower over all the others.
I agree that there are certain aspects from every decade of racing to appreciate as both a fan and a racer, but I can also identify where those decades go wrong. Another thing I’ve done, and will continue to do, is to take joy in auto racing’s feats of yesteryear, whilst also reveling in auto racing’s greatness as I witness it for myself. If I compare the two I fear that I will morph into the very thing I’m criticizing.
If that ever happens, punch me.
