The Formula One season is upon us...

So, you like lawn bowls? 

A man who loves cars, his cat and single malt. 

Our fiesty sports writer David Cutting drives a mean arguement for why you should get into cars. 

Lawn Bowls is a silly sport.

Consider it objectively. To play one must roll a series of balls that aren’t round with the aim of achieving maximum proximity to another ball, which is round. This is done in lethargic sequence to a soundtrack of nil but the birds and the cracking of arthritic fingers. And then they want me to remove my R.M Williams just to walk on the grass. I believe it to be, unreservedly, silly. But, there are those who love it and while they’ll never make a convert of me, I must remind myself that are some people it’s a legitimate sport.

Sport for most people in this country include balls of some description, but for raw, visceral thrill, nothing trumps Formula One motor racing, and the 2014 season is about to start. Maybe I’m the strange one but I’m still meeting people who don’t love Formula One. “Its just cars going around in circles they say, it’s too noisy” they whine. I must remind myself about variety (for want of Moruga Scorpion pepper) being the spice of life and these well-meaning dullards leave tickets available for the rest of us.

It’s a lazy observation to just see a man in a car driving fast in circles, for that man within is an elite athlete at the peak of physical health and is car is the resolute application of nearly all known sciences in their purest form. A Formula One team is a polymath project; it’s about calculus as much as it’s about courage. These are drivers who spend hours a day in the gym working on such things strengthening the oft-neglected muscles of the neck just so their heads aren’t torn from their bodies by the lateral g-force that their cars can generate through corners.

G-force is representative of one atmosphere. Imagine the weight of the sky on your shoulders at all times. You don’t feel it, but imagine that times three or four, acting upon your neck, for hours at a time. Sure, David Coulthard was genetically predisposed for it, but it takes a lot of training for others. These drivers aren’t just errant thrill-seekers or revheads. They’re artists, perfectionists. They’re mortally committed to moving their vehicle from point a to point b as quickly as physically possible. It’s not a drag race floor-it-and-hold-on sort of operation. It’s about turn in accuracy, throttle position, entry speed, brakes, balance and balls. It takes Jedi reflexes and unremitting belief in the vehicle. 

These are after all, cars that become ‘safer’ the faster they go. Formula One cars are light. Their carbon fibre and witchcraft construction ensures this. Anyone who removes the golf clubs from the boot before the weekly commute knows that a lighter car is both faster and more fuel-efficient. But the inherent danger lightweight cars is their lack of purchase on the road but the lab coat geniuses in Formula One development teams thought of a way to combat lift-off years ago.

While the cars get lighter each year, they too get heavier. Okay ,bear with me… The body work of an F1 car isn’t just there to carry logos and look pretty. It’s wind tunnel designed, to be as sleek as possible and to run with as little as possible drag co-efficient. This is science talk for the ability of air to slow the car down, as it’s punching through it at 300km/h+. At high speeds, air actually becomes rather dense so the cars need to be able to penetrate though this invisible wall as best they can. But beyond that, the body is designed to channel the air through a series of ducts and venturis in the bodywork to provide down-force so the faster you go. The more the car weighs, giving vastly improved traction.

At high speed, this kind of trickery can produce up to three times the vehicles’ weight so if we’re talking about a 600-odd kilogram car, at speed that same car effectively weighs 1800kg! It’s actually been theorised that Formula One cars could drive upside down so long as there is a means of getting fuel and oil into the engine. You can’t play lawn bowls upside down.

“Sounds dangerous” moan the detractors. And sure it’s not what you might call safe. But the drivers understand this risk, so too the spectators, team bosses and pit-crews. The last driver to be killed racing F1 was the shockingly brilliant Ayton Senna. Killed only one day after Roland Ratzenberger on the same track in 1994. Since then, while cars have left the road and drivers have been stretchered from the circuit (notably Fellipe Massa in 2009, when he caught a loose spring with his head), many of the stories we hear of drivers coming to harm are from off the track.

Mark Webber broke his leg mountain biking in 2008, Kimi Raikonnen had a little too much champagne and bonked his head falling from his yacht in 2006, Lewis Hamilton was arrested for lighting up the rear tyres on his C63 in Mebourne in 2010 and while I shouldn’t make light of it here in this silly analogy, the recent tragically awful accident of Schmumacher’s in the French Alps is the worst the great man has suffered in a lifetime of racing.

F1 drivers are built for this sort of work; their bodies and brains are designed to work within the parameters of racing, within that elite zone where the room for error is zero to none. Just as well suited to the task the boffins and brainiacs behind the scenes who calculate all manner of hopelessly complicated formulae to extract every single ounce of performance from both their cars and drivers. It is an elite sport, its spectacular and its viscerally thrilling. It’s like horseracing without the cruelty and with nine hundred and twenty two times the horsepower. A damn side more exciting than rolling balls around the backyard of the RSL.  

http://www.formula1.com/