by Malcolm Toogood

Created on: December 23, 2008   Last Updated: December 24, 2008

It is interesting that, at the time of writing this, nobody has yet taken the tenuous step of writing an article on the Yes side of this debate. Of course, there will eventually be a submission from some eco-warrior killjoy who will trot-out every reason why Grand Prix racing is killing the Planet, along with every other enjoyable activity that demonstrates how mankind needs entertainment to balance the heavy weight of responsibility we all carry every day. But until then the reason for that gaping hole in this debate is quite simple; nobody who is a true fan of motor sport would vote Yes.

Why? Well because we already have a myriad of formulae where the car, or the engine, or both are built to a fixed specification, all the way from the karting grass roots of the sport to GP2, the feeder competition into F1 for up-and-coming drivers, and teams. GP2 provides support races at Grand Prix events around the world, and gives us exciting racing where the skills of the drivers are paramount to success. But it doesn't draw a tenth of the crowd numbers that the main event does, despite the fact that it is less processional than Formula One tends to be. This is purely because Formula One is the race that everybody wants to watch, because it pits man AND machine against each other.

You cannot be a petrol-head without having at least an appreciation of superb engineering, and for a car to be competitive in Grand Prix racing, it has to be exactly that, a feat of engineering of the highest calibre. Of course, the gizmo's take some of the shine off of the driver's contribution, but to suggest that these cars drive themselves is a huge misunderstanding of exactly how difficult they are to handle even with the so-called driver-aids' that are now being stripped-away, year-on-year.

I became hooked on Motor Sport at the age of seven, when one of the first things I saw on our new Black and White TV was the 1957 British Grand Prix, live from Aintree, when Stirling Moss took over Tony Brooks' Vanwall, having blown the engine in his own car, and drove it from ninth place up through the field to score the very first win for a British driver in a British car since the 1920's.

What an introduction to a sport that was! You could see his elbows flailing around as he battled to control a front-engined car delivering nigh-on 300BHP through skinny rear tyres, with no aerodynamic package, no special tyre compounds and no seat-belts. His only obvious protection was the equivalent of a pith-helmet,

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