F1: A Sport's Political Correctness, and Its Two Enemies

One enemy is the environment. The other, it must be said, is F1 itself.

April 9 was race day at the F1 Chinese Grand Prix. The crowd outside the Shanghai International Circuit began to gather in the morning, and by around eleven it had become a long line at the security gate. Getting inside took at least another half hour of waiting.

Before the race, 12 of the 14 price tiers of general admission on F1's official ticketing site had already sold out. On race day the main grandstand was close to full, and even the platinum section, the most expensive seats at 2,760 yuan, looked more than ninety percent occupied.

The scene at the track was lively enough. But there is a fact no one can ignore: F1 carries far less weight than it used to.

The numbers the promoter released afterwards say the same thing. Jiushi Group, which also operates the Shanghai International Circuit, counted 145,000 spectator visits over the three days of the Chinese Grand Prix. That was 5,000 more than in 2016, but nowhere near the 250,000 the race drew when F1 first came to China.

Zhang Kai has followed F1 for years, and this was her third season in a row at the circuit. The atmosphere felt much the same to her, she said, though: "Looking at the different fan camps — Shuilai (the fan nickname for Ferrari driver Kimi Räikkönen) still had plenty of people, but they didn't do the organized card-flipping displays they used to. Maybe the weather had something to do with it. It just didn't feel that strong."

"Every fan I talked to at the track had been following the sport for more than ten years. It feels like hardly any newcomers have picked it up in all that time," Zhang Kai said. "F1 in China is probably not doing as well as it once did."

China is not the only place where the tide is going out. This is a global problem for the sport.

By F1's own published figures, the series had 600 million television viewers worldwide in 2008; by 2015 that had fallen to about 400 million. And in Britain, where the first F1 race was held, F1 shed 1.11 million viewers in 2016 alone, a drop of 29.7%.

F1's total revenue in 2015 still came to a startling $1.77 billion, enough to make it the third-biggest sporting event in the world after the World Cup and the Olympics. But the crisis is out in the open, and even Bernie Ecclestone, F1's former supremo, has had to admit it.

This may be the first time trouble this large has found a sport founded in 1950. For nearly seventy years F1 sailed along untroubled, and only in the past decade or so has it started downhill. That arc tracks the history of the car industry over the past hundred-odd years — and the match is not a coincidence.

The world's first car appeared in 1886. After two years of experiments, the German engineer Karl Benz mounted a gasoline engine on a three-wheeler and used it to drive the vehicle. Before long more and more firms were building cars, among them Daimler in Germany and Peugeot in France.

As the car industry grew, racing grew with it. In 1894 the race historians count as the first was held in France, running 126 kilometers from Paris to the town of Rouen. Its organizer, Pierre Giffard, did not intend a contest of speed; he wanted to test how reliable the cars of the day were.

As the machines got better, racing moved its center of gravity to speed. In 1901 Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, took a car of his own design around looking for challengers, hoping that winning would make the Ford name famous and sell more cars.

By the 1920s and 1930s the car had become a middle-class possession. Again the credit largely belongs to Henry Ford, whose Model T and moving assembly line cut prices sharply. General Motors then added a product-line policy, a range of models pitched at different buyers, and in doing so fixed both the shape of the modern car industry and the way the public thinks about cars.

Then came the Second World War. The war shut down many car factories and brought the industry close to a standstill, but military demand produced a crop of new technologies: automatic transmissions, hydraulic brakes, aerodynamic design. When the factories reopened after the war and put those technologies into road cars, the global car industry took off.

The 1960s were the decade when carmakers everywhere chased performance without restraint. The Big Four — General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and American Motors (AMC) — each put out horsepower-first "muscle cars." The 1962 Dodge Dart had a 6.8-liter engine and ran the quarter mile in 13 seconds. In 1964 the Ford Thunderbolt used a 7.0-liter engine, and Chrysler copied the move with a 7.0-liter Hemi of its own.

The horsepower race peaked in early 1970. The 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS 454 carried a 7.2-liter V8 making as much as 450 horsepower.

It was in that climate that F1 settled into its place as a sport. Speed was the thing it sold, and that is what carried it into competitive athletics.

The first official F1 race was held at Silverstone in Britain in 1950. Through that decade most of the entries were works teams from carmakers: Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz and others. Their aim was exactly Ford's aim half a century earlier — put your new technology on the track, win with it, and tell the world you build the best cars.

From the late 1950s on, the history of F1 is a sequence of technical advances. In 1958 the Cooper-Climax became the first car to put the engine behind the driver, a revolution in the sport; two years later everyone had followed.

Lotus then broke through in aerodynamics, showing that a car needed more downforce from its bodywork to behave predictably on track. That idea quickly became F1's governing doctrine, and aerodynamic design is still one of the main measures of whether an F1 car is any good.

In 1967 Lotus broke through again, this time on engines. It was the first team in F1 to run a twin-cam, four-valve engine, a design that went on to rule the whole of the 1970s.

The technology kept improving and the cars kept getting faster. Somewhere in that process F1 acquired a meaning it had not carried before. To the car industry, F1 stood for the most advanced engineering in the business, the car's performance pushed as far as anyone could imagine. To ordinary spectators, F1 stretched what people could imagine about speed; the engines sounded like a bugle sounding the charge, and the charge always won.

Zhang Kai feels this. This year she brought a friend to the circuit. The engines roared, the cars flashed past and disappeared into the corner, and on every overtake the whole grandstand shouted. The friend had never known anything about F1, and the place got to her anyway. "After we got home, she told me to call her for the next race," Zhang Kai said.

After the headlong growth of the 1970s, the wind in the car industry changed. In 1978 the United States passed a fuel tax act requiring carmakers to hold fuel consumption to about 13 liters per 100 kilometers, a heavy blow to American manufacturers who had always liked big engines.

Even without the American law, the first oil crisis, which began in 1973, had pushed oil from $3 a barrel to $13. Rising fuel prices made carmakers take energy efficiency seriously. They began to see that the age of chasing displacement for its own sake was over.

The industry had also gone a long time without a breakthrough. Engine technology built on burning gasoline was close to its ceiling.

One important measure of an engine is thermal efficiency: how much of the chemical energy in the fuel the combustion turns into mechanical energy. The most thermally efficient gasoline engine in mass production today is Toyota's hybrid 2ZR-FXE, claimed to peak at 41%. By Toyota's own figures, gasoline engines have gone from about 20% in the 1960s to roughly 39% now.

In the wider consumer market, the appetite for power has largely been fed. Even a cheap family car selling for a few tens of thousands of yuan has around 100 horsepower, enough to reach the 120 km/h speed limit, and a tank of fuel takes it at least 500 kilometers. Spending more to squeeze out a little more engine efficiency hardly looks worth it.

When the car industry ran out of imagination, F1 — which reflects the state of that industry — slowed down too. Car design leaned further and further toward aerodynamics, producing things like the high nose cone and the X-wing.

And just as the oil price made the industry rethink big engines, a single accident changed F1. In 1994 the legendary driver Ayrton Senna was killed in a crash at the San Marino Grand Prix. After that F1 raised safety to a height it had never occupied before, and wrote a run of rules to slow the cars down: less engine power, narrower bodywork, grooved tires.

Speed was no longer the only thing F1 wanted, and sometimes it was traded away for something else. There were good reasons for those changes, but they cost F1 its standing as the car industry's showcase of imagination.

The final blow came from the environment.

Ten years ago, still in high school, Pang Qi was already a committed F1 fan. Her school made students report back to campus on Sunday evenings, which was no help to anyone who loved F1, and she started an F1 club with her friends anyway.

In the past two years she has dropped out of the fandom. The reason, she says, is that the rule changes and the focus on safety over those two years have made the racing less and less fun to watch.

Older fans may still remember the 2004 French Grand Prix. Under the rules of the day, a car took on fuel and changed tires in the same pit stop, and three stops was considered the classic strategy in France.

Michael Schumacher was at the height of his powers, but he missed pole in that race and had to start second, behind Fernando Alonso. Ferrari judged that Alonso's defense was tight and that passing him on track would be hard, so the team decided to beat him in the pits instead.

Schumacher went with four stops. Every stop costs time, but the extra one kept his car light on fuel throughout, and the tires he took on were not all new, so they were in their best working window. That let him lap faster. The advantage built up lap by lap, and when he came out of his fourth stop he was ahead of Alonso and on his way to the win.

You will never see that again. For the 2010 season F1 banned refueling during a race, which means every car has to start with enough fuel to go the distance. The tactic of shaping the timing and number of stops around the fuel load was gone.

There are many more changes of that kind. The V10 engines gave way to V8s in 2006, and the V8s to V6s in 2014. The number is the cylinder count; fewer cylinders mean less power, lower speed, and a sound as the cars go past that no longer shakes you the way it did.

What pushed F1 into those rule changes was the environment.

The issue surfaced in the early 2000s. Figures from the FIA, motorsport's governing body, showed that an ordinary road car used about 9 to 11 liters per 100 kilometers in city traffic, while an F1 car burned more than 70 liters over the same distance. Set against the energy the world consumes in a year, what a race burns is close to nothing, but environmental campaigners protested all the same.

Even a long-time fan like Pang Qi has her complaint: "The cars use far too much fuel. It isn't good for the environment."

Under that pressure, on December 9, 2006, the FIA published the framework for F1's technical rules for the following five years. The reform centered on recovering and reusing energy in the cars, and on the environment. Cutting fuel use and raising energy efficiency became F1's stated direction — which is where changes like cutting the cylinder count came from.

This is less a pressure on F1 than a pressure on the whole car industry. Environmental protection is a real demand, and it is changing how some countries legislate on cars. The European Union caps average CO2 emissions per kilometer, which pushes carmakers toward efficiency rather than speed.

Those demands even produced a racing series of their own: Formula E, or FE, sanctioned by the FIA just as F1 is. Big manufacturers including Jaguar, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Ferrari have either entered FE, teamed up with an existing FE outfit, or begun weighing whether to join.

FE pays off for a manufacturer. It shows the public what the company can do in the relevant research, which lifts the brand. It also serves as a test bed for high-end electric drivetrains, which is worth a good deal to the manufacturer itself.

With that in mind, Audi announced it would leave the World Endurance Championship after the 2016 season, ending 18 straight years in the series, and move to Formula E.

For F1 the threat could hardly be plainer. If the manufacturers go to FE, what they spend on F1 goes down. Imagine an F1 grid without Ferrari, without Mercedes-Benz, without Renault: nothing of F1's value would be left.

F1 owns no car technology of its own, so it has always depended on the carmakers. When those carmakers face a new round of technical change and have to point their research somewhere else, the test comes for F1. It is a choice between speed and the environment, and either answer costs the sport part of its audience.

F1 looked a little different in 2017. The 1:32.573 lap Schumacher set in 2004 was finally beaten, thirteen years later, by Lewis Hamilton. After the rules on body and tire width were loosened, lap times came down by more than three seconds.

F1 is still one of the most-watched sports in the world. The question has not gone away: how much patience do carmakers have left for the internal-combustion engine that F1 stands for?