Often, another name for Formula One could have been Formula Same-Same: Same-old faces driving for the same-old teams winning the same-old races.
This has long been a sport with established hierarchies of teams, cars and drivers so hard to dislodge that 342 races over the past 20 years produced fewer than three dozen different winners, or just 29 to be precise. And six of those 20 seasons — including the last two — produced no new race winners at all.
So if variety is the spice of sport as it is in life, then F1 has at times over the past two decades been serving up the entertainment equivalent of hospital food — lacking rich choice and therefore quickly tiresome and bland. Can we switch to another channel, dear?
But this year, well, wow. Hands off that remote control.
For the first time in 62 seasons of F1, the guy dousing himself in champagne on the winner’s podium has changed at each of the first six races. Australian Mark Webber was the sixth, providing a tasty new slice of F1 history to jazz up the otherwise ho-hum Monaco Grand Prix this Sunday.
Another welcome addition to F1’s menu is that two of the other winners so far in 2012 — German Nico Rosberg and Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado — hadn’t won an F1 race before this year. They were F1’s first new faces atop the winner’s podium since Webber in 2009.
At this rate, 2012 is shaping up as a throwback to F1’s mustachioed, some would argue sexier, era in the 1970s and early 1980s when drivers like James Hunt, Niki Lauda, Mario Andretti, Rosberg’s ****** Keke and many others regularly shared victories and glory. The 14 races in ‘75 produced nine different winners, and an astounding smorgasbord of 11 drivers won in the 16 races of ‘82.
impdaddy
