F1's economic car-crash

Two things happened last Thursday which underlined the fact that the economy’s hit the skids.
One was the Bank of England’s decision to slash a further percentage point off interest rates.
The other was a series of phone calls made to Mr Graham Mulholland of Draycott that evening.
I’ll come on to Mr Mulholland’s telephone in a mo. First that interest rate decision.
Why so significant? Well, the Bank of England hardly ever makes big changes to rates, preferring instead minor touches to the tiller intended to make sure the supertanker that is the UK economy maintains a steady, sustainable course.
Yet in the space of only eight weeks, the Bank has slashed rates by more than 50%, a move that tells you it thinks the supertanker is heading for rocks that suddenly appeared out of the fog. So it’s yanking at the tiller in a desperate attempt to steer it away.
What about Mr Mulholland and his phone calls? They happened because Thursday was also the day car company Honda decided the economy was so bad it could no longer afford to throw more than £150 million a year at its Formula One team.
The problem for F1 isn’t just the money. To the casual observer, a successful F1 team needs a powerful engine and a fast driver. Put the two together and you’re a winner, right?
Wrong. You also need to master computational fluid dynamics and know how to successfully exploit the torsional properties of baked carbon fibre.
If that sounds like double Dutch don’t feel guilty. There’s no reason why even died-in the-wool sports fans should understand that air acts like a fluid at speed or that a stiff chassis is better than one that flexes.
So why do F1 teams spend hundreds of millions of pounds on arcane technologies that mean a big fat nothing to spectators? Because the sport’s disappeared up its own exhaust pipe over the past few years, forgetting that what matters is not drag coefficients but dicing at 150mph (indeed, the obsessive pursuit of the former has made the latter a rarity).
It happened because car companies and big sponsors have made enough money during the boom to blow tens of millions on the mobile adverts that F1 cars have become.
With big money involved, the difference between success and failure has become a matter not of places on the podium but of millions in prize money.
Hence the obsessive pursuit of advantage through unseen technology.
Some of that technology is pretty much pointless. Some of it is shared with road cars, and this is where Graham Mulholland’s company, epm technologies, comes in.
The Draycott business makes carbon fibre components ranging from small body parts all the way through to a complete chassis, and it does it for road cars as well as F1 cars.
A smart engineer who has worked his socks off, Mulholland has slogged away developing a business which isn’t dependent either on one customer or one industry.
Hence the decision of six members of the Honda F1 team to ring him on Thursday night as soon as they knew their Japanese masters were pulling out of the sport and ask him of he had any jobs going.
When I caught up with him on Friday, Mulholland made a telling observation about the economic downturn: “It normally takes 18 months before motor racing gets affected by things like this. This time round, it’s nine months.”
You might struggle to shed a tear for Jenson Button if he loses his F1 drive. After all, he’s a multi-millionaire well capable of looking after himself.
But the people who toil away on his car aren’t multi-millionaires. They’ll be hoping they can find a future with the likes of epm.