Quotes of the Day

Best not to bother Dan Maccallum on Grand Prix day. On March 16, as the cars lined up on the grid in Melbourne, the Sydney solicitor and father of two began his season's viewing in exactly the way he has always done: no one but him in the house, and a large Supreme pizza delivered just before the start of the race. "I was rude to my family in the morning," he says. "I reminded them that they'd promised to go away for a couple of hours in the afternoon." What does he love about F1? Screaming engines are high on the list — and here he mimics one amid the Friday afternoon hubbub of an inner-city pub. His greatest fear, he says, is not to be watching when the luckless Australian driver for the Red Bull team, Mark Webber, finally wins a Grand Prix. That certainly didn't happen in Melbourne. In a pointer to the kind of chaotic racing that fans like Maccallum could see a lot of this year, Webber was one of five drivers who bombed out on the first lap.

Formula One has become one of the great sporting festivals. The 2008 World Championship resumes in Bahrain on April 6 and continues at an appropriately frenetic pace until the 18-race show winds up in São Paulo, Brazil, on Nov. 2. Along the way, F1 rubber will burn on four continents, drawing in more than half a billion television viewers. Between them, the 11 teams have spent about $3 billion in their quest to be fastest. Throw into the mix the kind of A-list celebrities you used to see ringside at heavyweight title fights, and a scattering of supermodels and pop princesses, and F1 stands alone as a corporate and entertainment phenomenon.

This year's drivers' championship is shaping as the best of recent times. It follows the closest in the sport's history and is the first to be contested under new rules that are helping to produce some spectacular racing. In the crash-laced opener in scorching conditions in Melbourne, just seven of the 22 drivers finished the race. There were fewer mishaps a week later in Sepang, Malaysia, where 17 drivers made it to the end, but the racing remained fierce and unpredictable. The key is the abolition of driver aids that have worked to neutralize some drivers' superior skills. If the first two races are any guide, 2008 will be less about the machines and more about the men inside them. "We have a strong chance of seeing who are the real drivers out there," says F1 author Stuart Sykes, "and who are the ones whose shortcomings have been masked by all the toys they've had in their cars."

British Upstart
The three key figures at the climax of last year's championship are all back in the cockpit and now spearheading three separate teams. Ferrari's "Iceman," Finland's Kimi Räikkönen, snatched last year's title by a point, squeezing out feuding McLaren teammates Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton by winning in Brazil. "Team-mates" can be an empty word in F1. Applied to Alonso and Hamilton it was comically inappropriate. As a two-time world champ and McLaren's senior driver, the emotional Alonso could be excused for failing to share in the sport's enthusiasm for Hamilton's stunning rookie year. Accusations flying (Alonso felt the British team was favoring the Brit Hamilton despite Alonso's superior status), the pair got themselves to a place from which there was no way back, and the Spaniard has returned to Renault, where he won his titles in 2005-'06 but may be facing a lean year based on early results.

Hamilton, meanwhile, is the sport's most compelling presence. The handsome, doughty 23-year-old and F1's first black driver was bold yet rock solid last year right from his first race. Some of the former kart champion's overtaking maneuvers had veteran observers shaking their heads in astonishment. A comfortable winner in Melbourne before a fifth-place finish in Sepang, where Räikkönen dominated, last year's upstart is one of this year's favorites. Will Hamilton have the mettle to cope? Sound judges are sure of it. "Every now and again a talent comes along who sets everyone back a bit," says the 1980 world champion, Australian Alan Jones. "We saw this with [Aryton] Senna. We saw it with [Michael] Schumacher. And I honestly think Hamilton is in that ilk."

Though devotees crave great driving, everyone knows there's more to F1 than that. In fact, motor racing leaves many sports lovers cold because all they see is the cars, not a genuine human-to-human contest. Tiger Woods and Roger Federer wield state-of-the-art equipment that may be subtly different from what their opponents use, but it's not better (nor particularly high-priced). In F1, however, some cars are indisputably better than others. Recently, those superior cars have belonged to Ferrari and McLaren, and no matter how good a driver you may have been, if you weren't with one of those teams you were not going to win a world championship. Seven drivers representing five teams didn't score a single point in last year's championship, meaning they failed to finish eighth or better in any of the 17 races.

Rather than let the lack of equality bother them, F1 fans embrace the technological warfare that defines their sport. For this year's championship, each of the leading teams has spent around $300 million on building and fine-tuning its cars. Behind the drivers is a network of boffins — engineers, mechanics, wind-tunnel experts — charged with analyzing the performance of every system of last year's model with the goal of making the new one faster. Inevitably, the high stakes have led to skulduggery. The sport's governing body, the Paris-based International Automobile Federation (FIA), last year fined McLaren a record $100 million for possessing 800 pages of confidential technical data about the cars of arch rival Ferrari. The FIA also stripped McLaren of all its points in the constructors' race, handing the title to Ferrari and splashing fuel onto this year's volatile mix of engines and egos.

Whether it's tinkering with hydraulics, aerodynamics or something else, "The discipline you have to bring to the technical exercise is extreme," McLaren boss Ron Dennis has said. "One weak element and you're not going to win." For the investment over the years, people get to see cars that accelerate from zero to 160 km/h in 3.5 sec., and are so endowed with aerodynamic downforce that, in theory, you could drive one of these babies across the ceiling. Eventually, some of that technology filters down into the cars that the rest of us get around in: the steering wheel-mounted control systems, variable valve timing and traction control in your family car are all hand-me-downs from Formula One R&D.

Arguably, though, the sheer engineering ingenuity of the F1 teams has diminished the sport's appeal. All 11 teams contesting the championship this year have produced machines of amazing quality. And all F1's pilots possess extraordinary gifts, not least the ability to make split-second decisions on steering, gear changes and strategy under the most trying conditions. But sport at the highest level is about separating the great from the really good, and some engineering advances have muddied the process. Part of all cars' armory from 2002-'07 was traction control, an electronic aid that kicks in when the rear wheels begin to spin or slide. Say you're driving through a tight corner in the rain. At the midway point you floor the accelerator. Because an F1 car is both ultra-light and ultra-powerful, your action would surely cause the rear wheels to spin and the car to slide out of control. But not with the magic of traction control, which overrides your foot and cuts power. You could hear this happening, by the way — the engine note changed from smooth to bombing-raid violent as the device interrupted detonation in certain cylinders. And according to many experts, it reduced driver skill in the racing equation. The sublimely skilled driver with impeccable throttle control in slippery conditions was brought down to the level of the leadfoot who simply pounded the accelerator and hung on.

Traction control is history. The FIA has banned it for this season (along with launch control, which through comparable mechanisms made starting races easier for drivers and more predictable for fans). Its abolition has been widely applauded. British F1 pioneer Stirling Moss calls traction control an "appalling device." Jones argues that fans come to the track first and foremost to see superb driving. "You don't see all the technical bulls___ that's going on underneath," he says. "People want to see overtaking, locking up brakes, cars going sideways coming out of a corner because the driver's put his foot on the accelerator prematurely."

The current drivers are not, understandably, sounding quite so cavalier. The end of traction control should suit those with recent experience in other grades of motor racing where the device is banned, and those who are strong in the rain. The first impulse of Räikkönen's Ferrari teammate Felipe Massa, on the other hand, is to max out acceleration, regardless of the conditions, and few were surprised by the Brazilian's involvement in the first-lap mayhem in Melbourne, nor his spinout on lap 31 in Sepang, where he appeared to have second place (and a one-two finish for Ferrari) in the bag.

Hamilton has said that while he has no desire to waste his life, he's never felt afraid while racing cars. Pre-season testing without traction control, however, whitened his knuckles a little. "It does make it a little more tense on corner entry," he said after a session in Jerez, Spain. But after victory in Melbourne, Hamilton was a convert: "This is real racing," he said. "It is how it should be."

A chance to identify, with greater certainty, the best of the best is the promise F1 is holding out this year. Almost certainly, Ferrari and McLaren still have the fastest cars. But with technical aids on the scrap heap, drivers from BMW, Renault and maybe even Williams could just get a look-in. And F1 may gain a new legion of fans — those who, while they'll never be transfixed by fast-moving, logo-covered machines, could be won over by the brave and brilliant souls who control them.

• Daniel Williams