Fernando Alonso. Felipe Massa. Kimi Raikkonen. These men are taking my husband hostage this weekend.
On Friday, the 2010 Formula One season will commence with the Bahrain Grand Prix and my husband may actually cry tears of joy. He will also be crying real tears of pain and suffering if he wakes me up as he scrambles to the television for the 6:00 a.m. start of the Qualifying round to determine which driver will be on pole. Not that kind of pole. It means who’ll be in the #1 position for the start of the race. Formula One has sucked me in, but only a little.
Only true diehards wake up at o’dark thirty to watch petite men with big paychecks race around a twisty track in a far off land. In some sense, I do understand the appeal now that I recognize how hard it is to steer an ultralight beast with a tiny steering wheel full of gizmo and wangdoodle buttons. The amount of G-force these guys encounter is enough to scramble their brains. And I guess that’s why they get the big bucks and the superstar status.
But here’s a question that’s been nagging me – since Formula One exists, why does anyone watch NASCAR? Side by side, I just don’t see the appeal of watching Jimmy, Jeff and Kyle drive in a circle at Talladega in their Cheerios & Betty Crocker cars when you could watch Fernando and Felipe go 200 miles an hour through the streets of Monaco or around the course in Monza, Italy. I’m just saying. I don’t get it.
And why am I even writing about this? It may be a case of “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. For the next several months, the sounds of every Grand Prix race will be booming from my husband’s office/man cave. Packages from mysterious overseas vendors will continue to arrive on my doorstep containing weird looking parts from old F1 cars. Apparently, they’re quite collectible. But I will tell you this – if I walk into my husband’s cave one day and find a fully built Formula One car, I’m going to be pissed.
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