Showing Their Metal

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.

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