This year has been a tricky one for global motorsports. The immense success and popularity of Nascar in the US and Formula One across the world—not to mention the minor formulas of the motorbike and rallying circuits—have been predicated on cheap oil. But this is not because it keeps running costs low—with engines and gearboxes alone in Formula One costing up to £50m a season, fuel is a pretty insignificant issue. Instead, cheap oil has been the fuel that has supercharged the motor industry and its global reach, as well as the demand for luxury goods and highly branded consumer products. The madness of engaging in competitive environmental destruction has not yet—and may never—undermine the sport's appeal. But even without a fuel shortage, there is going to be a scarcity of aspirational consumers with access to easy credit.
As the spike in oil and food prices has bled into the now mutating global property and financial crises, sports of all kinds are feeling the pinch. The Premiership's gargantuan debts are coming under renewed scrutiny. With regulation finally back in fashion, UEFA is contemplating restrictions on indebted clubs and would-be club owners. The calculations on which the construction of the 2012 London Olympic village were based have been rendered meaningless by the collapse of the property market. And Formula One has had a particularly difficult year. Leaving aside the indiscretions of Max Mosley, president of Formula One's governing body, the real issues are economic. Costs have risen astronomically; getting onto the back of the grid costs at least £100m, getting to the front more than double that. The car manufacturers can stand the pace but the largesse of sponsors and individual investors is waning. Mosley himself has argued that the circus only needs three teams to drop out for the exercise to lose all credibility.
What place is there for motor sports in a low-carbon economy? Shorn of the worst excesses of the shallow consumerism that have sustained them, what meanings might it take on? Look to the middle east. In mid-November, the fifth and final race of the Palestine road racing championships takes place in Jericho. Urban rallying and stock car racing in the West Bank has now acquired organised form after years as an underground subculture, strangled by the Israeli occupation and its total control of the transport infrastructure. Wataniya, a Palestinian telecoms company, has organised a series of city-based urban rallies in Ramallah, Nablus and Bethlehem and enormous, high-spirited crowds have come out to watch them.
Like in a Levantine Havana, ancient BMW saloons, souped up and repaired by ingenious backyard engineering, career around the shattered neighbourhoods of urban Palestine, or conduct minute manoeuvres in the tiny spaces of wasteland that the Israelis allow them. In an unlikely twist of fate, auto sports have become a vehicle of the liberation struggle—a protest against the hundreds of checkpoints that slow Palestine to a crawl, while Israeli superhighways occupy the space above their heads. It will be an extraordinary moment if the Palestinian motor racing authorities are able to stage a rally from city to city. At the moment, the Israelis will not countenance this, but I hope one day to see a race across an unbroken, unfragmented Palestine. For sure, it'll burn up those last precious barrels of oil, but it will be a real carnival, rather than a high-speed billboard for the unattainable, gossamer-thin glamour of our long economic boom.
A lesson from Tampa bay
This is not a great moment to pitch any kind of American economic model. But Major League Baseball has got something right. This year's American League pennant was, at the time of press, being played out between the mighty Boston Red Sox and the minuscule Tampa Bay Rays. The victor will play the winner of the National League pennant for baseball's ultimate prize: the world series.
Over the last ten years, the Rays have been the worst team in baseball. Before this season, they had never made the playoffs nor won even half of their games. And yet this year, they have beaten the Red Sox and trounced the New York Yankees. The equivalent in English football might be Sunderland winning the Premiership after beating Chelsea and Arsenal.
How is this possible? MLB's draft—the primary mechanism of assigning players to teams—gives the top picks to the weakest teams from the previous season. Together with salary caps and luxury taxes on excess wage bills, conditions exist for the rise of small teams like the Rays which do not in the Premiership.
But even so, someone still has to go out and play some baseball. At the club itself, the story is as yet incomplete, but it has familiar components. There's a fearsome but joyous team spirit and a smart coach. The players include white, black and Latino Americans as well as Venezuelans, Japanese and Dominicans. Oh, and the club's owners, who made all the changes, are guys who bailed out of Wall Street a few years back, selling at the peak. If they go on to win the world series, perhaps the new guard at the Federal Reserve should be talking to them.
