Why did they take all the fun out of car launches?

It’s been a long winter break for Formula 1 fans as we eagerly await next week’s car launches, but, now, February is synonymous with F1 unveils in the lead up to before pre-season testing and that first taste of the season to come. 

Sadly however, the launches are not what they used to be and some of us miss those heady days of jets, music stars and exotic launch venues.

Formula 1 has always been super competitive - from the moment the designers pen the first line on their new car plans to clinching that title at the end of the season – every aspect about it is forged around winning – or at least trying to win. That need to be the best – on track, in the paddock and even just fighting to be the most entertaining F1 team out there, all make F1 the special sport it is.  

In other words, it is just one huge pissing contest from concept all the way to championship, which has often gotten out of hand and has needed to be pruned back every now and then.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, teams did their best to outdo each other and the pandemonium even reached gargantuan proportion before a car had even turned a wheel with car launches that could only be billed as eccentric. 

Teams would go completely out of their way to introduce their new steeds in the most dramatic manner imaginable – from cunning stunts to light shows, revolving and gyrating stages and even going as far to have the likes of the Spice Girls, the Sugababes along as an encore to the rotating plinths of Rome.

Some say that car launches should go way beyond the routine as they reveal teams’ latest world championship creations, that the launch should rather set the tone for the season to come and deliver a shot across rivals’ bows. 

Like McLaren did launching the MP4/12 way back in ’97. Having lost Marlboro to Ferrari, Dennis and the dudes wanted to make an impression nobody would forget as they unleashed the first West branded McLaren.

It was however not the striking new livery that took the awaiting Alexandra Palace audience most by surprise. It was none other than the Spice Girls, who batted out a three-song dance routine to support Hakkinen and Coulthard presenting their new car to the world on the very week that the Girls went number one in the charts Stateside, that floored the audience, media, fans and the rest of the world.  

Scary, Sporty, Baby, Ginger and the future Ms. Beckham, Posh Spice saw to the arrival of thae MP4/12 even making it on to MTV. It must have worked too, as once Mika and David had revealed the MP4-12, they went on to secure first and third on the car’s Melbourne. It proved a troubled season tough, but the next McLaren – the Adrian Newey penned MP4-13 proved to be the car to spice Dennis’ life up in the first of two back-to-back Hakkinen world titles for McLaren.

Among the sport’s boldest and ‘in your face’ characters, Eddie Jordan was another man who loved his launches. Eddie may not have had the budget the factory teams had to play with bit you’d never guess it,  judging by his team’s lucrative launch stunts – in fact one could easily be for forgiven for being mistaken at times, like when Jordan signed a primary sponsorship deal with DHL in 2002.  

Eddie sensed a PR opportunity as he hosted a media Q&A session with drivers Takuma Sato and Giancarlo Fisichella. Jordan interrupted the interview session to share a DHL message confirming an urgent inbound delivery to him paired with footage of a DHL-liveried Airbus on a flypast. Moments later, the hangar doors swung open to reveal the 52-metre long jet, which  soon disgorged the brand new EJ12.

Benetton’s 25-year F1 era yielded couple world championships, 27 race victories and 102 podium finishes. But when it came to the fashion brand’s 2001 departure from the sport, a special send-off was in order for its swansong B201. Being only the second team ever to have raced under two nationalities, Benetton returned to its Italian roots, splashing out five-hundred grand to hire Venice’s Piazza San Marco in to reveal its last of the breed.  

The B201 was made to appear as if it was immersed in an aquarium tank with the deep blue water masking the livery of the similarly toned B201. Benetton’s Baptism would perhaps have yielded a stronger season had the team rather hired the Pope, even if that $500K would likely not have sufficed -- it had to settle for a disappointing 7th in its final that F1 championship season before Renault took over.

Sadly, in some ways F1 has shifted away from those extravagant and often bizarre 1990s and ‘noughties car launches, with teams instead shiftng to far more mundane launch activities. Perhaps it’s to do with the internet and the immediacy that gives fans and the media, social and otherwise, to access all the info the second it drops. Maybe it’s the cost cuts teams must now adhere to, but those days of the Spice Girls, Venice, Airbusses and the rest now  seem confined to history.

In their place we have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the internet – over the coming weeks they will live stream as the ypull the covers off in a hall full of clapping friends and journos, if we are lucky. Or it will be streamed from a studio or they may even just share some glitzy vid of that new machine. Others will just roll the new car out of a dank, misty Barcelona pit box, throw a sheet over it and then get the wheel men to tug it off again while the drivers coyly click their heels and grin, and the whole world that wants to, will be waiting to see it…

Somehow, I’d still prefer to see Posh and her pals dancing, smell the jet fuel of the Airbus or even enjoy the backdrop of San Marco, but that is not is how it is done anymore.  

Either way, we certainly will still be counting down the seconds as that chatroom clock ticks down to each of this year’s car launches. See you there! (Photo: McLaren)