PARIS—Besides my father’s lifelong habit of driving like a maniac every time we leave the house for the airport, it’s been many years since I paid much attention to fast cars. I followed Indy Car racing in the early ’90s when Canucks Jacques Villeneuve and Paul Tracy, a.k.a. The Thrill from West Hill, were tearing up the circuit, but nothing much has interested me since then. NASCAR always seemed a little too insidery for me, even as it was rising to become the next great American sport—I figured you had to follow the soap opera-ish driver feuds to get much out of it, since those big balloon-shaped cars never look to me like they’re traveling that quickly.

Formula One was another beast altogether. The international scope of the circuit, and the big foreign following, led me to believe that this was someone else’s circuit, too cosmopolitan for a little Canadian lad to even begin to understand. Races in places like Bahrain, Monaco, Hungary and Japan? Whoa, far out! In short, the elite nature of the sport (or what I perceived as its elite nature) turned me off.

But suddenly, poof! I’m a European! So, with newly acquired street cred in hand, I’ve been eyeing the start of the 2008 Formula One season, which goes off this Sunday with the Australian Grand Prix at the Albert Park Circuit in Melbourne. About all I know about F1 is that some guy named Schumacher used to be pretty good. But a quick tour of the international sporting webworld, the most useful stop of which was the International Herald Tribune’s five-part (and counting) season preview, gave me a pretty good grounding in this granddaddy of motor sports. So hop in the passenger’s seat as we preview the 2008 Formula One season.

OK, first a little history: Finnish driver Kimi Raikkonen won the 2007 drivers’ championship for his team Ferrarri, with a pit girl–thin winning margin of one point over two McLaren teammates, the Spaniard Fernando Alonso and the up-and-coming Brit Lewis Hamilton. Over the winter Alonso decided that the McLaren spotlight wasn’t big enough for both himself and Hamilton, the sport’s new hot shot driver who’s been called the “Tiger Woods of racing” because he’s, well, black.

So Alonso quit McLaren and moved to Renault. Most commentators see this as a bad move for Alonso, because McLaren is the only other team that can put together a fast enough car to compete with Ferrari – indeed, all 17 races last season were won by one of the four driver from either Ferrari or McLaren (Brazilian driver Felipe Massa was Raikkonen’s teammate with Ferrari). Of course, Ferrari won the constructor’s title by a mile because McLaren, the only other competitive team, was disqualified from the constructors’ championship for a cheating scandal that featured sabotaged gas tanks, a disgruntled Ferrari employee passing engineering secrets to McLaren and a thorough investigation by the Italian government. Hmm: cheating, espionage, government investigations—good thing there’s no controversy that sordid in North American sports to sully that pristine reputation.

A couple other drivers who could be dark horses in this year’s title chase: Hamilton’s new McLaren teammate Heikki Kovalainen (Finland), veteran driver David Coulthard (UK/Team Red Bull Racing), Robert Kubica (Poland/Team BMW Sauber), Nico Rosberg (Germany/Team Williams) and Kazuki Nakajima (Japan/Team Williams).

As far as the race schedule goes, F1 has added two new events this year and subtracted the US Grand Prix, previously held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (the site of the famous 2005 race, where only 6 cars competed due to a tire fiasco). Valencia will host a street-course race in 2008, but the big news is the Singapore Grand Prix, which will be held in late September and contested at night.

This is the first ever F1 race to be held under cover of darkness. (Apparently the sport’s stewards just caught wind of this great automotive innovation: headlights.) There are major safety concerns, primarily with lighting and the presence of multiple backup generators (from a liability standpoint—and remember that I’m no lawyer—but you really don’t want a power blackout with cars traveling at velocities approaching 320 km/h). Still, if the race is successful, commentators are hinting that there will be pressure on other races in Asian time zones—in places like Malaysia, China, Japan, and this week’s host, Australia—to follow suit, creating more audience-friendly start times in the dominant European media markets.

(One supposes that the response from Australian race organizers will be a belligerent, “We get up at all hours of the bloomin’ night to watch your sporting events, so you had bloody well sack-up and set your alarm clock to watch ours!” You go, Paul Hogan!)

So that’s what’s new with Formula One heading into the 2008 season. What remains unchanged, thankfully, is one of the sport’s great traditions: the post-race podium champagne bath. Mumm is currently the official post-race champagne of F1, and the top three finishers at each event are given immense bottles to shake up and pour over each other at every race except for the Bahrain Grand Prix, where drivers spray each other with a non-alcoholic rosewater-based drink called Waard.

So, to commemorate the start of the F1 season, I stopped by my local FranPrix this morning and picked up a couple bottles of cheap champagne. Or rather, I would have picked up a couple bottles of cheap champagne, if such a thing existed. Let’s just say there’s a brand-prestige-related reason that champagne bottlers are engaged in a worldwide PR campaign to protect their naming rights. So I opted instead for three bottles of Pol Rémy vin mousseux (essentially, “foamy wine”) at an obscene €1.58 per bottle. The woman running the checkout at 10:30am definitely gave me a look as I rolled through with three bottles of the French equivalent of Baby Duck and a packet of sliced ham, but I just told her that it was for a journalistic project. This middle-aged Frenchwoman looked quintessentially unamused.

You know who was excited to witness my homage to Michael Schumacher, dispenser of wildly agitated bubbly? The schoolchildren in the courtyard of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris’s fifth arrondissement, who were there on some kind of a field trip. As my cameraman, the official Sportstrotter brother-in-law-to-be, lined up the shot of me pretending that I had just won the Grand Prix du Canada at Montreal’s famed Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, a couple of them became distracted from their game of tag and wandered over.

And when I started shooting champagne (er, excuse me, vin mousseux) in the air and pouring it all over myself—I followed the champagne-spraying technique of Amazon.com how-to guide writer Joshua Allan of Maranello, Italy—the kids howled with excitement.

Unfortunately, this immediately attracted two park security guards, who looked at us like we were idiots and banished us from the park with a simple, “C’est terminé, ça.” Still, we’d done what we came to do. Tune in to the Australian Grand Prix at 3:30pm Melbourne time on Sunday (12:30am in New York, 5:30am in Paris) to see the world greatest automobile drivers competing for the honour of spraying their fellow podium finishers with champagne—real champagne.

[The Sportstrotter’s Champagne Photoshoot. Click thumbnail for larger image.]

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Posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 11:50 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.