“A giant step then into the new! The Chinese Grand Prix! The first ever! … Is GOOOOOOOOOOOO!”: It’s 2004, and twenty-two Formula 1 cars accelerate towards the first ‘snail’ turn – a partly blind 270 degree chiral line, inclining into a tight hairpin and out to a straight – of the inaugural Chinese Grand Prix. Rubens Barrichello, driving for Ferrari, confidently converts his pole position to an early lead ahead of Kimi Räikkönen’s McLaren. It’s the 16th of 18 races in 2004 and Michael Schumacher, who is already crowned with his fifth-consecutive (and final) drivers championship with Ferrari, has started from the pit lane – bracketing the field to his teammate Barichello all the way out in front. Leading up to the Sunday Grand Prix Schumacher has had a disastrous weekend, an engine change relegating him to the pits, the dramaturgy of the race is constructed around guessing how far the world champ will ascend over the course of the race.1
As the cars hoon around the track over fifty-six laps, reaching speeds of up to 340 km/h, the drivers follow, repeat, and refine their lines – precisions that will gain them valuable tenths/hundredths-of-seconds; or aid positioning, to defend or attack. The repetitive relentlessness involved in driving like this borders on the meditative. Conversely, lapses of concentration are severely punished and this person/machine synergy has been described by many legends of the sport in near-spiritual terms; F1 drivers are often quite specific, intense personalities.
The car itself, constructed of around 13,000 parts, is designed to a set of regulations where slight variations in design can create a performance advantage, and therefore make the car more or less competitive. ‘Nailing the regs’ can mean the difference between a world constructors championship (where most of the competition’s prize money is won) and lingering at the back end of the pack. Furthermore, the team surrounding the driver and car – employing between 400 to 1000 people, depending on the team – is comprised of a team principle, mechanics, race engineers, pit crew, strategists, data analysts (enormous amounts of real-time and recorded data are collected and transmitted), reserve drivers, trainers, cooks, hosts, media team, etc.
All this activity comes together on the track; a circuit is designed with various ‘content’ (fast/slow corners, hairpins, straights) and has been described, by those in the know, as “a living thing”2 (i.e., the more it is used the more it evolves). Drivers and teams need to understand it to get the most out of it, and different tracks speak to different drivers’ styles. The track in Shanghai is no different, but its design is remarkable in that its layout echoes a piece of language: the track’s design is inspired by the Chinese character 上 (Shàng). Connected, primarily, to place (Shànghai), the character can be translated as ‘up’, ‘high’, or ‘to ascend’.
Built on top of a former rice paddy, at a cost of £250 million (~NZ$565 million), it was designed by Herman Tilke, a former racing driver, engineer, and circuit designer, and has been described (and criticised) as a ‘technical’ or ‘precision’ track. That it’s designed after a written character perhaps lends it two of its most distinctive features: the longest straight and the longest turn of tracks on the current F1 circuit. It can be punishing on brakes and tyres – the chance of mechanical failure is high.
From above, the legibility of the track is not only of the sign but also of the tools used to make it, the shapes of French or Bezier curves present it as a piece of engineering (tools that are also used to achieve precision and consistency in the designing of typefaces). As a piece of language the track represents, then, a legible sign without a describable ‘gesture’. Its construction is empty of the expression that is principal and present in Chinese writing and calligraphic practice, traditionally an ‘art of rhythmic movement’ and a ‘dance’ to be read, not in profile like Latin, but in and through the depth of its construction with a brush or device. It is posited that the technologies of engraving and mechanical reproduction, and now digitisation, disconnected the gesture and the mark – in a sense freezing it into vectors and nodes made for recall, infinite, and precise reproduction; not for a rhythmical dancing.
On the other hand, the depth, or gesture, of this sign may be still there, but to be read in a different way. A huge piece of language, built on a swamp with a foundation of 40,000 pillars made of concrete, where human and machine interact, repeat, refine lines and movements to go fastest – or until something breaks or crashes. A sealed surface overwritten by the interweaving of black-rubber skid marks, gestural marks made with practice and intention from necessary burnouts as the drivers warm up their tyres on approach to the starting grid. The choreography of a team, where constituent parts and processes come together to operate as a whole system, a language that enables it all. These are signs and practices attuned to the mechanics and pace of global capitalism. It is a somewhat complex and convoluted reminder that, in this designed world, writing and typing (choosing the font) is first an inner practice, before looking out; up.
Bibliography:
Yuehping Yen, Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society (Routledge/Curzon, 2005).
Footnotes:
- Schumi’s ascent doesn’t materialise, after an aggressive (and often indignant) drive he suffers a puncture with twenty-one laps to go, failing to finish the race. Barrichello narrowly takes the win from a late charging Jenson Button by just 1.035 seconds (remaining the closest winning margin of any Chinese Grand Prix). Räikkönen completes the podium places.
- More specifically, by David Coulthard during the live commentary for the China Sprint Race, on F1TV in 2025.
