The Return of the Pay Driver?

The year 1994, in many ways, can be considered Formula One’s annus horribilis. Besides the tragic events of the San Marino Grand Prix weekend that claimed the lives of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna, it arguably marked a particularly low ebb in terms of the level of driving talent on the grid. After that fateful third round of the championship, there were no world champions to be found on the grid save for when Nigel Mansell made a series of cameos late in the season for Williams, and the scourge of the pay driver was rife.

During the late 80s and early 90s, the cost of competing in F1 ballooned largely as a result of the pioneering of electronic driver aids such as active suspension, traction control and ABS. Between 1984 and 1993, no team other than McLaren or Williams had won the drivers’ championship, and by the early 90s the gulf between them and the rest had become particularly pronounced; it was only after the banning of electronic aids in time for 1994 that their duopoly was finally broken. In the meantime, the number of full time entries had dropped to 28 from a peak of 39 five years earlier, countless teams (including such illustrious names as Brabham and March) having closed their doors. It was the desperation for cash on the part of some of the smaller teams to avoid a similar fate that led to the rise of the pay driver.

Now, it is important to note that there are pay drivers and there are pay drivers. Mere pay drivers are those who have proven themselves to be competent, if not particularly talented, in the lower ranks, and have gotten themselves in a position to be an F1 driver by virtue of a well-heeled sponsor or two. A good example of this kind of driver would be Pedro Diniz, who despite having never achieved spectacular results in Formula 3 or Formula 3000 landed an F1 seat in 1995 courtesy of the sponsorship package put together by his father, who owned a chain of Brazilian supermarkets. In his five seasons of F1 racing, Diniz didn’t exactly disgrace himself, even measuring up to Arrows teammate Damon Hill in 1997 on some occasions.

On the other hand, pay drivers are those whose previous results indicate that they have no real right to a space on the F1 grid, and are merely there because their sponsors have paid handsomely (often on a race-by-race basis) for the privilege. 1994 was littered with this latter category of pay driver: Taki Inoue, Jean-Denis Deletraz, Jean-Marc Gounon and Philippe Adams to name some of the most dubious. Often, such drivers would be one of a number to compete for a particular team over the course of the season, as was the case at the cash-strapped Lotus, Simtek and Pacific teams, all of whom employed six different drivers apiece that year.

Just a couple of years later however, pay drivers had all but disappeared from the grid. By mid-1996, the number of cars on the grid was down to just 20 with most of the teams that relied on such drivers having fallen by the wayside. By the early 2000s, the return of manufacturers to F1 meant that money was in no short supply, and that would mean only the cream of the F3 and F3000 crop could entertain any realistic hopes of graduating to F1. The likes of Gaston Mazzacane and Alex Yoong could be regarded as the last of the bona fide pay driver breed, though even then they weren’t nearly as uncompetitive as their counterparts five or six years earlier.

However, it could be contended that we are seeing the gradual return of the pay driver, perhaps as an inevitable consequence of the recent mass exodus of the manufacturers. On the current grid, the seats of five drivers could be said to depend entirely or mostly on their sponsors – Pastor Maldonado (PDVSA), Sergio Perez (Telmex/Claro/Cuervo), Vitaly Petrov (Sibur), Charles Pic (IDEC/Lagardere) and Narain Karthikeyan (Tata) – whilst the seats of Romain Grosjean (Total) and Bruno Senna (Gilette/Embratel) could be at least partially put down to sponsorship.

Whilst the seven drivers listed above could be defined as pay drivers in the technical sense of the expression, it would be grossly unfair to put them in the same bracket as Inoue or even Diniz. All of them have proved at the very least that they merit their place on the F1 grid, and some such as Perez have marked themselves out as real talents of the future with their performances so far. More importantly, all of them (with the exception of Karthikeyan) have won races or even championships in GP2, so it should therefore come as little surprise that they have been able to acquire such sponsorship.

In this sense, a driver like Perez, who has enjoyed Telmex backing for almost his entire career, is no different than a Sebastian Vettel or Lewis Hamilton, both of whom were backed by Red Bull and McLaren throughout their respective junior careers. Though it can’t be denied that sponsorship pressures have been responsible for such talented veterans as Jarno Trulli and Rubens Barrichello losing their seats for this season, those that dismiss their replacements as no-hopers simply on the virtue of the size of their sponsorship cheque seem to misunderstand that talent and money in the vast majority of cases go hand in hand.

By the same token, that’s not to say that drivers who lack any sponsorship are for that very reason no good: last year’s GP2 runner-up Luca Filippi, who is currently trying to raise a budget to compete in IndyCar, is a case in point. It is perhaps to be expected that Italian drivers are going to have a hard time finding backing when the state of the Italian economy is so dire, but that brings me neatly to an important point to note – certain drivers are able to obtain the required sponsorship more easily depending on the country they are from, with those coming from nations with a relatively low profile in worldwide motorsport such as Mexico, Russia or India seemingly at an advantage.

Whilst in an ideal world a driver’s nationality would have no bearing on whether he makes it at the very highest level, the truth of the matter is that it does play a part, as it has done for Perez, Maldonado, Petrov and Karthikeyan in particular. You can’t however criticise that quartet of ‘pay drivers’ for seizing the opportunities available to them. That is, after all, the name of the F1 game, and history will ultimately judge whether the talent they demonstrated warranted the backing they received. This will come as little comfort to the innumerable young hopefuls whose promising careers have stalled as a result of money shortages, but the increasing profile of other championships besides F1 means that many of them could yet potentially enjoy careers as fully-paid professional racing drivers.