F1, from an excitement point of view, suffers from the same issue as European footie: unequal budgets. Every team is only really judged against how much resourc

F1, from an excitement point of view, suffers from the same issue as European footie: unequal budgets. Every team is only really judged against how much resource they brought. Witness Man Utd, everyone is saying what an awful season they're having. They're in 5th place. Watch an F1 race and it's the same, everyone is on a money ladder and are doing well when they're up a little based on where you expect from their budget. The truly interesting thing about F1 is hidden from sight: engineering. Yes, your driver matters a bit but if you have money you will have a good car as well, which you need to attract a good driver. I guess it's easier to exaggerate the importance of the driver than the dozens of engineers who are doing new things all the time. Quite hard to do a TV show I guess. There's also the issue that driving is basically a plutocracy. You can't be a driver without huge, huge amounts of money. You _can_ be a driver if you've only got huge amounts of money. Either you have to be unusually good at driving so that someone sponsors you (an even narrower eye of the needle than pro footie), or you have to be unusually wealthy so that mom and dad can sponsor you. Is this a truly global sport? Top drivers seem to come from a small range of countries that either have a motoring tradition or absurd wealth inequality, or just rich countries. Finally the races seem to happen in all sorts of places that are to motorsports as Qatar is to football.