5 September

With Bathurst coming up, even if you’re not a car racing fan, there’s a genius to V8 Supercars that I think it’s still super important for everybody to understand. A specific Australian genius, that goes well beyond car racing. A bit longer, because interesting things aren’t usually scrollable memes. Car racing normally uses the same dumb framing of things we see in gun debates, where some say guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And others say guns are the problem. Like guns and people are two separate things. Similarly in car racing, fan culture thinks winning is all about driving skill. Others think it’s all about the engineering. Many of the different racing formulas in the world fall on one or other side of that divide. F1 lets engineering dominate everything, meaning a tiny handful of drivers in the biggest budget teams win everything. ‘Spec’ formulas like F2 and F3 give everybody exactly the same car, thinking that encourages better racing. It does, though they use things like reverse grids to even things up as well. V8 Supercars, and NASCAR to a slightly lesser extent, does something else. It recognises that what wins races is the *coupling* of driver and engineering, while restricting what different budgets are actually allowed to be used for. You can’t just engineer a new engine in V8s, for example, you have to use the approved standard engine for each manufacturer. It allows Ford, GM and Toyota to all engineer different cars, but then it ruthlessly tests them and makes sure those engineering differences don’t create fundamental advantages for one over the other. That creates an ‘envelope’ of similar performance, inside which teams are then totally free to engineer each car to each driver’s preferences. Everybody wins. Engineering gets a significant say, as do drivers. All drivers on the grid can potentially win, as you can see in the stats. Racing is the winner, you can watch any V8 Supercars race and have no idea who will be on pole, and no idea who will win or even be on the podium, from one week to the next. It’s a genuine competition. The much, much broader lesson here is about how to run a society that is fair to all, while rewarding excellence and innovation. F1 is like the US and to some extent old Europe (which invented F1), it thinks just remove all regulation and let everybody slug it out, and then call that winner the best. That’s bullshit. It entrenches historical advantage and status hierarchies. The big players always win, even if they’re not the most capable. V8 Supercars is a microcosm of Australian society itself, where you design equal opportunity into the DNA of things. It’s not ‘bureaucracy’, it’s deliberately targeting unfair status disadvantage, to keep societies open to new things.