The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (45 page)

Vettel has curly blond hair, blue eyes, and an impish charm. He should by rights have been the media darling of this spectacle. At 25, he was already the two-time reigning world champion, and poised to become the youngest driver ever to win three titles. Scattered around the track were posters drawn up in the Wild West style.
WANTED: A WORLD CHAMPION
, they said, and featured mug shots of Vettel and Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, who were leading in the individual driver standings, with two races to go. Back in the summer, Vettel had visited New York and appeared as a guest on
The Late Show with David Letterman
, where he talked about the “big balls” you need as a Formula One driver. But the more success he had, it seemed, the more credit went to Newey—Alonso himself spoke of “fighting against a Newey car”—and Vettel was getting defensive. “I don't see Adrian or myself being more important than any other,” he said. “I mean, when I'm on the track, I'm alone in the car, and if I steer left the car turns left, and I steer right the car turns right, so whatever I do is extremely decisive to the whole project.”

I made a habit of following herds of cameras wherever they went, and thereby learned to connect faces with some of racing's legendary names. The elfin man dressed all in plaid was Sir Jackie Stewart, a three-time world-champion driver in the 1960s and '70s. (“He's too good,” Stewart said of Newey. “He's a very clever man.”) The extremely tanned and perfectly coiffed fireplug who looked as if he'd just climbed off a yacht in the Mediterranean was Mario Andretti. The guy with a monocoque of a proboscis was Emerson Fittipaldi. The awesomely dressed man holding court in front of Ferrari's hospitality suite? “Oh, he's just an asshole,” Saward said. “He represents what you might call the indolently wealthy.”

But the real paparazzi of Formula One—the guys with the thigh-size lenses that could zoom in on an Ecclestone daughter from two blocks away—are not interested in people-watching. They stalk the pit lane, where the garages are arranged in order of success, and cluster at the front end, among the McLarens, Ferraris, and Red Bulls, hoping to catch an unobstructed view of the cars as they're reassembled each morning. A mysterious bit of film had emerged from the previous race, in Abu Dhabi. It showed Red Bull mechanics fiddling with Vettel's front wing and nose cone, which appeared supple, as if made of rubber instead of carbon. Was this another bit of Newey-inspired alchemy? Or was it a violation of the rules restricting wing flexibility, as some rivals charged? Flexing wings improve grip in high-speed corners without increasing drag on straightaways. Might it explain Red Bull's late-season surge to the front of the paddock after an inconsistent start? All I was able to discern while spying on the Red Bull garage is that its mechanics blast dance music that must be intended to drive the fussy neighbors from Ferrari mad. (You can “check out what the garage are listening to today” via the team's Spotify playlist.) Also, to judge from the open Red Bull cans in view, they may be overcaffeinated.

 

The course itself looked magnificent, rising out of a dusty field, southeast of the airport, that the city council had voted to annex less than two weeks before the race, in order to boost property-tax rolls. Those not arriving by helicopter had the option of taking a shuttle bus from downtown or parking in cow pastures along the access road, for $35, and using the two- or three-mile walk to get acclimated to the grinding whine of all the engine noise—the “glorious assault on the senses,” the official race announcer later called it—as the 133-foot ascent to the first turn came into focus. “Turn One,” I'd been told back in Milton Keynes, was “going to be epic.” It was a blind hairpin to the left, and would require drivers to downshift to first gear after a furious sprint up the hill. Hermann Tilke, the Robert Trent Jones of Formula One, was the architect, and I gathered that he'd given the undiscerning American audience of 115,000 an international sampler of sorts, borrowing an S-curve and a horseshoe bend from Interlagos and Istanbul, respectively, and alluding elsewhere to the swift Becketts Corner of England's Silverstone.

Through practice and qualifying, the drivers' times steadily improved as the track was in effect rubberized when the burned residue of the tires formed a smoother surface. Because of the circuit's newness, oil was still being released by the settling asphalt, and the competitors used words like “shiny,” “icy,” “slippery,” “wet,” and “green” to describe the conditions. “Green, yeah, dirty,” Newey said, sipping a cup of coffee a few hours before the race, and dismissing as an “occupational hazard” the nuisance of shutterbugs who had gathered for a shot of the wizard at rest. Newey had been vindicated in the wing-flexing controversy, which the FIA race director, in a press conference, attributed to an optical illusion, and Vettel and Webber, benefiting from still further tweaks to the front wing angles and the ride height, had secured the first and third spots on the grid.

Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, meanwhile, placed a disappointing eighth, which he deemed “logical,” a result of inferior machinery. Even worse, this left him on the “dirty,” or less rubberized, side of the track. Ferrari officials then made the cynical decision to sabotage their other driver, Felipe Massa, to help Alonso. With less than an hour to go before the ceremonial parade lap (in classic American muscle cars, naturally), they broke the seal on Massa's gearbox. Massa, who had actually been faster than Alonso in qualifying, was automatically penalized, and forced to drop back five spots. The newly configured grid placed Alonso in seventh, back on the clean side—and tough luck to those drivers from Force India, Lotus, and Williams who in turn were shifted from clean to dirty, as collateral damage. My Twitter feed filled with concerns from Formula One partisans that this might not sit well with an American audience obsessed by questions of fairness (“Yanks like sport over tactics”), ignoring the larger problem of widespread confusion.

Was Turn One indeed epic? There were no collisions or spinouts, so I'd have to vote no, although I was informed, after the cars had disappeared from view, that Alonso had managed to squirt past a driver or two. A veteran race observer once described for me the conversational rhythm among spectators in terms of 90-second intervals, or roughly the amount of time it takes a car to complete a three-and-a-half-mile lap. That is, you talk for 90 seconds, and then pause out of necessity when the cars whiz by again, trying in vain to hold a thought as your teeth vibrate. I found that this held true only for the first few laps, when the cars remained bunched together, and before any drivers had stopped for a change of tires. Soon enough, the interruptions were more frequent and intermittent, and it was easier to understand the proliferation of champagne as a desensitizing device.

I was fortunate to be watching from Red Bull's section of the Paddock Club, above the pit lane, with the high rollers who had paid $5,000 each for the full experience: gnocchi, booze, and even a DJ from Miami, named Erok, whom Red Bull flies around the world to perpetuate its image as the brash upstart of the scene. Some helpful representatives of Infiniti, one of Red Bull's subsidiary sponsors, distributed handheld video screens that allowed you to shuffle between camera views from each of the cars, and after some experimentation I concluded that the best way to watch the race was from the perspective of McLaren's Lewis Hamilton, who had been made to obscure the painted letters “HAM” on his helmet after race officials learned that they were a reference not to his name but to the song by Kanye West and Jay-Z (and meant “hard as a motherfucker”).

By the midpoint, it was shaping up as a two-man race between Vettel and Hamilton, with Alonso in a distant third. (Webber's alternator blew on the 17th lap, forcing his withdrawal.) Hamilton's car was faster in a straight line—by 11 kilometers per hour, the BBC commentary said—but seemed to lack the Red Bull's downforce, or grip, and he slid more in the corners. On my screen, as I pretended to be Hamilton, Vettel would appear larger and closer each time we approached a sharp turn, only to scurry away again as we accelerated out. The cat-and-mouse game continued for more than 20 minutes, as Hamilton narrowed the gap to within DRS-boosting range.

Newey stood in the pit lane with several team officials, wearing noise-canceling headphones and staring at a bank of computer screens, in a bit of pageantry for the television production. (“We could probably do a better job in the back of the garage,” he confessed. “You're strung out in a line. You can't hear anything.”) They monitored live data from the hundreds of sensors in Vettel's chassis and engine, advising on tire conditions, and communicated via radio and instant message with another group of technicians seated in a command center back in Milton Keynes, some of whom simulated the race in real time, forecasting when Hamilton and Alonso and the others might make a pit stop.

The ample technical support was unable to help Vettel overcome his biggest obstacle: the inconvenient slowness of Narain Karthikeyan, of the struggling Hispania Racing Team. Vettel cursed into his microphone as he downshifted into Turn Eleven on his 43rd lap and found himself momentarily impeded by Karthikeyan, bringing up the rear on his own 42nd. The brief logjam brought Hamilton to within a couple of car lengths, and gave him the window he needed on the following straight. Up went the DRS flap on Hamilton's rear wing. More cursing. The cat had overtaken the mouse.

Vettel would have to wait another week to secure his third title, but, in accordance with the complexities of Formula One, Red Bull still had cause for celebration. The second-place finish in Austin was worth enough points in the team standings to clinch the Constructors' Championship, the source of the big prize money, if not of the cork-popping glory. Few in the Paddock Club, or among the departing crowd, for that matter, seemed to notice all the Red Bull personnel assembling on the track for a team photo after Mario Andretti had welcomed the victorious Hamilton and the runners-up, Vettel and Alonso, to the podium for the ceremonial Mumm spraying. The garages were being hurriedly disassembled. On the Jumbotron above, a man in a cowboy hat sang “Margaritaville.” Newey lingered a while longer, speaking politely to the remaining British TV cameras, and raised his fist and thumb in the air. Last week, a report surfaced in the Italian press that Ferrari had resumed its pursuit of his services.

FROM THE NEW YORKER

 

U
ELI STECK'S CLOSEST BRUSH
with death, or at least the time he thought it likeliest that he was about to die, came not when he plummeted 700 feet down the south face of Annapurna, or spidered up the Eiger's fearsome North Face alone and without ropes in under three hours, or slipped on wet granite while free-climbing the Golden Gate route of El Capitan with his wife, on their honeymoon, but, rather, while he was hugging his knees in a tent on Mount Everest, hiding from a crowd of Sherpas who were angry that his climbing partner had called one of them a “motherfucker,” in Nepali. They were threatening to kill him. He had no escape. He had planned everything so scrupulously. The intended route up the mountain was sublime, the conditions perfect. He had spent years honing his body and his mind while tending to his projects and the opportunities that arose out of them. As a climber, he knew that the mountains can foil the best-laid plans, that in an instant a routine ascent can turn into a catalog of horrors. But it would be ridiculous to die like this. The expedition had hardly begun.

Steck had made his first trip to Everest in May 2011, at the age of 34. He'd built a reputation as one of the world's premier alpinists—“the Swiss Machine,” some called him, to his dismay—by ascending, in record time, alone and without ropes, Europe's notorious north faces and then by taking on bold Himalayan routes, with style and speed. Everest hardly fit the pattern. In recent years, accomplished mountaineers in search of elegant, difficult, and original climbs had tended to steer clear of its crowds, expense, and relative drudgery. Still, Everest is Everest. Steck felt the pull.

That spring, 500 feet from the summit, he turned back, concerned that frostbite might claim his toes. He was also uncharacteristically spent, after climbing two other 8,000-meter peaks in previous weeks. (The goal of three in one trip was new.) But an idea had taken hold: a route that, if accomplished from beginning to end, would represent a milestone of modern mountaineering, a glorious plume. He began scheming and training for it. He returned a year later, to attain the summit via the standard route—a step toward the goal. He reached the top in the company of the lead group of Sherpas, the local people, many of whom work as porters and guides for the commercial expeditions on Everest. This was on the first day that the weather cleared for a summit push. The next day, the crowds went up—hundreds of aspirants, most of them clients of commercial companies, and their Sherpas—and, amid the traffic jam approaching the summit, four climbers died, of exposure and cerebral edema.

This year, Steck arrived in Nepal at the beginning of April. He intended to spend as long as six weeks prior to his summit push acclimatizing to Everest's high altitude, going on forays up the mountain from base camp, which is 17,600 feet above sea level. (The summit is 29,028 feet.) He'd kept his plans secret. He has long disdained revealing the details of expeditions in advance. He doesn't indulge in what he calls “tasty talking”—boasting of feats he has not yet accomplished. Also, a climber must generally be discreet about a bold route, to prevent other climbers from going there first. He was not displeased when climbing blogs reported, incorrectly, that he was going up the South Face. He had something else in mind.

His partners were Simone Moro, a 45-year-old Italian who'd been climbing in the Himalayas for more than 20 years (he'd summited Everest four times), and Jonathan Griffith, an English climber and photographer who lives in Chamonix. By the end of the month, they were established at Camp 2, at 21,300 feet, beyond the top of the Khumbu Icefall, a tumbling portion of the Khumbu Glacier mined with crevasses and seracs.