How F-Zero is a million light years ahead of F1
F-Zero (1992)
F-Zero (1992)
The period between pre-season testing and the first race of the year is always an awkward time for us Formula One high rollers. We’re all sat there, waiting, anticipating, until the new season kicks off and a load of lads chase after the all-dominant driver, which in recent times has been Max Verstappen.
Then the race itself goes on for quite a while until someone finally wakes up, waves a chequered flag and everyone gets to down tools and enjoy some champagne - a bit like my evenings after I finish writing, really.
Because of that extensive testing period, where all of the cars take to the same bit of track and get the gremlins out of their chassis, F1 isn’t really like football or rugby. You wouldn’t know exactly how a football season is going to pan out, even if Manchester City batter Blyth Spartans 8-0 in a pre-season friendly.
And a 12-day-long friendly cricket match between Australia and the West Indies might make for a great drink-up, but it still wouldn’t tell you what way the 9-month internationals are gonna go that year.
But, as much as people will tell you not to take much notice of the lap-times or even the lap counts set by F1 teams in testing, the fact is that you can gleam a whole lot from pre-season. Entire seasons could very well become formalities going by the top teams’ showing in testing, meaning everything is settled before Day 1 even begins.
And the usual upshot of this is that, whatever team was dominating before is gonna dominate again. As of late, this has been the Red Bull Racing team, who are notching up near-perfect seasons and coming out with stonking car after stonking car.
All of the other teams follow the fizzy drink boys in fairly hopeless pursuit, the closest being the Mercedes outfit, who were the previous dominators. And of course, always flattering to deceive is Ferrari, who even an oik like you will have heard of. No matter what year it is, it ain’t their year.
Further down the field, there’ll be more frustrations for Fernando Alonso as he turns 60. Williams will be slow. Haas will be irrelevant. And, unless he sails off into the distance, Max Verstappen will have the paddock seething and the fans squealing in equal measure.
With all of that out of the way, and as it always is in F1, it’s best not to even bother with the racing on track. After all, I’m not exactly selling you on the sport, am I? But maybe the Netflix series, Drive to Survive did. It’s a bit too hammed up for me, but if you haven’t watched it, F1 cars these days may look a wee bit different to what you’re used to.
The biggest change to the cars is that they’re now outfitted with what a carbon fibre doodad called the halo, bolted on top of the car above the driver’s head. It blocks his view like a set of WW2 night-vision goggles and, if we’re honest, ruins not only the aesthetic of the car but the aesthetic of the driver’s carefully chosen helmet design as well.
You are free to use Google Images in case my descriptive skills don’t cut it, but the halo makes the previously space-age looking cars resemble a rather clumsy looking sandal.
But then, it’s just another step towards keeping the driver’s heads from getting caved in. And it’s probably saved a few lives already, looking at some of the crashes we’ve had in recent years where two cars have become one.
It all comes alongside previously imposed safety measures in Formula 1, such as Safety Cars, Virtual Safety Cars (disappointingly not featuring a hologram of a car on track), longer nose-cones, double yellow flags and red flags, pit speed limiters, fire-proof suits, fences to protect spectators from chewing on metal shards…
None of these safety measures lasted through to the 26th Century when F-Zero for the SNES takes place, oh no. It just wouldn’t be accepted. Remember that this is a racing sphere where the machines are free to bounce off each other as much as they like, and in fact it’s actively encouraged to do so if it looks like you’re not going to make it through a particular corner.
Rather than re-profile dangerous corners as they do in F1, the F-Zero commission instead sought to place massive jump-plates near corners that send you hundreds of feet in the air, and God knows where you’ll land after that. And to make crashes even more thrilling, landmines are placed right in the middle of the tracks, and there’s even magnet strips that pull you into the barriers - imagine that around the streets of Monaco?
And you can forget about that DRS for extra speed. Just run over a massive zipper in F-Zero instead, and boost yourself up to a neck-breaking 960km/h in less than 1 second, perfect for getting past those stubborn backmarkers. There are no blue flags in the future, put it that way.
F-Zero was an essential launch title for the Super Nintendo in Japan and North America, and came out a couple of months after the SNES launched in Europe. This was at a time when gamers were still being wowed by Rad Racer, so you can imagine what this game must’ve looked like to them. Instead of racing into a parallax background, you can race around a Mode 7 Monopoly board instead.
You can batter opponents in 3 cups in Grand Prix mode over 4 difficulties, or save your best times in Time Trial mode for other pigeons to be jealous of. The sensation of speed in F-Zero is still there as well, to this day, and it’s always a thrill to hit that top-end 478km/h speed in the Fire Stingray, or throw the slippery Golden Fox around hairpins before giving it a burst of maximum acceleration.
I’ve always felt that one conspicuous disadvantage of F-Zero SNES is its lack of multiplayer function. Well, Nintendo corrected that in the most delightfully over-the-top by releasing F-Zero 99 for the Switch. I’ll talk about that colourful bundle of fun another day, but sticking to the Super Nintendo, it would have been nice to have races against a buddy.
Actually, if you wanted to be even more critical of the game, you’d have to say that 15 tracks, many of them being simple retreads or longer versions of previous tracks, isn’t really giving you bundles to play with either.
But F-Zero doesn't need to complicate things, unlike a certain motorsport, and it's always brilliant for a quick play, especially considering how abundant the game is, physically and digitally. And even if you don’t like the racing – and many people who turn up to the tracks don’t - that music is unmissable.
So F1 gets safer and safer, with the halo and all the other myriad of changes to the formula over the past number of years. I shouldn’t really romanticise it, I know, but it’s all brought the sport further and further away from the thrilling, fiery deathraces that lit up the 1960s and 1970s.
But whatever about carbon neutral cars, vegan drivers or engines that run on tofu, the next major F1 innovation quite simply has to be getting rid of the wheels. Forget about Back to the Future 2 hoverboards - once we dispense with that silly rubber, we may finally be on our way to the crash-heavy, explosion-laden greatness that is F-Zero.
3 October 2023