Pain is gain, all the way up towards 20,000 RPM, music to the ears, the urgent advice of audiologist be damned. Even in the marginally quieter age of hybrid Formula 1 cars that dawned against carbon-soaked skies a decade ago and has internal-combustion noise aesthetes lamenting the decrescendo, the sleek racing machines can put out 140 dB trackside. That’s louder than a jumbo jet taking off.
Nostalgists for the shock-and-awe virtuosity of V12s, V10s, V8s curate medleys of motor masterworks, symphonic in scope and epic drive: there’s the tuning of the start; the sforzando of the first straight-away; soaring melodies punctuated by the staccato downshifts; the invertible counterpoint of jockeying for position, of one car passing the other then being overtaken again; the coloratura of cornering tires; the hairpin dynamics of hairpin turns; the high C cadenzas of brakes giving way to a surging accelerando; a fiery crash that resounds like the artillery blasts of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture; the final crescendo to the checkered flag and the cymbal-clash coda along pit row.
The descriptive language of F1 afficionados shares its refinements with that of the Carnegie Hall concertgoer. The motor works enumerated could well be confused with references to musical works, and in effect do, if you think of both Bach and BMW as sound art—BWV 232a (the early section of the B-Minor Mass) finding its counterpart in BMW M 12/13 turbo (a 1960s masterpiece from those famed Bavarian composers of engines).
YouTube is mouse music when compared to the real thing, but the platform spurs the imagination to hear the Red Bull race car’s roar at Monaco. But follow me anyway into a digital Temple of Audio Automative Art and listen to a survey of the cataclysmic F1 canon conducted by the motorhead maestro known as Gearbox Grid: “The Honda RA109 V8 screams with a distinctive shrill wail, its high-pitched whine cutting through the circuit noise to become one of the most memorable sounds of the early 2010s.” Grid waves his baton and conjures performances that are “haunting” and “iconic.” The best “create a unique ear-piercing soundtrack.”
This Grand Prix Professor’s use of the term soundtrack raises a fundamental question about the latest cinematic car-racing blockbuster—F1: the Movie. If motors make music, why hire a traditional film music composer—whether an old-school notes-on-paper mechanic or high-tech wizard up in his studio booth at the top of the grandstand—to roll out a traditional movie score? The engine of the APXGP (the fictional team featured in the film) is the real star of the movie for many who will see and hear it. (We won’t succumb to the Siren Song of all those versimilitudinarians who observe that “the APXGP car sounds like a Ferrari engine, even though it’s supposed to be a Mercedes engine, as given by the obvious Mercedes logo on the car.”) This movie motor star speaks and sings and shouts with as much nuance and more vitality than does its driver, Brad Pitt as the comeback renegade Sonny Hayes. Are the myriad emotional tonalities of this motor——from piston pathos to turbocharged elation—enough to let you know how to feel strapped into your multiplex seat as you watch Sonny bully his way through the Grand Prix pack, ride the highs and slam into the lows? Can’t this master of expressivity fully capture the macho melancholy, the sexual surge, the nihilistic pursuit of fast pleasure, the force Fate at full tilt? The answer is painfully, ear-splittingly obvious: No.
From start to finish, F1 confirms that Hollywood is and will remain addicted to the magic of musical sound, synthesized or real. (The distinction between the authentic and the artificial is all but vanished, but I cling vainly to it like a spent tire losing its grip on wet tarmac).
One top Hollywood composer with a tremendous track-record at high speeds is Hans Zimmer. He has worked with cool cars before, having chased the Batmobile through the night in Batman Begins back in 2005. Zimmer’s relentless musical drive train and cyclic harmonies move efficiently, unerringly around blind corners and then accelerate into arcing horn lines whose heroic contours connect the low-slung F1 chariot with those horsedrawn forbears piloted by Egyptian pharaohs or Roman emperors or stagecoach drivers. In 2013 Zimmer scored a Formula 1 movie, Ron Howard’s Rush, set not in the present, as is F1, but back in the swinging 1970s. That soundtrack throbs and throttles, portends, aches, and even brightly chimes along with the vintage Carusos of the Grand Prix Circuit.
No engine is invented anew. It must be at least partly built from elements already manufactured, tried, tested, and refined. Zimmer draws abundantly on his well-stocked inventory of musical effects. But echoes from previous Zimmer scores can risk eliciting associations that confuse, even befuddle. The British actor, Tobias Menzies, appears in F1 as a conniving racing team board member. Menzies also played a regally cool Prince Philip in several seasons of The Crown for which Zimmer supplied the title music. That miniature British coronation anthem was constructed of an arpeggio revolving ceaselessly as if trapped in tradition. From this figure emerged an inchoate melody that surged and faltered as if both facing and fleeing its Monarchic Destiny. When Menzies appears on screen in F1 within earshot of some of these same Zimmer-wielded sonic tools and techniques, one is struck by the possibility that the Windsors have given up the thoroughbreds of Royal Ascot for the screaming four-wheeled fire-breathing beasts of Abu Dhabi in the Grand Prix season—and also therefore movie—finale. A Zimmer-scored film can easily stray into a house of musical mirrors full of unintended cross-picture associations, bizarre regressions, and déja-vus-all-over-again.
F1 used to stand also for Function 1 on slow-poke computer keyboards of yesteryear: top key, upper left called for “Help.” For F1, Zimmer was certainly not afraid to press F1—figuratively, maybe even literally: the pianissimo intimation of action thwacks into terrifying motion; the pulse of an idea, like a chamois obsessively polishing the front wing of an F1 car, that sound then speeding into the suggestion of a melody; cellos yearn; a portentous collage of minor sonorities offers a prelude to the battle—on the race track or (as in Zimmer’s soundtrack Gladiator) the sands of the Coliseum—then bursts into fury, spurred on by martial percussion. In F1 these many musical revolutions per minute duet with the motors, like operatic tenors accompanied by a pit orchestra. Many high-performance Hollywood machines have coasted into the winner’s circle of box office lucre when Zimmer is a member of the crew.
When, in F1, the wounded warrior must be nursed back to health, these miniature musical cycles suggest the IV drip or the furtive signs of life from an EKG, but once the hero is behind the wheel again, Zimmer’s (auto)motives gather irresistible momentum and speed Sonny towards either victory or death or both. Pitt’s longest, most vulnerable speech, uttered on a hotel balcony high above the Las Vegas Strip, describes his search to relive those moments while racing in which he transcends Grand Prix mayhem into a high-speed stillness during which he sees everything all at once and clearly, anticipating all that his competitors will do as the apocalyptic roar around him recedes into silence.
This would be the world championship moment for the chorus of engines to be allowed to sing a cappella and then gradually diminuendo into nothing, emancipating machine and then man from musical score. But even down this otherworldly homestretch, the trusty components taken from Zimmer’s garage band wall and fitted onto the racing machine. Precisely when the hero should be racing, musically unencumbered, towards apotheosis, the turbocharged soundtrack runs right over us. At the crux, when it’s time for filmmaking team to win an unlikely victory, they lose their aesthetic nerve and spin out.
Rather than let allegory float free and lift off into myth and memory, the F1 keeps us on the ground and on the course (even if the car isn’t always), pedal to the metal, rubber on the road, Zimmer waving his wrench as the machine wails by.
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