In politics, as in F-1, lucky breaks do not exist. You can have the driver and his wise hands, the leader and his toned voice, but if you don’t have the machine and the people who make a difference behind it, configuring the strategy, positioning and message on a calendar, there is nothing to do. No one better than the two-time world champion Fernando Alonso to explain the veracity of these premises: “I believe that to win you must have the vision and the ambition… The opportunities are there for everyone, but it seems that only one team and its engineers are willing to do whatever is necessary. And you know, I’m proud to be a part of this organization.” He knows well what he says. For the first time in 12 years, Alonso has a competitive car. A year ago, at Aston Martin (AM) they were last in the first race, today they are third behind only the two Red Bull (RB) drivers.
At his side, the two-time RB world champion, Max Verstappen, agreed: “Yes, Fernando is absolutely right. I think if you have the right people in charge, they really want to win and you hire them, anything is possible.” AM signed engineer Dan Fallows from RB a year ago and the car has become a racing giant. RB did exactly the same exercise 17 years ago when it signed Adrian Newey, the most successful engineer for his avant-garde single-seaters. This is how Sebastián Vettel was a four-time champion with RB and how Verstappen beat Lewis Hamilton two years ago, ending seven years of Mercedes dominance. There is no sport, science and art that is more like politics than F-1. No driver is nobody without a great car behind him. And to gain tenths from the car, you need the talent of the engineers.
Pilot, car and circuits, or what is the same, elections. Innovations that make a difference are always incorporated into every winning car. In the case of the promising AM, the determining concept is negative degradation (DN). Applied to political strategy it is very interesting. The DN consists of turning around the classic relationship between tires and turns, that is, the headlines, the political content and the legislature that is running out. The natural tendency is that as the tire or message accumulates laps, its performance decreases and lap times increase, losing votes. In the AM, however, thanks to a devilish balance between fuel consumption and tire wear, Alonso was going faster and faster. A huge competitive advantage. As if you have an increasingly innovative message that is never flat or heavy.
In Spain, the figures have been frozen for months. The majority PP-Vox is not sure: 174 deputies. And after the municipal ones we know that in the general ones the one who obtains more than 140 seats will win. The game is so open that whoever has DN will have a condition of possibility. The DN is 500,000 more votes. Without it, the correlation of weaknesses prevails: the 129 seats and more than seven million votes that the PP has today, with DN or 500,000 more votes in its tires, would prevent the re-election of the progressive coalition. If the PSOE, with 97 seats and six million votes, for its part, had a DN, it would consolidate above 100, waiting to add more than 140 deputies with the space to its left; Vox, with 45 deputies and three million voters, knows precisely that it needs to recover the 500,000 votes it has lost since 2019; and the purple ones, with 29 deputies and 2.4 million voters, with DN they would be close to three million, leaving the assault on the third position to a Sumar (with a Podemos engine) on the brink of candy. If they are third and Vox fourth, the coalition is reissued. 500,000 votes or DN. How to work this miracle of social engineering?
Fallows and Newey know that designing a stable car, without rebounds, with DN, light in attack and fast in corners is always very difficult. In politics you would need to build a message capable of progressing to the end. It is not so much a question of measuring how many times voters take a breath in the polls as of having moments that leave them breathless. One clue: the nation state is back. It also helps not to make the biggest political mistake in history: what we don’t achieve is often within reach of the leap we don’t make.
