Tag Archives: F1 racing

F1 in Numbers

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A long time ago I wrote a post called Blogging by Numbers in which I wrote about various numbers that linked to the world of writing and blogging. This week I thought I’d try and do a similar thing with Formula One racing. I haven’t written much about the sport this year even though it has been quite an interesting season. Recently, Max Verstappen, who a few races ago was really out of contention for the World Championship, now seems to have caught up with the top two drivers, Norris and Piastri and it is even possible he could swipe the title from under the noses of those two, both driving for McLaren. Currently, Lando Norris leads Oscar Piastri by a single point so it looks like a three way fight for the title. Anyway, let’s take a look at those numbers.

1950

That’s a pretty good number to begin with. The world driver’s championship commenced in 1950 and the very first winner was Nino Farina who won the title after only 7 races. The very first race of the season was the British Grand Prix held at Silverstone and Farina won that one driving his Alfa Romeo.

5

Nigel Mansell German GP 1988 photo by author

The famous Red Five was Nigel Mansell’s race number. In the 1980s Nigel Mansell, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet were a quartet that dominated the sport for many years. Piquet won three titles in 1981, 1983 and 1987. Mansell joined Piquet at Williams Honda in 1985. Honda felt that Piquet could have won the championship in 1986 if Williams had nominated a number one driver. Frank Williams declined to do so and so Honda withdrew their engines prematurely at the end of 1987 and began a new relationship with McLaren instead. Together, McLaren drivers Prost and Senna dominated the 1988 season winning every race between them but one. Williams were forced to use the engine of a privateer, John Judd, and were hopelessly outclassed. Mansell signed for Ferrari, the last driver to be personally signed for the famous team by the Commendatore himself, Enzo Ferrari.

Designer Adrian Newey joined the team in 1990 and with a new Renault engine the Williams team began to return to form. Mansell was tempted back to Williams from Ferrari. He won the world championship in 1992 but was dismayed to find that Frank Williams had signed Alain Prost as his team mate for 1993. Mansell had been teamed with Prost at Ferrari and was not happy at the way Prost schemed behind the scenes. Mansell declined to sign for the 1993 season and instead opted to move to the USA and compete in Indycars. There the Haas team made him a gift of his new race number, Red Five.

Fangio (Picture courtesy Wikipedia)

Still on the subject of number 5, that was the total of world championships won by the Argentine driver Juan Manuel Fangio. He was the original Formula One legend, the one everyone else spent decades trying to catch. He raced in the 1950s, when cars were twitchy beasts with no seatbelts and drivers wore polo shirts instead of fireproof suits. And yet, Fangio made it look effortless. He won five World Championships with four different teams, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Maserati and Mercedes, an incredible effort which no other driver got close to until Alain Prost won his fourth in 1993 and finally Michael Schumacher equalled in 2001.

Decades later, when people discuss who the greatest driver of all time is, Fangio’s name still floats effortlessly to the top, a reminder that grace and talent once shared the same racing seat. Fangio retired from racing aged 47; he died in 1995 aged 84.

105

Image courtesy Wikipedia ceative commons

Lewis Hamilton currently holds the record for the most ever Formula One wins, 105. The previous record was held by Michael Schumacher at 91. Hamilton’s last win was the 2024 British Grand Prix. It was also his last win for Mercedes. In 2025, Lewis Hamilton moved to Ferrari. With the exception of a single sprint race victory, he has yet to win a full Grand Prix.

7

The record for the most world championships is held jointly by Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton. Many feel that Hamilton’s 7 championships should really be an 8. The result of the final race of the 2021 season, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, was controversial. Title contenders Hamilton and Max Verstappen both had 369.5 points coming to the race meaning that whoever won would take the title. It would either be Verstappen’s first or Hamilton’s eighth.

What happened was that Lewis Hamilton was leading the race but on lap 53 of the 58 lap race, there was a crash and the safety car came out. Mercedes realised there was no time to restart the race and so Hamilton would win behind the safety car. The Red Bull team decided to change the tyres of their driver, Verstappen, and he rejoined the field, still in second place but with 5 lapped cars ahead of him. The race controller controversially decided that the cars in front of Max, and no others, could unlap themselves and restarted the race with a final lap remaining. According to the rules there should have been a mandatory final lap behind the safety car but this was ignored and the race restarted for one racing lap. With fresh tyres Verstappen overtook Hamilton and won, taking his first world championship.

Various protests were made by Mercedes but the race result was upheld although the race controller, Michael Masi, was later sacked.

65

65 was the tally of pole positions made by Ayrton Senna which at the time of his death in 1994 was the record. Together, Senna, Alain Prost, and Nigel Mansell dominated most of the eighties and early nineties in Formula One racing. Mansell had left the stage for Indycar racing in the United States and Prost had retired, leaving Senna to take his vacant seat at Williams, or perhaps he retired because Senna had been offered a seat at Williams. Certainly, after the intense animosity that developed between the two at McLaren you can hardly blame Prost for not wanting to work in that same situation again.

Ayrton Senna 1988. Photo by the author

Those retirements left Senna in 1994 as the Elder Statesman of Grand Prix motor racing. Now that his two closest competitors had gone perhaps Senna had hoped that he could relax, let up the pace a little bit, just as Prost had thought in 1988 before Senna began to push him harder. But a new phase had begun for Aryton Senna, a new Young Pretender had appeared to challenge him in the shape of Michael Schumacher. Schumacher had won the first two Grands Prix of the year and Senna came to Imola for the San Marino Grand Prix without a single point. “For us the championship starts here,” he told the TV cameras, “fourteen races instead of sixteen.” Further pressure mounted on Senna when fellow Brazilian Rubens Barrichello was injured in a crash and then Roland Ratzenberger was killed, the first fatality at a Grand Prix meeting since that of Riccardo Paletti 12 years before.

In the race as we all know, Senna went off the track at Tamburello and was killed when a suspension arm, crushed in the impact, flipped back and injured the Brazilian driver fatally in the head.

1

I thought I’d finish with some one hit wonders, drivers who only ever won one race. According to my research there are currently 25 drivers who have won just a single F1 race. The most recent single race winner is current Alpine driver Pierre Gasly who won the 2020 Italian Grand Prix. Gasly started the race in tenth, but gained positions due to a well-timed pit-stop prior to a safety car. Lewis Hamilton, who led the race until this point, was given a penalty for entering the pit lane when it was closed and so passed the lead to Gasly.

Jean Alesi was a hugely promising driver who sadly signed for Ferrari just as they entered a very dismal period in the Italian team’s long history. His one win came in 1995 at the Canadian Grand Prix when he was running second to Schumacher in a Benetton and the German retired with a gearbox problem.

Peter Gethin courtesy creative commons

Here is one final one hit wonder and the winner was a driver you may never have heard of but the race he won has been considered by many to be one of the most exciting of all time. Peter Gethin was driving for Yardley BRM in 1971. Back then before the arrival of the chicanes, Monza, the venue for the Italian Grand Prix, was a super fast slipstreaming event.

Gethin in his BRM won the race from Ronnie Peterson in a March 702 by an incredible by 0.01 seconds. The top five were covered by just 0.61 seconds, with François Cevert finishing third and Mike Hailwood in his debut race for Surtees finishing fourth and Howden Ganley fifth. With an average speed of 150.754 mph, this race stood as the fastest-ever Formula One race for 32 years, until 2003. The following year, 1972, chicanes were added to the Monza circuit to reduce the ever growing speeds of the cars.

Gethin retired from F1 in 1974.

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F1, The Crown and Watching the Box on Holiday

Posted on by Steve Higgins

My original title for this post was Watching the Box in France. That however seemed to give the impression that this post was about French TV which it isn’t. Liz and I don’t normally watch much television on holiday, we are far more interested in swimming, going out for meals and barbecuing. On this holiday however, the weather was a little mixed and on quite a few evenings we settled down in the lounge of our rented house and decided to pop the TV on.

Just to backtrack a little, we rented this same house back in May and usually, the only time I put the TV on is to watch F1 racing. May is the usual month in the calendar for the Monaco grand prix, one of my favourite races of the year. There is actually plenty of talk recently about cancelling the race as nowadays, the F1 cars are faster and much bigger and so there is very little room left to overtake.

Back in the 1960s, cars were much smaller, in fact in those days there were three cars on the front row of the starting grid, the cars lining up in 3-2-3 formation. Fast forward to the present day and F1 cars and their aerodynamic fins and wings have spread out hoping to grab that extra bit of air in order to generate more downforce and push themselves down to the track so they can corner ever faster.

Many people have called for the race to be cancelled as bigger cars combined with a narrow track makes it virtually impossible to overtake which reduces the racing to just a procession of high speed cars and of course whoever is on pole position is pretty much guaranteed a win. Push that to one side and I must tell you that I happen to love the Monaco grand prix, I love the track, I love the exotic names of the corners: Saint Devote, Mirabeau and Rascasse. I love the run down to the Casino Square, the dash into the tunnel and the following tight chicane, the prize giving, the boats in the harbour, the glamour; in short, I love it all.

Back in May then I was disappointed to find that the Skybox in this lovely house did not seem to be working. I switched it on and off, rebooted it, checked the connections but all to no avail. I was forced to watch the 8 minute highlights on YouTube and quite frankly, I was gutted. OK back in England our own trusty Skybox had recorded the race but by then I knew the outcome, I knew the winners and the excitement had all been lost.

Anyway, we came here once again in September and I was looking forward to watching the Italian Grand Prix, another of my favourite races. The TV worked ok but the skybox was no more, lying abandoned and disconnected on one side. A new TV set up had been sorted with the TV connected to the internet. I quickly ascertained that in France, F1 was available on Canal+. Yes, Canal was there, ok so far. I clicked on the channel only to find that a subscription was required. I would have to pay and subscribe to Canal to watch the racing!

My inner tightwad kicked in and declined to open up my wallet so once again I had to make do with the 8 mins of YouTube highlights. Oh well, we didn’t come on holiday to watch TV but even so, I was disappointed.

The other thing we noticed on one rainy evening was that Netflix was available. Now just recently when Liz renewed her Sky package, some negotiation was involved and to sweeten the deal, Sky threw in a Netflix subscription. I have to say I haven’t looked at Netflix much but I always assumed it was just an ordinary channel like BBC1 for instance, in that there was a schedule and certain programmes were broadcast at certain times. Not so, Netflix is more like YouTube, you can watch programmes on demand but what to watch, that is the question.

Liz wanted to watch The Crown which I can’t say I was really interested in at first but after a while I realised what a really excellent production it is. The actors are really good especially the portrayals of the Queen, Princess Margaret and Winston Churchill.

The younger Queen was played by Claire Foy and Princess Margaret by Vanessa Kirkby and Margaret’s situation as the Queen’s sister was explored in a few episodes. Her love affair with Peter Townsend was doomed because Townsend was a divorcee. The Queen was advised to ask Margaret to wait until she was 25 and then she could marry. When the time came the Queen’s advisors brought up more issues and then ultimately the two lovers had to separate which of course didn’t help the sisterly relationship between the Queen and Margaret. Margaret actually could have married Townsend but that would have meant giving up her royal status so it seems to me that perhaps being a royal meant more to her than being with Peter Townsend.

Prince Philip courtesy creative commons

Before watching The Crown I had no idea of the background of Prince Philip. I always assumed he was English and a member of some family which was eligible to marry into the royals. In actual fact he was Greek and aged only eighteen months old he and his family were exiled from their homeland which left him with a lifetime fear of revolution and anything that might threaten the royal family.

His and Charles’ school days at Gordonstoun were really well done especially the interplay and flashbacks between Philip’s and his son Charles’ time there. Philip apparently loved it but Charles hated it.

A real stand out story was the one about the retirement of Churchill which was cleverly linked to the famous, or infamous painting of a portrait of Churchill by Graham Sutherland. Churchill, played by John Lithgow, was coming up to his 80th birthday and various people wanted him to retire but he was adamant that he would carry on. Churchill had various sittings for the painting with the artist and Churchill himself was an amateur painter of some merit. The two, one a professional and the other an amateur, tried to examine each other through their works. Churchill was hugely disappointed with the result which portrayed him as a very old man and came to see at last, according to The Crown anyway, that the time had come for him to retire and hand over the leadership of the country to Anthony Eden. Everything was beautifully done.

The other thing about The Crown was even the quick cutaway and establishing shots of cars driving up to the Palace or through London in the 50s and 60s, were expertly done. I’m sure there was an element of special effects involved especially in scenes of crowds in London but even so, everything looked so good.

An interesting episode concerned Lord Altrincham who was concerned enough to put forward a little criticism of her Majesty when she seemed to brand the workers at a car factory ‘ordinary’ instead of praising their work. He said himself that he didn’t blame the Queen but those who were writing her speeches and he added; “The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect and a recent candidate for Confirmation.”

In the show, Lord Altrincham is invited to the palace to meet the Queen’s secretary, however when he arrives, he finds himself face to face with the Queen.

I doubt that ever actually happened but if it did then full marks to the Queen for meeting criticism head on. Many of the Lord’s recommendations, such as making a Christmas TV broadcast, were accepted by the monarch and surely must have helped her feel not as remote from her people as she had up till then. Another broadcast which was dramatised was the one made by the Duke of Windsor when he abdicated. The Duke flips in and out of the story. The Queen Mother detested him as he had forced the mantle of kingship onto her husband when he was ill-prepared for it. Prince Charles however, did strike up a sort of friendship with the Duke. I should imagine that a former King and a future one would have much in common although how much was fiction and how much was accurate, I don’t know. Charles was played by Josh O’Connor extremely well and the Duke in his later incarnation by Derek Jacobi.

Our last evenings in our gite at Parçay-les-Pins were made all the more enjoyable by this splendid series which I’m sure everyone has watched ages ago but for me, a latecomer to Netflix, is very new.

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7 Great F1 Designers

Posted on by Steve Higgins

There have been some pretty exciting races in F1 these days which is great for the fans and the sport in general. After all, who wants to see the same old faces winning again and again? But in this post I’d like to look at the men behind the machines, the designers who have created the cars that are the tools that the drivers use.

John Cooper.

I could start a little further back in the history of motor sport I suppose but I’ve chosen to start with the late 1950’s and John Cooper because he made a fundamental change to racing cars that set them on to today’s path. He decided to move the engine from the front to the back.

The rear engine revolution began in 1957 when Jack Brabham drove a rear engined Cooper at the Monaco Grand Prix. Jack won the championship in 1959 and 1960 for Cooper and since then every F1 winner has sat in front of the engine, not behind. The Cooper team sadly folded in the late 1960’s but the name is remembered today by the BMW Mini Cooper.

Colin Chapman.

Colin Chapman created his Lotus company in 1952 but had started out in racing by modifying an Austin 7. Later he created the Lotus 7 and made the car available to others in kit form. The car is still available today manufactured by the Caterham company and was the car driven by Patrick McGoohan in the TV series The Prisoner.

Chapman brought aircraft engineering and techniques into motorsport and created the first monocoque chassis with the Lotus 25. His design philosophy was for cars with lightweight construction rather than big heavy cars and engines.

Maurice Philippe.

In 1970 Colin Chapman worked with designer Maurice Philippe to produce the revolutionary Lotus 72. The car featured inboard brakes and moved the radiator from the front to the sides of the car where they remain today on modern F1 cars. This produced a wedge shaped car which went on to win championships for Jochen Rindt and Emerson Fittipaldi.

Lotus produced other groundbreaking cars such as the Lotus 79 which dominated the 1978 championship. The car was the first ground effect car which used aerodynamics to produce a low pressure area under the car which literally sucked the car down to the track. Skirts were added to seal in the low pressure area but ground effect cars were later banned.

Another Chapman innovation was the dual chassis car, which had a softly sprung chassis in which the driver sat and a second chassis to which the aerodynamics were attached giving the driver a much smoother ride. Sadly the car, the Lotus 88, was banned.

Gordon Murray.

Gordon Murray was the designer for Bernie Ecclestone’s Brabham team in the late 70s and to combat the Lotus 79 he came up with the concept of the BT46b Fan car. The car had a huge fan, ostensibly used for cooling but a side effect was that it sucked the air from the underside of the car creating a low pressure area and consequently sucked the car to the track surface. The car was only used in one race despite the FIA, the F1 governing body, ruling the car was legal. Bernie Ecclestone withdrew the car fearing that as he had just been made the leader of FOCA, the Formula One Constructors’ Association, disputes about the car could derail FOCA.

When John Barnard left McLaren, Murray was invited to join the team as technical director by Ron Dennis. Murray worked with the McLaren design team on the MP4/4 car which, coupled with the Honda engine, won 15 out of the 16 races in 1988.

Ayrton Senna in the Mp4/4 in 1988. Photo by the author

John Barnard.

Barnard first worked in F1 for the McLaren team in the early 1970s then moved to the USA to work in US racing. He was recalled back to McLaren when the team was taken over by Ron Dennis and there he produced the first carbon fibre chassis in F1 which was built for the team by Hercules Aerospace in the USA. Other teams followed and today all F1 cars are built using carbon fibre.

Barnard became the key designer of the period and in 1986 he moved to Ferrari. As he was in such great demand he was able to name his own price which included surprisingly a design office not in Marenello in Italy but in the UK. A revolutionary design by Barnard was the semi automatic gearbox where the driver changed gear from paddles on the steering wheel rather than having to reach down to a gear lever. Once again, the semi automatic gearbox and steering wheel paddles are still in use today on all the current F1 cars.

Frank Dernie

Frank worked for the Hesketh team and designed his first F1 car for them in 1976. Frank Williams later hired him to work with technical manager Patrick Head. Dernie was one of the first designers to use computers to aid design and he convinced Frank Williams to get a wind tunnel to aid their development programs. That made Williams the first team to have their own wind tunnel which is today a vital element of F1 design and development. Frank also created the active suspension concept in which a car’s suspension was controlled by a computer which set up the suspension in the optimum configuration for each corner on any given circuit. Active ride suspension was later banned for the 1994 season.

Adrian Newey.

Adrian Newey has been in the news lately as he has just signed to start work for the Aston Martin team from March 2025. Newey designed cars have won 25 world championships and Adrian designed cars for March, Williams and McLaren before joining the Red Bull team in 2006.

Newey has also seen the other side of Formula One. He designed the car which Ayrton Senna was driving when he was killed at the San Marino Grand Prix in Italy in 1994. It was a tragic day for all motorsport fans but it must have been even worse for Adrian.

Millionaire Laurence Stroll purchased Aston Martin in 1920 and he has spent a great deal of money in his quest to win at the sport. Numerous talented engineers and staff members have joined the team as well as double world champion driver Fernando Alonso. Aston Martin seemed to be looking good for a while in 2023 but this year seemed to be consigned to the middle of the grid. Adrian Newey has been hailed as one of greatest designers in F1 history. Will Newey and his design talent catapult Aston Martin towards the winners’ circle? Only time will tell.

All pictures courtesy Wikipedia creative commons except for the author’s shot of Ayrton Senna in the McLaren MP4/4.

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Remembering Stirling Moss

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I began to follow F1 way back in the late 1960’s. I’m not sure what first attracted me to the sport. I liked cars and back then I subscribed to a free magazine from Corgi, the makers of die cast model cars. They used to send me out a little monthly magazine which was nothing more than an advertising pamphlet and one of those thin missives was dedicated to model F1 cars. As well as reading about model cars I started to find out more about the actual cars and drivers of the time. It was probably 1969 when the cars first flirted with aerodynamics and later in 1970 the grids began to look very colourful as outside advertisers brought their brand colours to the sport.

Yardley sponsored the BRM team and John Player Tobacco sponsored the Lotus cars, even to the extent of naming the cars the John Player Specials. I also started to learn more about the history of the sport. Who was Juan Manuel Fangio, the guy who had won an incredible 5 world championships? Well he was an Argentinian driver who once drove for Mercedes in the 1950’s. His team mate back then was an Englishman named Stirling Moss. What had happened to him I wondered?

Moss was born in September 1928. His parents were amateur racing drivers. His father competed in the 1924 Indianapolis 500 and his mother competed in Hillclimb events. Even his sister Pat Moss became a rally driver so motorsport seems to have been in his blood.

His father got him his first car at the age of 9 and he drove it around the fields near his boyhood home, Long White Cloud House, on the banks of the river Thames.

Moss’s first racing car was a Cooper 500 which he bought using winnings from competing in horse racing events. He was good in the saddle as well as behind the wheel.

His first major international race victory came at the RAC Tourist Trophy in Northern Island driving a Jaguar XK120. That was the beginning of an incredible career in which Moss won 212 of the 529 races he entered including 16 Grands Prix, the most ever won by an English driver until that record was equalled by Nigel Mansell.

Moss came close to winning the world championship although he never quite managed it, becoming known as the greatest driver never to become world champion.

In 1953, Alfred Neubauer, the famous Mercedes team manager, was impressed by Moss. He made it clear he was willing to sign up the Englishman but wanted to see what he could achieve in more competitive machinery. He suggested Moss buy a Maserati 250F for 1954. Moss did so and was impressive; at the Italian Grand Prix that year Moss beat world champions Ascari and Fangio to the lead and only gave it up when his engine failed. Neubauer duly signed Moss for the 1955 season when he would be teamed with Fangio.

The mangled steering wheel from Moss’s crash.

Fangio and Moss worked well together and although it was Fangio who won another world championship Moss beat him at his home race, the British Grand Prix. The race was held that year at Aintree. The racetrack was in the grounds of the famous horse racing course and in fact used the same grandstands as the horse racing event. For the rest of his life, Moss questioned Fangio as to whether he, Moss, had actually won or had Fangio gifted him the win. Fangio always maintained that Moss was better than him on that day and won on his own merit.

In 1955 Fangio won his third championship and retired some years later having won 5, a feat unmatched until the modern era when Schumacher and later Lewis Hamilton upped the record to 7 titles.

By this time in 1955 Moss was a household name, probably as famous as Lewis Hamilton is today. In 1955 he also won the famous Italian race the Mille Miglia with Dennis Jenkinson as his navigator. Jenkinson was a journalist for Motor Sport magazine and famously signed himself off on his racing articles as DSJ. A few years later the classic race was discontinued after numerous fatal accidents during the race.

In 1962, Moss was competing in a Lotus at the Goodwood circuit. He came off the road and crashed.  He was trapped in his car for three quarters of an hour while various people tried to free him from his mangled car. He had sustained a shattered eye socket but more serious was a severe impact to the right side of his brain and this sent him into a coma. Moss was driving for Rob Walker at the time who was in France. Once he heard the news, Rob and his wife drove back to the UK, their radio tuned into the BBC Home Service which issued hourly updates on Stirling’s condition.

Moss had moments of lucidity but didn’t fully wake up for 38 days. In the excellent biography by Robert Edwards, the author describes Moss’s presence at the hospital in Colchester as ‘something of a sensation’. The switchboard was jammed with callers enquiring after Moss. Even Frank Sinatra called for information. The accident occurred on the 23rd April, 1962. Moss would not leave hospital until July that year.

Over a year later on Wednesday May 1st 1963 he drove a racing car again. It was a Lotus 19 sports car. He put in respectable lap times but the brain injury had resulted in subtle consequences. Moss reported that driving was for him now a disjointed, disconnected experience. Nothing flowed and now he had to think about what to do when before, all the aspects of driving fast would come naturally to him. He said this to a journalist about his decision to retire;

It was an easy decision to take at the time, because it was the only decision to take. I had to think. I had to give orders to myself -here I’ll brake, here I must change down and so on. And another thing: I used to be able to look at the rev counter without taking my eyes off the road -not only that but I could see the rev counter and a friend waving to me all at the same time. I’d lost that, that had gone.

He was by then divorced from his second wife and he was still a celebrity so he settled down at his impressive home at 46 Shepherd Street in London’s Mayfair. Moss had bought the vacant bombed out lot after the second world war and designed what was to him the perfect house. He retained an architect, a female architect to translate his ideas into reality. A spiral staircase takes one up to the first floor where there is a large sitting room and a smaller ‘snug’ and also an office. Upstairs again is a large kitchen and dining area and going up again there is the master bedroom where there are wardrobes with motorised shutters. He had remote controlled garage doors which were pretty amazing for 1962 when the house was built and also a descending table where Stirling could send a meal down from the kitchen to the dining room. He did love gadgets.

Just recently I saw an advert on the TV for a tap which could deliver hot, boiling or cold water at the touch of a button; Moss had one in 1962.

He married for the third and final time in 1980. He worked as a commentator on US TV and in public relations. He became involved in historic car racing but finally gave up competitive driving when he was 81.

He died in 2020 aged 90 after a long illness.

I’ve saved my favourite Moss story till the end. At a memorial service for Stirling this year, 2024, Jackie Stewart revealed that after winning his third world championship he was stopped by the police for speeding. Stewart was pretty famous himself by then. He had been called the world’s first superstar racing driver but as he wound down his window the police officer looked at him and said ‘who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?’

All the information and pictures in this post are from the excellent book by Robert Edwards, Stirling Moss; The Authorised Biography.

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F1 in 2024: A Personal View

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s a while since I’ve done an F1 post. If Formula One motor racing isn’t for you, apologies but please tune in again next week for something different.

I’ve followed F1 since the late sixties and in fact the 1970 season was the first one that I followed in full which means that this year is my 54th season as an F1 supporter.

Back in 1970 there were 13 races in the championship season but there were also a few non championship races; The Silverstone International, The Brands Hatch Race of Champions and the Oulton Park Gold Cup. This year there are a whopping 24 races on the calendar and no non championship races at all.

As I write this there have been 5 races so far and Max Verstappen has won 4 of them. In the Australian race, he had trouble with the brakes on his car which gave Spanish driver Carlos Sainz the chance to win a race for Ferrari. One thing I have noticed in recent years is the incredible reliability of the F1 cars today. In years gone by there was the always unexpected puncture or engine blow up to throw a spanner in the works when some exceptional driver or car combination threatened to dominate the proceedings but these days, the amazing engineering of the current cars seems to make that a very rare occurrence.

Let’s take a closer look at the drivers and my personal assessment of their chances this year.

Max Verstappen

You’d have to be a fool not to put a bet on Max winning the championship this year, once again. I personally don’t care for the guy but to be fair, he isn’t the cocky upstart he once was. He has mellowed a little and even seems to be showing signs of a little maturity. Is he the genius everyone says he is? Maybe but these days F1 is all about the car and without the car a good driver is nowhere. There was a time back in the 60s or even the 70s when a great driver could take a bad car and manhandle it to the front. There was even a time when an underpowered car could do the job, provided the right driver was in the cockpit. Think of Stirling Moss at Monaco in the Cooper Climax beating those powerful Ferraris in 1961 or Jackie Stewart in the much over hyped March in the Spanish Grand Prix of 1970. In 2024 if you have a dud car, forget it.

Image courtesy Wikipedia creative commons

Lewis Hamilton

He may be a 7 times world champion but these days Lewis Hamilton is looking a little sad. He was totally shafted at the 2021 championship finale when the race director decided to re start the race after a safety car incident when if he had followed the rules, the race should have finished under a safety car. Since then the once conquering Mercedes team have been looking rather like one of those teams who tend to populate the latter half of the grid.  Hamilton won 6 titles with Mercedes and one with McLaren. Towards the end of his time with McLaren the cars were not the class of the field but even so, in his last year with his old team he won four times whereas in 2024, just coming home in fourth position is just a daydream for Lewis. Is he good? Of course he is! You can’t win 7 championships by luck but sometimes I wonder if Lewis is as quite as good as I used to think he was.

Lando Norris

Lando came home second to Max in the Chinese Grand Prix. He seemed surprised to have done so thinking that the Ferrari team would have been faster. He comes across as an amiable sort of guy and I always listen to him in post race interviews because I know it won’t be the usual stuff about thanking his sponsors and the guys back at the factory. Will he ever win a race? Back in the 1970’s there was a driver called Chris Amon who was always a driver who looked good and was thought to be a future race winner and even a champion. The fact is, Amon never won a Grand Prix and never lived up to his full potential. I sometimes wonder if Lando Norris is the Chris Amon of the 21st century.

(Update 05/05/24: Lando Norris won the Miami Grand Prix which kind of makes me wonder whether I know as much about F1 as I thought I did!)

Sergio Perez

Perez has had quite a career in F1. He started out his career at Sauber and then moved to McLaren where he wasn’t popular with team mate Jensen Button. After only a year there he moved to Force India and when it looked like his F1 career was over he became a last minute team mate to Max at Red Bull. Despite having the same car as Max, he hasn’t had the same runaway dominance that Max seems to have. Maybe as many have suggested, his car isn’t quite the car that Max has, or is it just that Max is such a better driver. I have never driven an F1 car but having spent many years as a driver, I can tell you that no two Ford Transit vans are the same, just as no two Mercedes Sprinter vans are ever the same. If there is a better car you can be certain that Max will get that car just as, back in the 1970’s, the very best Ford DFV was allocated to Ford’s top man, Jackie Stewart.

Will Sergio be with Red Bull for 2025? Some commentators think he is bound to be dumped but then he is currently second in the championship which is exactly where the Red Bull team want him to be.

Charles LeClerc

I do rather like Charles and he is another guy I don’t mind listening to in the post race interviews. If he has driven a bad race, he will always admit it and when things don’t go according to plan, he seems ready to get down and work out the problems with his engineers. He has had 5 wins so far and has signed a long term contract with Ferrari so he is due to be teamed with new signing Lewis Hamilton in 2025.

Is he a future world champion? I’d have to say no. I’d put him on a par with Gerhard Berger, one of my favourite drivers, a multiple grand prix winner but not a champion.

Fernando Alonso. Image courtesy Wikipedia.

Fernando Alonso

Alonso is a double world champion and might even have won more championships had he not been so quick to move teams as well as moving at the wrong time. At McLaren he fell out with newcomer Lewis Hamilton. He had a stint at Ferrari which didn’t produce the expected results and his move back to McLaren was a disaster as their Honda engine was late in entering the new hybrid era of F1. That engine was finally sorted and currently powers the Red Bull cars but Fernando was in the right place at the wrong time. He is currently the oldest driver on the grid but his competitive spirit shows no sign of being diminished by age.

Alex Albon

Alex is currently my favourite driver. He pushes the uncompetitive Williams from the back of the grid up to the middle and sometimes even further. He comes over as a pleasant amiable sort of guy and would be a good fit next year at either Mercedes or perhaps even back at Red Bull, from where he was dropped a few years ago. There might be other teams looking to sign him too but at the moment, the only teams capable of providing a driver with a winning racing car are possibly Red Bull (if they give Perez the chop) and Ferrari with perhaps McLaren and maybe Aston Martin in with a chance of at least a top 5 finish.

Down at the other end of the grid there are a number of drivers that I tend to look at and wonder, why are you here? Daniel Ricciardo is surely at the end of his career as a so-so F1 pilot and as for Lance Stroll, if his dad wasn’t the millionaire owner of Aston Martin, would he even have a drive? Valteri Bottas has hardly shone since leaving Mercedes but perhaps that just reflects the state of the sport; if a driver is not in a top car, he cannot make his contribution and will forever see himself in the results as p13, p14 or lower.

Lewis Hamilton’s announcement of a move to Ferrari has set off F1’s ‘silly season’. The silly season is a host of rumours and unsubstantiated reports about who will move where. A very big rumour lately concerns not a star driver but Adrian Newey, the star designer of the Red Bull team. Adrian has designed cars for various teams and has won, as a designer, 25 World Driver and Constructors’ championships. The rumours said he was about to leave Red Bull and that was actually confirmed this week. Newey is leaving Red Bull after 20 years with the team. Will he sign for Ferrari or will he pocket the huge fee currently on the table from Aston Martin? Adrian is 65 so it could be he is just planning on retiring? What will he do? Only time will tell.

For me, as long as these various moves mean that someone new and different will be winning races instead of Max all the time, then that sounds good to me.

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The Triumph and Tragedy of F1 Racing

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This weekend the new 2022 Grand Prix season kicks off in Bahrain. I’ve been reading all about the testing sessions in the various F1 blogs I follow as well as catching up with some of the testing action on YouTube. Will Hamilton and Verstappen commence battle again? Will Ferrari be contenders for the win? How will George Russell get on at Mercedes? All these questions will soon be answered. Having got myself fully into Formula One mode it was time to take a look back at some bygone racing to get myself fully hyped up and ready for Sunday’s Grand Prix

A few years ago I wrote a post about the Weekend of a Champion. It was an old VHS video I had unearthed about the F1 weekend of racing driver Jackie Stewart at the Monaco Grand Prix in 1971. After watching the video I went onto the internet to do a little research and found that director Roman Polanski had recently remastered the film onto DVD. I went to my other old internet friend, eBay, and quickly got myself a cheap second-hand copy.

I put that DVD onto my shelf and pretty much forgot about it until the other day. I had been doing some work, writing and editing, and it was time to settle down and relax with some TV. As usual, there was nothing much on terrestrial TV to catch my eye so it seemed to me to be a good time to slap in that unwatched DVD and give it a go.

I do love watching old F1 films and documentaries. In the 1970’s I knew every driver and every car. Back in those days drivers chose a distinctive design for their helmets and stuck to it. Today in F1, drivers have a new helmet design and a new helmet for almost every race so fans can buy, if they so wish, a replica of their hero’s British Grand Prix helmet 2021, or Italian Grand Prix helmet 2020. More memorabilia for us fans and more income for the modern driver of course.

Jackie Stewart

Jackie Stewart

The Weekend of a Champion is a documentary that focuses closely on Jackie; we don’t see the work the mechanics have to do or the decisions made by the team manager but we do see Jackie setting up his car and deliberating about gear ratios and tyres and so on. A nice moment for him must have been strolling down into the circuit and having all the fans call ‘Jackie’ as he walked down towards his pit. Afterwards Jackie walked round to the first corner and watching the F3 cars, pointed out to Roman who was taking the corner properly and who wasn’t.

One particular scene stood out for me. Shot in Jackie’s hotel room, he is on the balcony talking to his wife Helen and director Polanksi. As they chat, the camera comes back into the room and reveals Nina Rindt, the widow of the 1970 world champion Jochen Rindt, killed at Monza in practice for the Italian Grand Prix. She looks sad and ill at ease and later Helen explains that in the past she and Nina, Jackie and Jochen spent time together travelling the world as they competed in motor races. She had come to Monaco at Helen’s invitation, to spend time together and perhaps remember the happy times of the past. The Formula One of the 1970’s was no less glamorous than that of today, although perhaps tinged with a sadness for the many who lost their lives back then.

Later Jackie is seen engaging in some 70’s style PR with fans who have won a competition to attend the event, then in the evening he and Helen are at a gala dinner evening.

Jackie drove for the Tyrell Team owned and managed by the affable Ken Tyrell. Ken worked with the French car company Matra and they produced a car for Ken in 1969 which, coupled with the Ford DFV engine, won the world championship for Jackie that year. For the 1970 season Matra wanted to run the car with their own engine so Ken and Jackie, fully committed to the Ford engine, parted company with the French car manufacturer. In 1970 they used a car produced by the then new March team but after disappointing results, Ken decided to build his own car for Jackie and mid-season the Tyrell 001 made its appearance.

Matra had always asked Ken to run a French driver in the second car and perhaps because of the sponsorship of French oil company Elf, they continued to do so. Johnny Servoz-Gavin was Jackie’s French team mate but when he retired from racing after an eye injury Ken recruited François Cevert.

Francois Cevert

Cevert was a good looking Frenchman who was eager to learn from his senior team mate Jackie Stewart. The film shows the two working closely together talking about the lines that they use around particular corners with Jackie advising François which gears to use around the Monaco street circuit.

Seen fleetingly in the film are the other star drivers from 1971, drivers who were once familiar figures to 1970’s race fans like me: Graham Hill, Ronnie Peterson, Emerson Fittipaldi, Pedro Rodriguez and Jo Siffert. Siffert and Rodriguez were both killed in racing accidents. Graham Hill later started his own racing team and retired from driving but was killed in a light aircraft crash when returning home from abroad. Fittipaldi went on to win two world championships, retire then make a comeback in the USA racing Indycars.

Ronnie Peterson was a driver who I always thought would become one of the F1 greats. He won 10 Grands Prix in his career and was the world championship runner up twice. He was known as the Superswede. After some bad career choices he returned to the Lotus team partnering Mario Andretti. In the 1978 Italian Grand Prix at Monza, Ronnie was involved in a first lap crash in which he was trapped in his car when it caught fire. Other drivers involved in the incident helped pull Ronnie from his burning car and his only injuries seemed to be just broken and fractured legs.

Graham Hill

Graham Hill

There was no regular TV coverage in the UK at the time and I used to tape record a radio broadcast about the race. I was shocked to hear about Ronnie but at least I went to bed that night knowing that he was ok. However, Ronnie’s broken bones produced a fat embolism and during the night his condition worsened. He died the next morning. His wife Barbro, never got over his death and she took her own life some years later.

Jackie Stewart won the 1971 Monaco Grand Prix and the World Championship that year but decided to retire at the end of 1973. He had a wife and family so I suppose his personal safety must have been high on his list of priorities. Jackie even had his personal doctor present at all his races, as immediate medical care in the aftermath of a crash was a big issue back then. He was close to François Cevert and glad that he would take his place as Ken’s lead driver. The US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen would have been Stewart’s 100th race. He must have been feeling confident. He had already tied up the ’73 world championship, he had a great car and was ready to retire. In the practice session Cevert had a bad crash. By all accounts he hit a kerb on the left side of the track which caused him to swerve over to the right where he bounced off the barrier and back into the barrier on the other side. Photographs show the car upside down on the barrier and poor François was killed instantly. The Tyrell team withdrew from the event and Jackie never raced again.

Towards the end of the DVD Jackie and Roman Polanski are filmed together for a present-day epilogue. They talk about the events of the 1971 race and it is clear that the death of Cevert still weighs heavily on the former champion’s shoulders.

Once, a few years ago, Liz and I were holidaying in the Loire and as usual were rummaging about at a vide grenier, a French car boot sale. I don’t usually look at the book stalls there as my French reading is even worse than my French speaking but I spotted a book with a familiar face on the cover. Liz asked who it was and I replied that it was François Cevert. Straight away the book stall owner mentioned that Cevert was a local man and was still popular in the region. Others heard us talking and they too came forward with their Cevert stories. After his death in the USA his body was returned to France and he was laid to rest in the village of Vaudelnay, Maine-et-Loire.

The 1970’s was a sad time for motorsport but today’s hi-tech F1 is a much safer environment despite being infinitely faster. Hopefully Lewis Hamilton and his fellow drivers will never have to deal with the death of a racing colleague unlike their counterparts in the 1970’s.

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So Who is the Greatest F1 Driver Ever?

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As I write this Lewis Hamilton is the Formula One driver with more wins to his name than any other driver. More F1 wins that is; how he stands on actual wins in any form of racing I don’t know but back in the 1960’s and 70’s, Formula One drivers competed in a number of other non F1 races such as Formula Two or Three, Sports Cars, Saloon Cars, Can Am racing and all sorts. Now the F1 driver has an unprecedented tally of over 20 races in a season; making one every other weekend, they don’t have much time for other racing. Either way 103 F1 wins is a pretty impressive total and everything Hamilton wins now is a new record because the previous winner of the most Grands Prix, Schumacher won only 91. Only 91? Well 91 is pretty good too. The previous record holder before Michael was Alain Prost and his total was 51.

Fangio (Picture courtesy Wikipedia)

Of course, can we really understand a driver’s greatness just from his winning record? F1 racing, like all forms of motorsport is really about winning. In every Grand Prix TV interview, drivers will talk about aiming for a podium, looking to score points but really none of that matters, except the maximum points and the top step of the podium,  you know, the one where the winner stands. Hamilton, at the time of writing this has stood there 94 times which is a pretty hefty claim in the all time greatest driver stakes.

So who are the other contenders for the title Greatest Driver Ever?

Juan Manuel Fangio

Alberto Ascari was Formula One’s first ever World Champion but then came Fangio, winning an incredible 5 championships in the 1950’s, a record that stood for 46 years until overtaken by Schumacher in the 1990’s. Like Hamilton, Fangio drove for Mercedes as well as Ferrari and Alfa Romeo. Fangio won 24 F1 races out of the 52 he entered, an amazing percentage of 46.15%, the best of any F1 driver.

Jim Clark

Clark equalled Fangio’s record of Grand Prix wins and pushed the record up to 26 before he was killed in an F2 event at Hockenheim in Germany. He won only 2 world championships and drove exclusively for Colin Chapman’s Lotus team.

Jackie StewartJackie Stewart

Stewart won his first F1 race for BRM in the 1960’s and then moved to Ken Tyrell’s team in 1968. Stewart was a close friend of Clark’s and was devastated when his fellow Scot was killed. Stewart took the world championship in 1969, 1971 and 1973. He was due to compete in his 100th Grand Prix when team mate François Cevert was killed in practice for the US Grand Prix. Stewart withdrew from the race. Not only was Stewart fast, he was intelligent as a driver and had a great capacity for not only understanding his car but explaining the issues to his engineers. In 1988, he test drove the Lotus Honda of Nelson Piquet who was being soundly beaten by McLaren despite using the same world beating Honda engine. Stewart correctly divined the issues with the car after only one test drive. He took the record to 27 wins before retiring. Today Stewart is one of the elder statesmen of the sport but from what I have read on social media, he is not universally popular. He mentioned recently that neither Hamilton or Vettel are on his personal list of great drivers.

Ayrton Senna

Senna is a controversial driver in many ways. He was killed in 1994 at Imola during Formula One’s black weekend where he and fellow driver Roland Ratzenberger both lost their lives. Senna was dedicated to his profession, completely focussed on taking pole position in qualifying and from there winning races. He had a great natural talent but his ruthless attitude and determination made him few friends. I remember once being at Silverstone and heard him soundly booed although today he is revered as a legend of the sport. Senna won three championships and took the record for wins and pole positions to new heights.

Ayrton Senna

Alain Prost

Prost was known as the Professor, a nickname which reflected his intelligence and race craft as well as his undeniable talent. He and Senna enjoyed a fierce rivalry which ended with Prost stepping down from the race winning Williams team rather than accept Senna as a team mate and repeat their toxic relationship from their days at McLaren. Prost won 51 races and four world championships.

Prost

Sebastian Vettel

Vettel won four world championships but later moved to Ferrari where things have not gone quite so well for him. He has been involved in various controversies over the years. He overtook Red Bull team mate Mark Webber despite a radio message asking the drivers to hold their status as first and second and he was once involved in a wheel banging incident with Lewis Hamilton when he perceived Hamilton had unexpectedly brake tested him. He left Ferrari at the end of 2020 for the new Aston Martin team and has just (July 2022) announced his retirement.

Michael Schumacher 

Schumacher is another controversial driver. A hard racer, he won his first championship by pushing Damon Hill off the track in Australia. He moved to Ferrari taking with him the key technical staff from his previous team Benetton and went on to retire after collecting 7 world championships and 91 Grand Prix wins.

Lewis Hamilton 

Hamilton’s victory in the 2020 Turkish Grand Prix confirms his win of the 2020 championship and came with his 94th win. By 2022 he had upped it to a massive 103 wins. That Turkish race was actually an epic win where he started down the grid due to a poor qualifying performance but kept things together, gradually moving through the field to the top spot.

https://youtu.be/bg3v8VKEtBc

Hamilton has of course had the best car just like all the other great drivers. F1 is a team sport and the days when a driver could manhandle a bad car to the front of the pack, just with driver skills alone are long gone. Another advantage Hamilton has had is coming straight into F1 driving for the top team which at the time was McLaren. There were no up and coming years for Lewis, no trying hard to show off his talent in a poor back of the grid team.

McLaren’s days at the top have waned in recent years but perhaps Hamilton saw McLaren’s fall from the top coming, which may explain why he moved to Mercedes. Mercedes have brought on board other great talents in both the managerial and engineering fields and today, Mercedes are the undisputed kings of F1. I think Hamilton has a strong claim to be the number one of all time and it’s sad that some people still refuse to admit as such.

Still, any judgement of drivers across the many decades of the sport is bound to include personal tastes. Many would include Gilles Villeneuve in the hallowed halls of the greatest ever drivers. For me he was a good driver, nothing more. Conversely, I always thought Ronnie Peterson was one of the future greats and would go on to multiple championships; sadly, he never did and was killed in 1978 but I have always thought of him as high on the list of great drivers. Nigel Mansell with his one and only championship in 1992 was another great driver. His was not a natural talent. I’ve always thought that like Graham Hill, he was a man who had to work hard for his victories. It was not for nothing the Italian Tifosi named him ‘Il Leone’, the lion. Spare a thought too for Stirling Moss, the greatest driver never to win a world championship. His record of 16 victories stood for a long time as the best of any British driver.

Hats off to Lewis Hamilton then. 103 wins and will take some beating.

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More Letters to Younger Selves

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Wait just a minute! Letters to Younger Selves? Haven’t we had this post already I can hear you thinking? In fact not just once; there was Letters to My Younger Self and then we had A Video to My Younger Self? Hasn’t this guy got any new ideas? OK, I know where you’re coming from but bear with me for a short while. I did do a post a while back which was about me writing a letter to my younger self. Then the other week I told you about how I put together a video version for my YouTube channel. This week I want to tell you about what happened when I actually uploaded the video.

Now I did say the original letters post wasn’t my own idea. I got it from one of those blog writing prompts that can easily be found in either Google or your search engine of choice. After uploading my video I always do a search for it and if it comes up near the top of the search then I’ve feel I done a pretty good job in terms of tags and meta data (all that technical stuff) and choosing a good post title. A search for A letter to My Younger Self gave up some surprising results, in fact it seemed to me that everyone and his dog had been making a short video on this same subject. Even more surprising was that a lot of these short videos were by Formula One drivers. I’m guessing that at some time there was some kind of trend for this subject, perhaps a promotion around the hashtag #DearMe but when it comes down to it, I might as well admit, I don’t know.

Anway, I thought it might be interesting to showcase a few of the videos I came across so let’s start with Fernando Alonso, frustrated former Ferrari driver who jumped ship thinking Honda were going to create a world beating engine for his new Mclaren team, only they didn’t. Hard luck Fernando.

(I should point out here that F1 being the multi million dollar global industry it is, they wouldn’t for a minute let these videos play on my cheap nasty amateur blog post. Press play then you have to click the button that says ‘Play on YouTube’. Annoying I know but hey, that’s big business for you.)

Many people think that Fernando is one of, if not the greatest driver of all time. Those people are of course completely wrong and this then is the perfect time to introduce someone who actually is the greatest driver ever. Jackie Stewart, winner of 27 Grands Prix from 99 starts, three World Championships and now one of the Formula One world’s elder statesmen.

South African Jody Scheckter was once the enfant terrible of Formula One, especially when he spun and caused a huge pile up at the beginning of the British Grand Prix back in 1973. A lot of people weren’t happy but Scheckter went on to drive for Ferrari and win a World Championship in 1979.

Emerson Fittipaldi was one of my favourite drivers of the 1970’s. He took over from the late Jochen Rindt at Lotus and won three world Championships before electing to drive for his brother’s new F1 team. Things didn’t work out so well for the Fittipaldi brothers and Emerson retired for a while but then made a comeback in American Indycars winning the Indycar title in 1989.

Someone who did what Emerson did, only in reverse, was Mario Andretti. He was a champion in the US and had a few one off drives for Colin Chapman, head of he Lotus team who tried numerous times to lure Andretti over to F1. Andretti finally dipped his toe into F1 and won the world title for Lotus in 1978. He was the last American to date to win an F1 race. He won numerous races in all types of racing disciplines in the USA including 4 Indycar championships and numerous other races and awards. He is probably as synonymous with motor sport in the USA as Stirling Moss was in the UK.

I think that’s probably enough from the F1 world so I’ll finish with some other famous people. The first non F1 person I came across was Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the assassinated president. It’s pretty brief and the good news is that all these next videos can be played within this post!

Still with the Presidential theme here’s something from former first lady Michelle Obama.

Art Garfunkel, former singing partner of Paul Simon did one too . .

And finally, here’s one which isn’t by a celebrity. I came across this one after hours of trolling through Google and YouTube. Many videos I found were of young people talking to their even younger selves so really they didn’t have much to say. I think that the whole theme is better suited to someone older, someone in their later years looking back to their youth. Anyway, here’s a pretty inspiring video.

Finally it’s time to plug my own video once again. Here’s a slightly edited version with a few subtle sound effects added . .

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Desperately Seeking the Monaco Grand Prix

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I started off on this lockdown waking up at about 8 ish and now after 5 or 6 weeks of lockdown I’m waking up at 10, if I’m lucky. Of course I’m staying up much later than usual too, sometimes till 3 in the morning watching TV or listening to music on my new favourite app, Spotify.

One app I’ve found really annoying lately though is my calendar. Earlier in the year I downloaded the schedule for this year’s Formula One season to both my Outlook and Google calendars so that every other weekend my phone warbles away telling me that it’s time for qualifying or practice or for the actual race itself.

Last weekend should have been the weekend of the Monaco Grand Prix. It didn’t take place because of course the 2020 season has yet to start, affected like everything else by the Corona Virus pandemic. Pity, because I do love the Monte Carlo event even though it is essentially a race won during qualifying. It is so difficult to overtake around the narrow streets of this small but exclusive principality that make up the race track that pole position is essential.

The first Monaco race I ever watched was the 1970 event. Jack Brabham, the 3 times world champion and the only person ever to win a world championship in a car of his own manufacture, very nearly won the race. On one of the very last corners he made a mistake and slid into the barriers. Jochen Rindt driving an ancient Lotus 49 slipped past into the lead and won the race. Jochen didn’t even get the chequered flag because the race organisers were looking out for Brabham.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find a video clip on YouTube with a British commentary to show you. There are some available but none that show Jack sliding into the barriers. In those days the UK commentator wasn’t Murray Walker but Raymond Baxter who is perhaps more well known for presenting Tomorrow’s World on the BBC rather than F1. It would be so nice to hear Murray commentating once again but the clip below does show Jack miscalculating that last corner and the French commentator sounds suitably excited.

Later in the season Lotus sorted the game changing Lotus 72 and Rindt went on to amass an unbeatable points tally taking him to a championship he would tragically never live to savour. Rindt was killed in a practice accident at Monza, the home of the Italian Grand Prix.

Getting back to 2020 and even though there has been no actual racing there has been plenty of Formula 1 news. Sebastian Vettel has not had his contract renewed at Ferrari for next year and Ferrari have quickly signed up Carlos Sainz to partner Charles LeClerc. Daniel Ricciardo, once thought of as a contender for the Ferrari seat has announced he is moving to McLaren for 2021 so although not much is happening on the racetrack there has been plenty of F1 news.

Alonso is rumoured to be going to Renault for 2021 so perhaps his F1 career is not over after all. What then will Vettel do? Retire? Take a year off? Lewis Hamilton’s team mate Valtery Bottas is also out of contract at the end of this season so theoretically Mercedes could snap up Vettel and create a super team, Hamilton and Vettel, that could take on all comers. Of course 7 time world champion Hamilton might not be happy about that. He must be anxious to enter the record books as the winner of 8 titles so Vettel might have to sit out the 2021 season.

Alain Prost famously took a year off when he was sacked by Ferrari in 1991. They weren’t too keen about him being uncomplimentary about their car to the press so Ferrari being Ferrari he was quickly shown the door.

During his year off Prost must gave watched enviously as Nigel Mansell romped to the championship in his Williams and so, suitably impressed, Prost decided to begin negotiations to get himself behind the wheel of one of Frank Williams’ cars. Nigel Mansell wasn’t too impressed by this news at all so he promptly walked away and signed up for a season driving Indycars in the USA leaving Prost to head up the Williams team and win another championship.

A year later Frank decided to sign up Ayrton Senna. Then it was Prost’s turn to be unimpressed and he left Williams and retired from racing.

The other night on ITV2 there was a showing of the Senna movie which brought back all the excitement and rivalries of the late 80s F1 world. There was Ayrton looking very clean cut with a new short haircut signing up for McLaren. Ron Dennis the team boss looked happy and Alain Prost was all smiles too. By the end of the season those smiles were wearing a bit thin and a year later it was outright war between the two McLaren drivers.

The film Senna is interesting in a lot of ways. All the footage was taken from the official F1 TV feed and it is clear how Prost lost faith with McLaren and boss Ron Dennis and after two years he was off to Ferrari. When the two drivers came together in Suzuka for the Japanese Grand Prix and Senna was disqualified, Ron Dennis put in a protest even though the result had given the championship to his other driver, Prost.

Of course the film takes Senna’s point of view and Prost is portrayed as the bad guy. Even the famous interview between Jackie Stewart and Senna is only shown in part although Ayrton is clearly not amused by Jackie’s questions. A year later after winning his third title Senna would admit to purposely pushing Prost off the track as he was fuming about his pole position spot being moved to the dirty side of the track. That may not have been right but neither was purposely crashing into Alain Prost. Senna went way down in my estimation that day and as much as I admire Senna, I’ve never really subscribed to the legend that he has become in the last few years. I remember being at Silverstone in the early 1990’s and being surprised to hear him soundly booed by the fans as he came past.

Senna was killed at the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994 in an accident at the Tamburello corner. His car skated off the circuit into the barriers and although the impact was high it was survivable. Both Berger and Piquet had survived bad accidents at that same corner in the preceding years and even now I remember watching Ayrton’s crash in disbelief. I was certain that he would be OK but sadly that wasn’t the case. In a freak twist of fate the suspension arm of the car flipped back, pierced Aryton’s helmet and dealt him a mortal blow.

When Jack Brabham almost won at Monaco in 1970, future McLaren boss Ron Dennis was Jack’s chief mechanic, which is a nice link to bring us back to the Monaco Grand Prix. The first race at Monaco was in 1929 and was won by the famous British driver who mysteriously used the pseudonym ‘Williams’. The race gradually became more and more important and became a round of the European Championship in 1936. The first post war event was held in 1948 and in 1950 the race became part of the new World Championship and was won by the great Juan Manuel Fangio.

Stirling Moss won in 1956, 1960 and 1961 and another famous winner at Monaco was Graham Hill who won the event 5 times, a record until Senna surpassed it in 1993. Here is Graham tackling the tight corners of the circuit.

Now compare that to Lewis Hamilton in 2019. Much faster but then again, Lewis was driving a semi automatic Mercedes and didn’t have to do all those manual gear changes that Hill had to deal with. (The following two clips will take you to YouTube to view.)

You might think that with limited overtaking the Monaco Grand Prix can be boring. Take a look at this clip from the 1982 event.

In a lot of ways it’s amazing that the Monaco race has continued up to the present. The F1 cars of today are faster than ever before and they hurtle round these tight and twisty public roads at incredible speeds. Somehow the track seems even narrower or is it just that these modern cars are wider, their wings and fins stretching out to take advantage of every available bit of the slipstream.

The F1 teams return because the glamour of Monte Carlo; the yachts, the casinos, and the famous movie stars and celebrities all make this event the perfect opportunity for the sponsors to sell their wares and link their brand to glitz, glamour and hi technology.

I’m looking forward to the 2021 race already.

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F1 2019 and the Sky TV Era

Posted on by Steve Higgins

The start of a new formula one racing season is always an exciting time. Drivers have settled into their teams, the testing of the new cars is over, the journalists are busy making their predictions and we, the fans and viewers, can finally settle down to watch the first race.

Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash

Great, but this year is the start of a new era in television. Live F1 has vanished from terrestrial TV and if you want to see the races and their qualifying sessions live you must now cough up £10 per month to subscribe to F1 on Sky and that’s on top of the charge for the basic Sky TV service. Just to rub that fact in, the very first advertisement shown on the first ad break on the qually show on terrestrial TV’s Channel 4 was an ad for Sky TV’s F1 coverage!

Today we are in a sort of elitist TV age where those willing to spend a great deal of money can see all the latest and trendiest TV shows whilst the rest of us have to make do with whatever the BBC, ITV, Channel Four and all the other Freeview channels can offer.

I have heard that Game if Thrones is something pretty exciting, in fact the other day one of my work colleagues told me she was ‘obsessed’ by the show. As far as I know it’s some kind of sci fi fantasy show with a liberal handful of sex thrown in but sadly, as it’s not available on terrestrial TV, I am not one of the lucky few who can watch it.

In a few years’ time we might get a rerun on the BBC but by then all the fuss and excitement will be over and some new show will be in the limelight. I can just imagine perhaps turning to that same work colleague and saying something about a Game of Thrones and her replying, ‘Game of what?’

Ah, the fickle nature of TV. Anyway, back to the F1 season and you might perhaps be thinking if this guy is so keen on F1 why not cough up the dough and subscribe to Sky? Subscribe? Pay for TV that traditionally has been free? My generation can of course remember the days of black and white TV, the days of only two or even one channel. TV to us is like free school milk, the NHS, the number 17 bus. TV is something one takes for granted and as for actually paying for it, surely that’s undemocratic, unBritish and simply unacceptable!

So what is happening then in the world of F1? Are Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton still at the top? Are Ferrari still challenging? Of course they are. The big story for me was the ninth place qualifying spot of Lando Norris in the McLaren. McLaren were once one of the giants of the sport but in the last few years they have slid down towards the back of the grid. Their relationship with Honda fizzled out but when they strapped a Renault engine to the back of their car they still found themselves under performing and that excuse of blaming the Honda engine was no longer acceptable. Either way, it was enough for star driver Fernando Alonso to throw in the towel and say ‘I’m off!’

Hopefully McLaren have started down the road which may one day return them to the winners circle. Another once great team, Williams are not looking good either. Paddy Lowe who contributed so much to the success at Mercedes has not been able to work the same technical magic at Williams and they have found fundamental issues with their new car, so much so that Paddy has had to take a break from the team for ‘personal reasons’.

Only Ferrari seem to have been able to keep their team viable across the changing vista of Formula one. Lotus, Brabham and many others have come and gone. Will Williams and McLaren be able to carry on? Only time will tell. Neither team finished in the points in Australia but at least the performance of McLaren was encouraging. Williams though were not looking good. During the interviews from the paddock the shouts of the fans praising F1 returnee Robert Kubica were quite evident. Kubica’s story is one of those great F1 success stories. Kubica, a rising star and Grand Prix winner had turned to rallying prior to the beginning of the 2011 season but was involved in a terrible crash in which his right arm was partially severed. Surgeons were able to sew the arm back on but the terrible injuries left Robert with reduced mobility in his hand. Now, many years later, Kubica is back on the F1 grid and with a few adjustments to his Williams steering wheel, he is back racing once again. Sadly, he is driving a car not worthy of his talents but with his feedback and the talents of the Williams engineers, maybe things can be turned around. Everyone loves a comeback story.

Valtteri Bottas took Mercedes back to the winners’ circle once again and brought home an extra point for fastest lap. That single point incidentally is something new for 2019, a point for the fastest lap. So, we might find that no longer will drivers decide to rest their engines on the final laps, in fact they will be putting the hammer down in an effort to bag that one extra point for fastest lap.

Getting back to Valtteri, the Finnish driver didn’t have such a good season last year so this win was exactly what he needed. The Ferrari’s took fourth spot for Sebastian Vettel and he didn’t look too happy about it but things could have been a lot worse.

The Red Bull team came home in third place with a great drive from Verstappen in their new Honda powered car. It looks as though Honda might be finally getting things together.

Yes, I may moan about Formula One and pay per view TV but I did manage to get to the 2pm Channel Four broadcast time without finding out who the winner was. I had steered clear of the Internet, no mean feat for cyber geek like me. I didn’t even look at my emails because that could have given rise to the possibility of seeing an e-mail about the event. I subscribe to a number of F1 web sites and their e-mail newsletters always have the winner’s name in the subject so e-mails and Internet were a no-no. TV news? No, kept well away from that too.

Yes, I managed to stay well away from the media and as a result the race was almost as enjoyable as watching it live.

Well, almost but not quite.

Floating in Space is a novel by author Steve Higgins set in Manchester, 1977. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information.