Tag Archives: motor racing

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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Graham and Damon: An F1 Story

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I haven’t done an F1 post for a while so I reckon it’s time for a new one. F1 in 2023 seems to promise much but so far has failed to deliver. Red Bull seem to be winning everything which is great for them but makes things a bit boring for the average F1 fan. It’s in times like these that I tend to look back to the past for a little F1 drama.

Damon Hill is not exactly my favourite racing driver. He pops up these days as a pundit on Sky TV’s F1 coverage and I’m sorry to say that I tend to fast forward past him until I find someone a little more interesting to listen to. Back in the day when he beat Michael Schumacher to the F1 world title in 1996 I cheered for him but even then, that was mostly a reaction to the tactics of the highly ruthless Michael Schumacher. Anyway, when Liz handed me a copy of Damon’s autobiography, I thought it might be worth scanning through.

Hill starts his story not with himself but with his celebrated father Graham Hill. Hill was a great driver, a double world champion but also one of the great, if not the greatest, characters in the sport. What F1 fan would not instantly recognise the prominently chinned and moustached Graham Hill with his swept back hair and his witty and straight to the point remarks?

Graham didn’t even pass his driving test until he was 24 yet went on to win two world championships. He began by seeing an advertisement offering some laps of Brands Hatch in a racing car for five shillings. He went along, paid his money and subsequently was hooked on motor sport. He got himself a job working as a mechanic for Colin Chapman’s Lotus team and soon talked his way into actually driving one of Colin’s cars.

In the 1960’s, Colin’s star driver was Jim Clark, one of motorsport’s absolute greats. Jim was universally respected as being the star driver of the day and won the world championship for Lotus in 1963. In that year Jim won seven of the year’s races (there were only 10) a record that stood until 1984 when Alain Prost won seven races for McLaren.

Graham Hill had left Lotus for the BRM team and won his first world championship in 1962. In 1967 Hill returned to partner Clark in Colin Chapman’s new Lotus 49 powered by the new Ford Cosworth DFV engine.

In 1968 Clark was entered in a Formula 2 race for Lotus at Hockenheim in Germany. In those days, F1 drivers regularly competed in other events apart from F1 including sports car racing, saloon cars and of course, Formula 2. During the race, Clark’s Lotus veered off the track into trees and Jim suffered a broken neck and was killed. A deflating rear tyre was thought to be the cause of the crash but the racing community was devastated. Clark was a quiet unassuming Scotsman, born into a farming family but is still remembered today as one of the greats of all time.

The Lotus team looked then to Graham Hill to lead them forward into the next round of F1 races and despite initial difficulties with the car and engine, Graham was able to win his second championship title. In 1969 he suffered a terrible crash in the USA when, after getting out to push his car after a spin, he jumped back into the cockpit but was unable to fasten his safety belts. He crashed and was thrown from the car breaking both legs. He later drove for Brabham and finally started his own F1 team with sponsorship from Embassy cigarettes. He was killed in a plane crash in 1975 along with key personnel from his team.

In Damon’s book, he gives an interesting insight into the events above, telling them from a son’s point of view. He knew many of the great drivers and team bosses of the time, meeting them as a child and he tells of Graham’s life from a family perspective; Dad being away from home a lot and always being so busy. He was the first to hear of his father’s death, seeing TV reports of a light aircraft crash just when the family was expecting him home. Graham was an accomplished pilot and owned his own Piper Aztec light aircraft. He had flown back from testing his new car in France but when he arrived back at Elstree, the weather was cold and foggy and he crashed on his final approach killing all on board. Not only was Damon distressed about the loss of his father but he resented the press who reported on not only the plane crash but also the subsequent funeral.

Graham HillAfter Graham’s death it was found that his pilot’s license had expired and this and some other things invalidated his insurance which meant that the other families who had lost loved ones in the crash were forced to sue Graham’s estate for compensation. This meant the Hills had to sell their home and move to a smaller house. These things seem to have weighed on young Damon’s mind for a long time, even into his own days as a racing driver.

Damon initially took up motorcycle racing and worked in a variety of jobs to fund this, including being a motorcycle courier. Later his mother arranged for him to take a course at a car racing school thinking cars would be safer than motorbikes and so Damon began his career in car racing. In his book he describes the difficulties of getting drives and wrestling with the issues of bringing money to the table through sponsorship.

He managed to get drives in Formula 3 and then Formula 3000 and I personally saw Damon quite a few times at Oulton Park in the late 1980’s. I remember meeting his mum in the paddock at Oulton Park when I was photographing her son’s car. She went off to bring Damon back for a picture but alas, she wasn’t able to find him.

Damon at Oulton Park. Photo by the author

Damon struggled with the issues of sponsorship as many race teams were looking for drivers who could bring personal sponsors into a team but Damon was able to get himself a F3000 drive which also led to an F1 drive with the faltering Brabham team. At the same time, he had also replaced Mark Blundell as the test driver for Williams. After a difficult year with Brabham, Williams were having a tough time with their driver line up. Mansell had won the world championship in 1992 but he wasn’t happy about having Alain Prost as a team mate in 1993. Williams were still expecting Nigel to drive for them, after all he had just won the title, but Mansell decided to up sticks and go to the USA to drive in Indycars. Williams signed Prost and Hill got the promotion from test driver to full time driver for the 1993 season.

1993 was an interesting season. The Williams was without a doubt the best car of the field but Prost had just come back from a season out of the sport and was on a learning curve with the new car while Hill, who had been testing was actually pretty familiar with it.

Prost won the championship and Damon scored his first win but for 1994 Frank Williams had signed Ayrton Senna and Prost decided he wasn’t going to work with Senna again and promptly retired. That left Damon to partner Senna. In 1994 active suspension, a system where the suspension and ride height of the car was controlled by an onboard computer, was banned and the car had become rather difficult to drive. When the team came to Imola that year, Senna had scored no points at all and was desperate for a win. Damon says he had not settled into the team well and he was clearly still trying to get used to the way the Williams team operated. In the race Senna had a major accident.

Damon passed the scene of the crash, not knowing it was serious and felt for Senna thinking it would be three races in a row without points for the Brazilian driver. When the race was stopped he sat in his car on the grid waiting for information but little was forthcoming. Later, the team’s press officer advised him that things were serious but it was only after the restarted race had finished that news came through that Senna was indeed dead.

It was almost a familiar scenario to that which Graham Hill had experienced in 1968. The team leader had been killed and Graham had to step up and lead the team. Now Damon had to do the same.

Damon Hill won the world championship in 1996 but his team boss Frank Williams had for whatever reason decided Damon was not the driver he wanted for 1997 and his contract was not renewed. Damon ended up driving for Arrows in 1997 which he thought was a middle of the grid team trying to move up to the front. It turned out to be a back of the grid team, trying to move up to the middle. Damon won once more for the Jordan team and then retired. In some ways it almost seems that Damon had his F1 career in reverse, he started at the top and then drove for lesser teams until he decided to call it a day.

Damon’s book is not one I really fancied but in fact it was really a pretty good read. His younger years as the son of the great Graham Hill are fascinating, especially his behind-the-scenes motorsport memories. His recollections of his early racing days and the complexities of sponsorship and his experiences of F1 also make great reading. The book falters a little when Damon tries to interest the reader in his problems with depression, brought on possibly as a result of losing his father in such a tragic way, however, I do feel I have a little more respect and time for Damon and perhaps in future, when he comes on my TV screen as an F1 pundit, I might not be so quick to fast forward past him.

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Autographs, Murray Walker and Formula One

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s a while since I’ve produced an F1 blog post so perhaps it’s about time for one. Over in France while we are on holiday we very rarely watch TV. We spend most of our evenings sitting in the porch watching the sun go down, watching the sky and chit chatting.

Last week I broke the no TV rule and watched the Italian Grand Prix. To be fair, Formula One has been pretty exciting this year with some great races and terrific battles. Max Verstappen who won the championship last year in controversial circumstances looks set to make it championship number 2 this year but if he wins, and it’s still not decided yet, he will have won it fairly and squarely and pretty convincingly too. His big challenger has been Charles LeClerc in the Ferrari and although Charles has been fast, his own team, Scuderia Ferrari, have not performed well in the area of strategy. They have cocked up Charles’ pit stops, stayed out when they should have pitted, pitted when they should have stayed out and gone for the wrong tyres at the wrong time.

At the historic race track of Monza, Charles was ready to chase Max for the win but a safety car came out when Daniel Riccardo conked out in a dangerous section of the circuit. The race marshals had problems shifting Daniel’s McLaren and the race ended under the safety car which stopped Charles’ pursuit of Max in its tracks and of course, ruined the race for the fans.

The big surprise this year is that so far, Lewis Hamilton has done pretty badly. Lewis is an all time record holder with more race wins and more pole positions than any other driver ever and is currently tied with Michael Schumacher for the most world championships ever (seven). However, Lewis’s team Mercedes have dropped the ball badly and after years of winning time after time they have produced a car which is not the class of the field.

Why have Mercedes failed in 2022? My personal feeling is that they should never have dubbed this year’s car the W13. Yes, there it is, I’ve said it. I know that’s going to be controversial but no one is ever going to win any kind of championship with a car numbered 13. Just go back some years to the Apollo space programme. All went pretty smoothly, Apollo 8 circled the moon, Apollo 9 tested the lunar module, Apollo 10 was a dress rehearsal for the landing and Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Apollo 12 made another successful moon landing but Apollo 13, well that was where everything went wrong and the crew were lucky to get back to earth alive. NASA should never have named that space craft Apollo 13 and gone straight to Apollo 14.

The same thing happened this year with Mercedes, those guys should also have gone straight to W14 and missed out W13 entirely or perhaps even numbered the car W12B. If they had, I think Lewis might well have won a few races this year.

During the summer break there has been quite a bit of controversy to keep us armchair F1 fans happy. Sebastian Vettel decided to jack everything in and announced his retirement. That caused Fernando Alonso to announce he would be quitting Alpine for Vettel’s vacant seat at Aston Martin for next year. Alpine then announced Oscar Piastri as their new driver. Oscar the current F2 champion announced that wouldn’t be the case. What? A rookie declining an F1 drive? It turned out that Daniel Riccardo was getting the bullet from McLaren and they had engaged Piastri only Daniel hadn’t been informed. The result, after a meeting of the F1 contracts recognition board is that Oscar is in at McLaren but Daniel is on his way out. OK, that’s how the cookie crumbles in modern F1.

Back in the 1970’s Jackie Stewart drove for Ken Tyrell with a handshake agreement. How times change.

Things have changed in F1 in many ways. A few years ago one of my friends came to me saying he had something he knew I would want. What is it? I asked. It turned out that his daughter who has emigrated to Australia had gone to the Australian Grand Prix. She had a paddock pass (very expensive) and had got all the current drivers to sign her programme. What was I offering for it?

Of course I love F1 and I am a bit of a collector. Over the years I’ve picked up various programmes, F1 models, memorabilia and autographs. We threw a few figures back and forth and then I asked to see the merchandise. My friend obliged and produced the programme. What a disappointment! The programme was covered in what looked like a series of scribbles and squiggles, all of which were completely illegible but which were apparently the signatures of the current crop of F1 drivers. Sorry, no sale I said to my disappointed friend who was forced to flog the goods on eBay.

Here’s one of the autographs in my collection. Not the greatest driver of all time but Graham Hill is probably the most outstanding personality of Formula One racing, ever. Not only that, nice signature too Graham.

Graham Hill

On holiday I always grab a few books to take away with me. Reading is one of the great pleasures in life, at least I have always thought so. One book I picked up was the autobiography of Murray Walker. Murray was for many years the voice of F1. Clive James once described him as talking in his quieter moments like someone who has his trousers on fire. Murray always added his supreme enthusiasm and excitement into his broadcasts. He made mistakes, he mixed up drivers and cars but he always, always kept his viewers entertained. He belongs to that golden era of British TV Sporting commentators like Harry Carpenter (boxing) Brian Moore (football) David Coleman (football) Peter O’Sullivan (horse racing) and many others who are just a faded memory now.

Murray’s book ‘Unless I’m Very Much Mistaken’ was, according to the blurb on the back cover, the number 1 best seller. I was looking forward to reading it but sadly it was all a little boring. Many celebrity autobiographies start off well and are very interesting but when the author reaches the point of fame and fortune, they all seem to go down the same path and become lists and lists of films or shows or appearances or meeting other famous people and just become rather boring. Murray doesn’t waste much time, his book starts out with some boring bits and then goes straight into more boring bits.

To be fair, some of the book was interesting, for instance when he talked about working for the BBC when they commenced their regular Grand Prix highlights programme in 1979 and working with James Hunt, his co commentator for many years. Otherwise though, it was a book I found myself mostly skimming through.

Murray was someone who accepted he made many mistakes but even so, did a fabulous job over the years. I remember once watching the start of the Le Mans 24 hour race on BBC TV’s sports show Grandstand. Murray commented for the first hour or so and then the coverage went back to the studio. It was obvious to me that Murray was in France as he was so well informed, he knew what was going on and so on. Back in the studio in the UK the announcer explained how the BBC were clearly not going to be with the race for the full 24 hours and then turned to Murray who was sitting next to him. His commentary had not been from France but from the TV studio in the UK!

Murray did an amazing job but sorry, his book wasn’t the great read it should have been.

This weekend we will have left our rented French house behind with all its creature comforts and will be slowly meandering our way home in our motorhome, visiting family and friends en route. Happily, YouTube will be showing short highlights of this weekend’s race. Hope we’ll be in a spot where the Wi-Fi signal is good!

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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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Monaco, TV Ads and the Problem with VHS Tapes

Posted on by Steve Higgins

The F1 season starts later this month in Bahrain, in fact the race teams are already gathering there for the pre season testing, getting ready to shake down the new cars and sort out any teething issues before the actual racing. Of course, I’m assuming that despite Covid 19 we will have something of a normal F1 season once again. One of my favourite events, the Monaco Grand Prix traditionally takes place in May and even though the hi tech F1 cars outgrew this road circuit many years ago, they still come here and race fans can hobnob with the rich and famous and look enviously at the harbour when it will be choc-a-block with millionaires’ yachts.

The other day I was once again going through my old VHS tapes, selecting ones to keep, ones to copy to DVD and ones to throw out. One tape was marked Monaco 2002 qually and I was tempted to dispose of it straight away but I put it to one side and then later when the TV schedules declined to offer up anything interesting I thought why not give it a watch?

I have to say I couldn’t quite remember off the top of my head who was winning and who was losing in 2002 or even who was driving for who.

The video started off talking about what was portrayed as a controversial event in the previous race in Austria. Michael Schümacher and Rubens Barrichello were both driving for Ferrari at the Austrian Grand Prix. Rubens, the popular Brazilian was fastest in qually, fastest in the warm up and led the race. At the very last corner he came out ahead of Michael but then lifted off for a moment and it was Schümacher who took the chequered flag. Schümacher and Rubens came to the podium and Michael was not popular, facing a barrage of booing from the crowd. Michael, clearly embarrassed, pushed Rubens on to the top spot but that would not change the result; Rubens had handed the race win to Michael.

I started to fast forward through the TV ads but then saw one that always used to make me laugh. Here it is:

Back to Monaco and the TV coverage back then had passed to ITV and Jim Rosenthal was the TV anchor. He quizzed pundit Tony Jardine and guest and FIA chief Max Mosley about the Austrian Grand Prix. They weren’t happy at all that Rubens had handed the win to Schümacher. Are they bringing the sport into disrepute asked Jim. Max and Tony seemed to think so. The ITV web site was apparently flooded with complaints. Some drivers were interviewed and one I thought was interesting was the comment by Jacques Villeneuve. He said that we all knew that Ruben’s contract said he was number 2 and had to give way to the number 1 driver who was Schümacher. We all knew also that in Schümacher’s contract it said that the number 2 driver had to give way to him so why should we be surprised at what had happened in the race? Schümacher said Villeneuve should act like a man, accept what has happened, stand up on the number 1 spot and accept the boos.

Funny thing is that nowadays, Villeneuve is always in the F1 websites saying something controversial so perhaps I’d forgotten he was a straight talker even back then. Yes, that whole episode was a big scandal back in 2002 although I really don’t know why. Motor racing is a team sport and Ferrari has always been known to give team orders so why was everyone getting upset? Even Stirling Moss, who drove in an era when team orders were pretty much de rigueur felt compelled to say he had lost respect for Michael Schümacher. The thing is, as the two had led the race and Michael of course knew that Rubens would move over, then the two were hardly racing were they, as Ferrari Team Boss Ross Brawn pointed out. If there had been no team orders then Rubens would have had Michael up his exhaust pipes pushing him until he found a way past. To me the whole thing was a fuss over nothing but as I remember, the whole thing rumbled on and on for quite a while.

Anyway, I soon fast forwarded to the action, the actual qualifying which was I have to say, pretty exciting. There was a time when, as an ardent F1 fanatic, I knew race results and team personnel off by heart. Who won at Monaco in 1970? Jochen Rindt of course. 1971? Jackie Stewart. 72? Jean Pierre Beltoise in the rain. What about 1977? Was it Lauda? No, Jody Scheckter. 86? Prost? Yes, Alain Prost. 2002? 2002, there’s a question.

Time to fast forward again but then another advert caught my eye. I haven’t seen it for years but I’ve always found it rather funny. It starred the northern comedian, Peter Kaye.

Getting back to the qually; as I said before, it was all pretty exciting, especially as I couldn’t remember who was driving for whom, never mind who came out on top. Schümacher soon set the top time then David Coulthard driving for McLaren went fastest. Hakkinen his team mate, who was as you may remember, a double world champion, wasn’t doing so well but then Juan Pablo Montoya, one of my favourite drivers claimed the top spot. The cars began to get faster as the track ‘rubbered in’ and got faster. Coulthard went fastest again, in fact there were ten changes of pole sitter until Juan Pablo the Columbian driver finally claimed the top spot. I’ve always liked Juan Pablo. He was a man who told it like it was, he didn’t go in for PR led team speak and I was looking forward to seeing his post qually interview but then something happened, something that always used to happen back in the VHS age.

The other day I was idly watching an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. It was the one where Ray and Debra his wife are watching their wedding video and suddenly the screen dissolves and on comes a football match. Debra is furious because Ray has taped over the wedding. Yep, those sort of things happened back then and on my video tape something similar occurred. The race video vanished into a hail of snow only to be replaced by a James Bond documentary. I was furious for a moment but then I got interested in the documentary. It focussed on Miriam D’Abo who starred in the 007 film The Living Daylights and she interviewed various ladies who had the dubious honour of being a ‘Bond Girl.’ There were plenty of clips from the Bond films, interviews and bits and pieces of behind the scenes stuff, in fact it was all pretty interesting for a Bond fan like me.

Pity about the Grand Prix but what the heck, pause to get a bottle of lager and a few nibbles and who cares? Wonder who did win the 2002 Monaco Grand Prix though?

(If you’re interested David Coulthard won with Schümacher coming home second!)

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https://youtu.be/5hTLreQ1y5g

Ayrton Senna: Touching the Glass

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As the 2020 Formula One season comes to a close, many people must speculate about those who race these amazing F1 cars at such incredible speeds. Measuring high speed lap times against car control and the desire to go ever faster is the juggling act performed by the Grand Prix drivers every time they step into their hi-tech carbon fibre cockpits. The consequences of a mistake can range from an embarrassing spin in the gravel trap to a cruel death. Romain Grosjean crashed in the recent Bahrain Grand Prix. His car split into two and his cockpit, jammed in the crash barrier turned into a deadly fireball. Happily, he escaped with only minor burns.

This year, 2020, marked the twenty sixth anniversary of the death of Ayrton Senna, one of the greatest racing drivers of all time.  Aryton was killed on the 1st of May 1994 at the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola. Anyone who knows anything about motor sport can tell you that. The date lingers in the back of the collective mind of all racing fans, along with other tragedies of the sport, like the deaths of Gilles Villeneuve and Jim Clark to name but two. Clark’s death is unexplained to this day. His Formula Two Lotus left the track at an easy, straight section of road. The facts of Villeneuve’s accident are well known – he crashed into a slow-moving car – but his death is perhaps only really explained under close analysis.

Villeneuve was on a slowing down lap, on his way back to the pits after a handful of fast qualifying laps but still, he kept the hammer down, his right foot pressed down to the floor when there was no real need for absolute speed. So why? Why was he going so fast?

Grosjean escapes from his burning car

One answer is simply that that was the way he drove; fast. Foot down to the floor. Full stop. Another was that he was still estranged from team mate Didier Pironi, who he thought had unfairly beaten him in the previous Grand Prix at San Marino in Italy. The two had diced together for the length of the race, team leader Villeneuve thought they were putting on a show, Pironi thought they were racing. When Pironi took the chequered flag it was an act of betrayal, or so Villeneuve thought and when they arrived at Zolder for what would be Villeneuve’s last Grand Prix, Villeneuve was still seething. And so, perhaps that state of passion was a factor on his last lap. Jochen Mass was slowing down and saw Villeneuve approaching at high speed. He moved over to the right to let Villeneuve through on the racing line but at the same moment Villeneuve also moved to the right to overtake and the two collided sending Villeneuve’s Ferrari into the air.

For Ayrton Senna in 1994 that intense rivalry with a fellow driver seemed to be a thing of the past. 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 – it depends on which story you believe. 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.

So now, the Young Pretender had become the Elder Statesman of Grand Prix motor racing and his two closest competitors had gone. Perhaps he even 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 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.

Many sources have said that after these twin disasters Ayrton did not want to race in the Grand Prix. That is something hard to believe, a man as focussed as Senna, not wanting to race. Could it be that he was finally becoming more like his once deadly rival Alain Prost? Prost had always put his own life before winning motor races and as a consequence had driven a dismal race at the rain soaked 1988 British Grand Prix and completed only a token lap at the similarly affected 1990 Australian Grand Prix. Events may have pushed Ayrton’s thinking from the neutrality and detachment of the past towards a greater concern, a concern beyond the continual winning of races.

Whatever his inner feelings he started the San Marino Grand Prix in his usual fashion, leading into the first corner from pole position. Behind him though, JJ Lehto stalled his Benneton and was hit from behind by Pedro Lamy. Lesser events had stopped races in the past but on this occasion the organisers sent out the safety car and the grid cruised round after it in formation for five laps while the crash debris was removed.

At the end of the fifth cruising lap the safety car pulled off, the lights turned to green and Senna, Schumacher and the rest floored their throttles. The Williams was not handling well and it felt nervous through Tamburello, that evocatively named but most dangerous of corners. Still, Senna kept ahead of Schumacher, he kept the hammer down. On lap six the Williams entered deep into Tamburello and Schumacher saw the spray of sparks as the car bottomed out and side stepped slightly. Senna caught and corrected the Williams and throttled onwards for the charge down to Tosa, the next bend. Both Senna and team mate Damon Hill knew their cars were nervous and to a certain extent unsuited to the bumpy surface at Imola. Someone like Alain Prost might have eased off slightly, settled for second or third, collected some points and used the rest of the San Marino Grand Prix as part of a learning curve, collecting mental and electronic data to develop the car into another Williams race winner. For Ayrton Senna, a third defeat by Michael Schumacher was not acceptable. Putting points on the scoreboard held no interest for him either, except for the ten points that in those days came with a win.

The next time round Ayrton entered Tamburello at 192 mph. We know his exact speed from his car’s electronic management system, which records such data. Tremors went through the car as it bottomed out again on the undulating track surface. This time Senna couldn’t catch the Williams, or perhaps something failed on the car. Later on, the steering column was found to be fractured. Did it fail before the crash or was it damaged in the impact? Some have speculated that his tyres were not up to pressure after many laps circling the track at low speed. We will never know. Whatever happened, the car went straight on towards the tyre barrier masking the concrete wall that lay behind. Senna’s last act was to slow the car down to 131 mph, but it was not enough.

I have never met Ayrton Senna. The last time I had seen him, in person, was at the Silverstone tyre tests of 1991 and even then, he was a blur of yellow in the red and white of his McLaren. To understand someone we have never known is not an easy task. Sometimes we can only do so by looking into ourselves and searching for similar experiences.

A long time ago, I must have been eight or nine, my Mother took me to visit my Grandmother. Sat alone in the lounge while the two women gossiped in the kitchen, I became fascinated by my Grandmother’s new fireplace. It was a coal fire and the fire glowed dormantly behind a glass door. A real fire was not new to me, indeed we had one at home, but the glass door seemed to attract me, so much so that I reached forward and held my hand a fraction of an inch from the glass. On an impulse I reached out further and put my hand on the glass. As you can imagine, I recoiled in agony having burnt my hand.

Courtesy Wikipedia creative commons

That moment, in 1994, as I watched my television images in disbelief, I came to think of that small boy, reaching out towards the glass door that enclosed a coal fire almost as one with Ayrton Senna, reaching towards the barriers of absolute speed, touching the zenith of his car control and going ever so slightly over his limits. He had done it before and had come back from the brink. Indeed, it may have even been vital to him to occasionally push and go over his limits just to fix in his own mind where those limits lay. Ayrton was a man who could learn from his mistakes and could go on to better and faster things, but on that tragic day fate stepped in and stopped the process. A suspension arm crushed in the impact, sprang back and hit Ayrton, piercing his most vulnerable point, the visor of his helmet.

Prost and Stewart, two of the all-time greats of motor sport, were men who came closer than anyone to touching the glass without ever being burned. Perhaps that was their secret. Stewart was a man in absolute control of his skills as a racing driver, both on and off the track. After three world championships and twenty-seven Grands Prix wins Stewart was able to say goodbye to it all without ever looking back. What other driver can boast of doing that? Schumacher retired again after a disappointing comeback. The careers of both Nelson Piquet and Gerhard Berger fizzled out inconsistently at Benetton. Mansell called it a day after joining McLaren and then realising that their epic run of success had run out of steam. Alain Prost retired after cantering to his fourth championship. It was clear that in Prost’s final year he was no longer willing to push hard. The motivation of his youth had evaporated with the Grand Prix seasons and with the relentless high-speed sprints of Formula One.

The day had arrived, as it will no doubt one day arrive for Hamilton, Alonso, and Vettel, when he was no longer trying to touch the glass.

This is an edited and updated version of a previous post which as you may have correctly guessed means that this week I was running out of ideas for blogs. Normal service might be resumed next week.

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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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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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