Ask Nigel: April 11

Dear Nigel,
I crave for the days when we could once again see slip-streaming battles at tracks like Monza and Hockenheim, but wonder how much would need to be done to the cars and the circuits to allow the chicanes to be removed once and for all? Did you ever witness a classic Monza slip-streamer and how much are modern fans missing out with the current chicane blight? Also, what do you think could be done as an alternative to putting in chicanes left, right and centre?
Edward Farley, Gillingham, Kent

Dear Edward,
No one loathes chicanes more than I - apart from the fact that they destroy the flow of a Grand Prix circuit, I also think them responsible for a great many unnecessary accidents. The one at Monza last September, in which a marshal sadly died, was a classic example. It was the first lap, and a bunch of cars arrived at a chicane, travelling at close to 200mph. With varying fuel loads, and therefore different braking points, contact is almost inevitable somewhere down the field - particularly when, with overtaking so difficult these days, the opening seconds provide a driver with the best chance of making places he will get all afternoon.

These days, Monza is considered a very difficult circuit on which to pass, and that's ironic, for it used to be synonymous with wheel-to-wheel racing.

What, you ask, would need to be done to the cars and the circuits to allow chicanes to be removed once and for all? In my opinion, more fundamental is what would need to be done to the drivers! Simply put, they would have to shed the mentality which has sadly become commonplace in F1 over the last 10 or 15 years, the period in which the sport has become massively safer. Simply put, they would have to drive with a great deal more discipline, as in the oval races in the States.

No, I'm not advocating for a second that we take away run-off areas, and install concrete walls, on the F1 circuits of the world. What I am saying, though, is that I firmly believe what used to be called, rather charmingly, 'dirty driving' - swerving around in front of a guy trying to pass you - has become much more prevalent in F1 because the drivers feel they can get away with it.

I still think the most reprehensible thing I have seen in 30 years of covering this sport was the FIA's lamentable failure to punish - in any real sense - Michael Schumacher for his blatant attempt to drive Jacques Villeneuve off the road at Jerez in 1997. A golden opportunity to say 'enough', to send a message out to every kid on a kart in the world, was presented to the FIA, and they came down on Schumacher like a ton of feathers.

We may be disappointed, but we can't really be surprised, when someone like Jenson Button says that 'anything goes' on the track - so long as it works...

That being the prevailing mentality, I think it inconceivable that we shall ever again see an F1 race in the manner of the old slipstreamers at Monza, Hockenheim, and so on. The drivers in F1 are always touted as the best on earth - and in the case of about half of them, that's true - but I doubt that some, at least, are sufficiently disciplined to tackle such an event. Veering around in front of other cars, at well the wrong side of 200mph, is not very sensible behaviour - as some have discovered after leaving F1 for CART...

Yes, Edward, I was fortunate enough to witness a classic Monza slipstreamer, in both 1970 and '71. Monza was then uncompromisingly fast, and as close in concept to an Indycar oval race as ever F1 has seen. "OK, you had the Curva Grande and you had the Lesmos, which were testing corners," said Jackie Stewart, "but for most of the lap you were flat out."

Although the track was occasionally denigrated as nothing more than a temple of raw speed, still the feeling was that, like Monte Carlo, it had a place in the Grand Prix calendar as a maverick event.

In the '71 race, most of the early leading was done by Peterson's March, Ronnie hounded by the Tyrrells of Stewart and Francois Cevert, Jo Siffert's BRM, the Ferraris of Clay Regazzoni and Jacky Ickx, and Chris Amon's Matra, which had started from the pole.

Inevitably, with so many long straights, the attrition rate was high, and by lap 18 Stewart was gone, together with - tragedy for the locals - both the Ferraris. So engrossing, though, was the lead battle that the tifosi stayed put. Monza used to be like that.

Next to find trouble was Siffert, but others were coming through by now, including Mike Hailwood, who had not been near an F1 car for six years, and was making a return with the Surtees team. On lap 25, 'The Bike' - who had qualified 17th - came by in the lead!

"I didn't know what this slipstreaming lark was all about," he grinned afterwards. "I'd never done it before..."

As the end of the race neared, the protagonists shook themselves down, tried to prepare themselves for the final sprint to the flag. It was all a matter of being in the right place at Parabolica, the last corner, of getting through it well, of slingshotting by the rest just before the line. No one wanted to lead into Parabolica, in other words.

Cevert and Peterson arrived pretty well together, both leaving their braking a mite too late, and getting out of shape as a consequence. At this point, Peter Gethin, fourth going into the last lap, took a deep breath, dived past them, and took his BRM V12 a thousand revs over its limit before snatching top gear. At the line, Gethin was perhaps a couple of feet ahead of Peterson, with Cevert third and Hailwood fourth. Howden Ganley, fifth for BRM, was six-tenths behind his team mate.

And Amon? He was sixth, half a minute later. "I led for several laps, without any problem, until nine laps from the end, when I lost my visor... In previous races, I'd been losing tear-offs, so this time I'd taped it more firmly, and when I pulled it off, the whole bloody visor went!" Another one out of the window for the luckless Christopher.

In America, they are very fond of statistics. After a race, they like to reel off the number of leaders, of lead changes, and like that, but in Europe such things are never mentioned, perhaps for the sound reason that lead changes are not something we take for granted in contemporary F1.

It was not always so. At Monza that day, the lead changed 25 times, among eight drivers, and perhaps the most remarkable fact of all is that on only eight of the 55 laps was the order as it had been the previous time around. Gethin would never score another World Championship victory, but assuredly his name will be in the record books for ever, as the winner of the fastest Grand Prix ever run: 150.754mph.

When the teams went back, a year later, chicane blight had attacked the circuit, and changed its character utterly, serving to break up the field, to reduce the lap speed by 20mph. Amon and Ickx shared the front row again, but neither finished, and it was left to Emerson Fittipaldi's Lotus to win comfortably from Hailwood's Surtees.

"A better result than last year," Mike observed, "but no fun at all. They've ruined the place with these poxy chicanes..."

That, moreover, was only the start, for more chicanes were to follow down the years. Monza remains my favourite race, but these days it's more for the atmosphere than anything else.




Dear George,
My 'take' on the Montoya/Verstappen accident is that it was Jos's fault. He had let Juan Pablo lap him, then, reasonably enough, ducked in behind again, but he simply didn't get on the brakes in time.

As a rule of thumb, the driver behind is always at fault. Very well, I accept that this is not an absolute rule - it is hardly unknown, after all, for a driver to give his pursuing rival a 'brake test' (in other words, to tap the brake pedal at an unexpected moment), but on this occasion such a thing may be ruled out. Montoya was not racing with Verstappen: he was already a lap ahead of him.

It is a fact - perhaps because the BMW V10 is giving such prodigious horsepower - that the brakes of the Williams FW23 are currently not the car's strongest suit, but I find it hard to believe that Montoya, going like hell, trying to build up his lead, was braking yards and yards earlier than the Arrows.

I wonder why you should suspect that Williams were running so little downforce that their drivers were having to brake way earlier than anyone else? First, Interlagos is not a high-downforce track, anyway: run a lot of wing there, and you get punished on the long climb at the end of the lap. Second, I don't quite see what 'today's ever more homogenised F1' has to do with 'different ideas on set-up'. Set-up, together with strategy, is surely the whole story of F1 today.

Last thing: if Montoya really were braking way earlier than most other drivers, is it not surprising, then, that Schumacher was not able to take advantage of this? Certainly, Juan Pablo was running a 'heavy' car, being on only a one-stop strategy, but this is the way F1 is these days. The easiest way to make places is on the stops, and obviously different teams will have different strategies. That being so, cars of very different weights - and therefore different braking distances - will be competing against each other in the early laps.

This accident, though, happened on lap 39, when Montoya was only half a dozen laps from his stop.




Dear Roy,
On the evening of Sunday, March 26 1995, at the airport in Sao Paulo, I made an announcement to the friends and colleagues who were travelling with me, and to anyone else in the vicinity: "That's it! I am never coming back to this f****** place again!" And I never have.

Interlagos, even its revised and shortened form, remains a superb race track, undoubtedly one of the best still in F1 use, but everything else about Sao Paulo I loathe, I'm afraid, and I'm by no means alone in that.

Why? Because it's humid as hell, the crime rate is off the clock, with a high chance your computer/money/credit cards/anything-you-can't-nail-down will be nicked - and because nothing seems to work properly. I remember once asking Ayrton Senna how, with his perfectionist attitude to everything, he could tolerate the endless power failures and duff phone lines, and he just shrugged: "That's Brazil..."

As well as that, I'm a passionate animal lover, and when you see how so many of the people have to live, in favellas, and so on, you can imagine how much compassion is available to dogs and cats. Every time I had to go there, I was counting the hours until I could get out. Ordinarily, I never fly back from a race until the Monday; for Sao Paulo, I made an exception to my rule.

As for Interlagos itself, well, the facilities at the track are primitive, and - I say this without any fear of contradiction - would not be tolerated by today's F1 Machine anywhere else. Frankly, it makes me laugh to hear the powers-that-be go on about the shortcomings of Silverstone when, year after year, Interlagos fails so lamentably in so many respects.

All that said, however, the one thing I always liked was the locals' genuine passion for motor racing. A race at Interlagos is strong meat, reminiscent of a time before F1 became homogenised, and the layout of the track lends itself to good, competitive, racing.

For that reason, I would be sorry to see it disappear from the World Championship calendar. Then again, these days I watch it from my armchair in Surrey!




Dear Andrew,
Good as they were, Mansell and Piquet were not - to me, anyway - on the same level as Senna and Prost, and I don't think most of my colleagues in the press room would dissent from that view.

I have always thought the best race of Mansell's career his victory in the Ferrari at the 1989 Hungarian Grand Prix. Why? Because I thought it the only Grand Prix he ever won in other than the best car. Nigel, in the right mood, was a supreme racer, and that day - when he took brilliant advantage of a momentary hesitation by Senna - he was at his very best.

When he and Piquet were driving the Williams-Hondas, and had a very considerable power advantage, they really should have beaten Alain Prost's McLaren-TAG Porsche to the World Championship in 1986 - in fact, it should not even have been close. As Keke Rosberg and others have said, "That was the last year in which a driver won the World Championship in a car which should not have won it."

Piquet was a better tactician than Mansell, but Nigel was much the more combative of the two. The 1992 Williams FW14B, the only car to have 'active' suspension that year, was consummately superior to everything else, and Mansell duly walked the World Championship. If sometimes a moral coward, he was physically extremely brave, and had absolute confidence in that car. But if anyone doubts its superiority, it's worth remembering that the championship runner-up was his team mate Riccardo Patrese. Senna, in a McLaren-Honda, was a distant third...

The year before, when Williams had yet to go the 'active' route, and ran the perhaps subtler FW14s, Mansell was frequently outpaced by Patrese. The year before that, 1990, when he was team mate to Prost at Ferrari, Alain comprehensively had the better of him, five wins to one.

In terms of the amount of sheer work they put into F1, Prost and Senna were streets ahead of any of their rivals. When others, on a Saturday afternoon, had gone off to play golf or whatever, Alain and Ayrton would be sitting with their engineers, sometimes into the evening. Senna was the fastest driver of his time, and Prost the most complete. Both would figure in anyone's Top 10 drivers of all time; Mansell and Piquet, for all their successes, would not get into mine.




Dear Fred,
Taking your last point first, I'm not entirely convinced that that's the way Schumacher thinks! Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost may have had no qualms about their team mates, but from his earliest days Michael has shown a...distinct preference, let's say, for someone unlikely to threaten him, either on the track or off it.

It's true that Senna vetoed the idea of having Derek Warwick as his Lotus-Renault team mate in 1986, but his argument - not unreasonable, given the team's history - was that Lotus would be unable to prepare two cars to the same level, and that the effort going into his car would inevitably suffer. Actually, I rather doubt that that would have happened, but undeniably Ayrton feared it.

In terms of sheer driving, though, Senna always saw his only true rival as Prost, and to that end was hell-bent on getting himself into the same team, to prove himself against the best in equal cars. Prost, to his credit, did not block Senna's move to McLaren (although he could have done), and thus we had a situation in which the two best drivers were in the top team together.

I could be wrong, but I rather doubt that Schumacher would go for having Mika Hakkinen in the other Ferrari. And since Interlagos the other weekend, indeed, I think the same is probably true of one J-P. Montoya.

As for team orders, yes, of course I far prefer McLaren's way of doing things, of allowing their two drivers to race, but it does, of course, bring with it an element of considerable risk, in terms of the guys taking points from each other, and so on. At the end of the day, Ron Dennis runs McLaren, and Michael Schumacher runs Ferrari. End of story. Schuey is not high on democracy, but then he could argue - with some justification - that he has brought Ferrari back from nowhere.


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