Ask Nigel: April 18

Hello Nigel,
I'm fascinated by the battles between the pre-war Mercedes and Auto Unions and I wonder if you could fill me in a little on the life and times of Richard Seaman. I believe he was not a popular figure in Britain in the closing stages of his tragically short career, but how did he stack up as a racing driver? I'm sure Mercedes wasn't in the habit of hiring also-rans, but his rise to prominence seems meteoric to say the least.
Richard Silver, Easington, East Yorkshire

Dear Richard,
An enigmatic character, by all accounts, Richard Seaman, and a driver who always comes to mind when racing drivers' superstitions come into a conversation. Seaman had a preoccupation was with the number 13, and its multiples. His contemporary, Bernd Rosemeyer, always regarded it as a lucky number, and would happily have raced with it. But not so Seaman.

He was leading when he crashed at Spa-Francorchamps, suffering burns from which he died a few hours later. And, given his fear of 13, there are enough coincidences to make you think.

The race was run on June 26 1939. Seaman was 26 years old. His car, 13th on the list of entries, was number 26. He crashed at kilometre 13, with 13 laps to go. And he died that evening in hospital, in room 39.

Four days later Seaman was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery, his funeral attended by the German Ambassador. There was a huge wreath from Adolf Hitler, and in Germany all Mercedes showrooms were cleared of cars, replaced by large photographs of Seaman, laurel-wreathed after his victory in the German GP a year earlier.

When I read of drivers from times past, professional curiosity always makes me ponder about them, their characters. Would I, as a Grand Prix journalist then, have found them likeable, intelligent, loathsome or what? How accurately were they portrayed by the writers of the time? Was there the degree of bias common to all journalists today...?

I can believe, with some surety, that I would have taken to Rosemeyer, for example, that his approach to life and work I would have found attractive, stimulating. Caracciola - if what I have read and heard be true - would have been polite, if heavy going, von Brauchitsch snotty and aloof, Lang pleasant, Nuvolari quirky, awesome. All of these have their doppelgangers in the Formula 1 paddocks of today.

Seaman, though, has always seemed elusive, a mystery. Everything I know of the man tells me I would have felt respect for him, but perhaps not much affection. For example, his habitual use in conversation of 'Seaman', rather than 'I', seems to me desperately precocious and contrived.

Years ago, in conversation with Raymond Mays, I brought up the subject of Seaman, with whom he had many an ERA battle. And while it must be said that Mays's private life would have been anathema to a man like Seaman - we are talking half a century ago, after all - nevertheless, the BRM founder's memories of him were...qualified, to say the least.

"I admired him," Mays began, "but I never got along with him. From a driving point of view, I suppose I was probably afraid of him - I think a lot of us were, because he was unpredictable, and singularly ruthless.

"The first time I raced against him was in the Grand Prix of Dieppe. It was a typical French road circuit of the time, six or eight miles long, with narrow second-class roads, poplar trees along both sides, that kind of thing.

"I was in the works ERA, with Seaman in a private car. And that first lap I will never forget - we had such a lead that everyone thought there must have been a multiple crash behind us. We went on like that for five laps or so, and then suddenly he fell away, and next time round I saw his car parked at the side of the road.

"It was a relief, I can tell you. Whenever I'd looked in the mirror, there had been Seaman's black ERA, and in those days he wore black overalls and a black helmet, so the overall effect was curiously sinister. But, that apart, I was highly impressed. He could obviously drive magnificently, and had enormous potential.

"Interestingly enough," Mays added, "I spoke years later - after the war - to Caracciola about Seaman, and he said Seaman had had precisely the same effect on him: if you were battling with him into a corner, and got yourself into trouble, you shouldn't expect him to give you room. Now, when you speak of Rudolf Caracciola, you speak of as great a racing driver as there's ever been, in my opinion. On a completely different level from myself, obviously. Yet Rudi was intimidated by Seaman in the same way..."

He was a quiet fellow, and reserved, but obviously intensely single-minded. Educated at Rugby, he was a natural rebel, despising all authority. His hero was Henry Segrave, and at Cambridge - amidst a life of country houses, shooting and jazz - he resolved to make a career of motor racing.

Getting started was no particular problem, since his father - already 52 at the time of Seaman's birth - was an extremely wealthy man. In time he came thoroughly to disapprove of his son's chosen path through life, not least because it worsened his already serious heart condition.

The young man then turned to his mother. "I've ordered an ERA," he said, "and it's got to be paid for..." She wrote out a cheque.

Through the mid-thirties Seaman emerged clearly as the best driver in the land, and, as such, attracted the attention of both Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union. His sights were squarely set on Grand Prix racing. "I shall never," he said after a handicap race in East London, South Africa, "run in another race like that - an afternoon's entertainment for a lot of amateurs..."

Mercedes took him on, in 1937, first requiring Hitler's permission, which was freely given by the professed Anglophile. But Seaman began badly by destroying a car in pre-season tests at Monza. He was thrown out, and suffered a broken kneecap, but made no excuses: the power had caught him unawares.

Later that year came another huge accident, this time in the German GP, when he was fighting with the Auto Union of Ernst von Delius. At 150mph the two cars touched, von Delius's somersaulting clean out of the circuit and across the public road beyond.

Once again Seaman was pitched from his car, skinning his nose and breaking a thumb. But von Delius was beyond help, and died later that night. Seaman's response seems to have been chillingly hard-nosed: annoyance at losing a probable third place seems to have been uppermost in his mind, according to one observer.

At Pescara, he crashed again, this time in practice, and team manager Alfred Neubauer noted in his memoirs that it occurred on Friday the 13th of August - at the 13th kilometre post.

All in all, it was not an auspicious maiden Grand Prix season. Seaman had particularly wanted to shine in the Donington Grand Prix, for he knew the circuit well and had won there often. But it was von Brauchitsch who had to carry the Mercedes fight to Rosemeyer's winning Auto Union.

In 1938, though, Seaman began to come of age as a Grand Prix driver, his glory being to win at the Nurburgring. There he stood standing proudly on the podium with a goodly selection of Hitler's thugs, who declined to smile, muttering that von Brauchitsch was the moral winner. For Seaman, who loathed the Nazis, it must have been an exquisite moment.

As the teams gathered for the second Donington race, in the autumn of 1938, war with Germany was clearly threatening. The French, in fact, went home, and Mercedes and Auto Union were on the point of doing the same when the 'Munich Agreement' was signed, and they were told to stay. This time Seaman finished third.

What to do for 1939? His position - an Englishman driving for a German team - was becoming untenable, for Hitler's intentions were scarcely disguised, and sooner or later would have to be confronted. Seaman consulted officials of the RAC, who recommended for the time being he stay put, try to win races for England - even in a German car.

He had family problems, too. In mid-1938 he had met Erica Popp, a young German girl whose father was a BMW executive. And at first his formidable mother was much taken with her, but when Seaman spoke of getting married the picture changed: no son of hers would take a German wife.

They married, nevertheless, at Caxton Hall in December of 1938, without the presence of Mrs Seaman. She had told him she would rather see him dead in his coffin than attend his wedding. I'm told they never spoke again.

By 1939 the old order was changing at Mercedes; Caracciola was past his best, and von Brauchitsch had never been consistently a front-rank driver, in any case. Increasingly, Neubauer looked to the younger men, to Hermann Lang and Seaman.

It was Lang, in fact, who won that day at Spa, that day of Seaman's death; Lang who inherited the lead, came in immediately with news of his team mate's accident, requested permission to quit.

Picture Post chose that weekend to do a story on Seaman. They took pictures of him at the hotel, shaving, preparing for the race, sharing a post-breakfast cigarette with Erica, then climbing into the Mercedes.

It was a foul day, misty and wet, with the 'old' Spa-Francorchamps at its most treacherous. Seaman took the lead on lap 11, and looked to be convincingly on the way to his second GP victory until lap 26, when the silver car slid off the road at the left-hander before where the pits are situated today, on the approach to La Source.

The car - recently refuelled - hit trees, and exploded; in the cockpit Seaman was immobile, stunned by the impact. Brave marshals eventually freed him, but there were no fireproof overalls in those days, and he was appallingly burned. Later that evening he died.

"Seaman won't mind going off the road and buying it if he is in the lead of a Grand Prix," he once said to a close friend.

Perhaps, over time, some of his various biographers have sold him short, with their unappealing 'Bulldog Drummond' pen portraits. Any man who so loved P.G. Wodehouse surely cannot have been so crass and insensitive as he has sometimes been painted. Perhaps, over time, our perception of heroes has shifted. Seaman the racing driver seems to me more admirable by far than Seaman the man. But perhaps, for all my loathing political correctness, I'm looking at the thirties through the eyes of today.




Dear Thomas,
I've been a fan of Jean Alesi from the very beginning of his F1 career, back in the summer of 1989, and when Alain Prost did his deal with Ferrari, I was optimistic that at last Alesi would have, if not a car on par with the best, at least one which would do some justice to his consummate talent.

I hated to see him floundering around in that hopeless Prost-Peugeot last season. Gerhard Berger, his longtime team mate at both Ferrari and Benetton, maintains that Jean is still one of the very best F1 drivers, and I agree with him.

Thus, it was very pleasing to me when he began setting quick times in several winter test sessions. What he liked most, he said at the time, was that the car was very reliable, which in turn allowed sufficient running to get some development work done; that made a welcome change from what he went through in 2000.

As well as that, Alesi said the new, Ferrari-engined Prost appeared to be a car with no significant vices. Perhaps it was not a McLaren, but neither was it a dog. He couldn't wait for the start of the season.

Thus far, though, the car - at the races - has been a huge disappointment, prompting many to speculate that it must have been way underweight when those sensational testing times were set.

Was this the case? It is a fact, well documented down the years, that running a car underweight in testing is hardly unknown. Indeed, since winter testing became so intense, so protracted, with every day of testing studied and analysed to death in the press, it has become a very common practice - particularly in the case of teams hoping perhaps to land a new sponsor, who may be seduced by outwardly impressive signs of competitiveness for the year to come.

This has happened times without number, and it is undeniable that the Prost deal with Acer was done very late in the day, with the first race beckoning. I have yet to come across any team, however, which is prepared to admit to the practice, and I don't expect that situation to change...

In point of fact, when I spoke to Alesi at Imola last Friday, he was not displeased with his car, which he said was very well balanced. The car was nice to drive, in other words, but the time wasn't there. Not enough grip.

Prost is suffering, too, by comparison with Sauber, who are also running last year's Ferrari engine/gearbox. It's unfortunate for Alain and his boys that Sauber has come up with clearly the best car they have yet produced - even if its designer, Sergio Rinland, is no longer with the team.

For all that, I still believe that the Peugeot engine programme was a disaster last year - in fact, it was a disaster almost all the way through the company's seven-year sojourn in F1. It wasn't that the engine was so terrible in itself - although it was invariably down on power, compared with the best, and always suffered from indifferent reliability - as much as the fact that Peugeot always gave the impression of a company which didn't really want to be in F1 in the first place. Even from the outside, one sensed their lack of commitment, and this was even more keenly felt by the teams which had to work with them.




Dear Mark,
The music I take it you're referring to is the Prelude from Carmen, by Bizet. I'm afraid I know neither how long they've been playing it at the Grands Prix (although it's certainly a good few years), nor why this particular piece was chosen. At the weekend I asked one or two people in the Imola paddock if they knew why, but they didn't. "Maybe Bernie likes it," was the most frequent response.

For all my love of classical music, I think a better choice for this particular circumstance might be the theme music from Grand Prix. Composed by Maurice Jarre for the 1967 movie, it seems somehow to fit perfectly with racing. In the old days - before the age of uniformity struck - they used always to play it at the Spanish Grand Prix.




Dear John,
I think there's much in what you say, although you will appreciate this is not a view held by any drivers of my acquaintance! This is the era of the 'cult of personality', with a public besotted by 'lifestyle stories', and presumably this is taken account by a sponsor as he contemplates whether or not to get involved in F1.

'If you've got Newey, who needs Schuey?' someone said a year so ago, and I think there's no doubt that, in general terms, the importance of a team's design and electronics personnel has hugely increased over the past few years, while the role of the driver has been somewhat reduced.

The cars of today are logically much easier to drive than once was the case. Changing gear, for example, used to entail watching your rev counter (so as not to blow up your motor), as well as operating a 'standard' foot clutch and gear lever. For years now, though, it's been a matter of flicking a steering-wheel-mounted paddle - and doing it when a light comes on to tell you it's time. Quite apart from anything else, this means that a driver can keep both hands on the wheel at all times.

If you doubt me, ask Jean Alesi - the only driver around now who can remember it - what Monte Carlo was like when it was a one-handed race track.

Now, with the 'gizmos' coming back, we will have completely automatic gearboxes, traction control - and also launch control, to take care of the starts. In absolute terms, then, the F1 driver of today has far less to operate than his predecessors. The flip side of that, of course, is that he has far less opportunity to demonstrate superior skills. Let us never forget that when Max Mosley banned the gizmos last time around, at the end of 1993, he took the decision shortly after receiving a letter from Ayrton Senna, imploring him to do so. Not even Ayrton's right foot could control traction as well as software - but he knew damn well it could do it consummately better than anyone else's right foot...

At the weekend, as it happens, I talked to Ron Dennis about this very subject. He is glad to see the return of the gizmos, and while I can understand his wish to have a level playing field (with everyone having traction control, for example), I can't share his enthusiasm for them back per se.

Dennis contends that a great driver will still beat a good one, but that it will be harder for him, that the gizmos will close up the field. I can't fault his logic, but still - to me - that is not a desirable situation, because it's not real somehow. If X is consummately better than Y, I believe he should be able to demonstrate it, and thus anything 'electronic' which flatters his rival is not to my taste.

"As well as that," Ron murmured, with a smile on his face, "it will drive down the rate card..."

Ah, now that I could understand! If the gizmos do ever more for the drivers, helping a good driver in a great car to beat a great one in a good car, then perhaps you won't need a Senna or a Schumacher as much as you did - or, at least, perhaps you won't have to pay him so much. Conversely, a man who conceives a car in which any one of a dozen drivers could win will presumably become worth more and more...