Ask Nigel: April 24

Dear Alvaro,

Arrows, under sundry different ownerships, have been in Formula 1 since the beginning of 1978, and have never yet won a Grand Prix. I remember Thierry Boutsen finishing second at Imola one year long ago, and Damon Hill was also second at the Hungaroring in 1997, after leading most of the way, but in going on 25 years that's as close as Arrows have been to the top step of the podium.

TWR is a multi-faceted company, and people suggest that Tom Walkinshaw's genius has always lain in his ability to move money around from one division to another, as required.

I don't know the extent of the TWR group's resources, but, as you say, they are presumed to be impressive. What is beyond reasonable doubt, however, is that the Arrows F1 team is currently extremely short of money. One sure way of judging a team's financial situation is to look at how often that team goes testing - and Arrows have just had what, to the best of my knowledge, is their first in 2002.

This is a great shame, not least for Heinz-Harald Frentzen, who, having been unceremoniously pitched out of Jordan at mid-season in 2001, and then having seen Prost, for whom he was due to drive this season, go under, was left with no alternative other than to sign for Arrows. The latest car is plainly not bad at all - and certainly a more competitive proposition than the highly-financed Jaguar, which uses the same Coworth V10 engine. Reliability, though, has been terrible, a perhaps inevitable consequence of no testing.

Whatever TWR's resources, it is most unlikely - to say the least! - that Walkinshaw would be willing effectively to spend his own money on propping up his F1 team. Remember the old adage that the best way to make a small fortune of out of motor racing is to start off with a large one... Simply, Arrows, like many other teams at the moment, is terribly short of cash, because sponsorship has taken a dive of late, thanks to the worldwide economic situation, further exacerbated by the events of September 11. And Tom is having to fork out for those Cosworth motors, remember, which will cost in the region of $20m for the season...



Dear Ian,

Yes, I think Damon could have won another World Championship; no, I don't think he 'remains underrated'.

It was an odd situation at Williams in 1996. Jacques Villeneuve was new, both to the team and to F1, and although Hill usually had the upper hand, particularly in the first half of the season, in the last few races Jacques - who won his fourth ever Grand Prix, let's not forget - came on increasingly strong, to the point that there was nothing between them.

That was just as well for Williams, who had decided - even before the start of the '96 season - that they would not be keeping Damon beyond the end of it. Why? Because at the end of 1995, Frank and Patrick Head had concluded that he should have won the championship that year, but had simply made too many mistakes, and was not the man they would need to take on Michael Schumacher, who was moving from Benetton to Ferrari. Hence, they signed Heinz-Harald Frentzen from Sauber a year ahead of time, to come into the team in 1997.

The great irony, of course, was that, had Hill driven in '95 as he did in '96, Williams would never have thought of dropping him. I can still remember the atmosphere in the team at Monza, when Damon - on course for the title - learned that he was to lose his drive at the end of the year. The situation was unfortunate, to say the least.

Had Hill stayed with Williams-Renault for 1997, would he have beaten Villeneuve to the title? Possibly, but not necessarily. Yes, Jacques made mistakes that year - but he also had some quite brilliant drives, and won seven races. Whatever, I don't agree that Damon would have 'eaten him for breakfast'. No way.

Neither do I think Damon is underrated by history, quite honestly. He was a superb driver, and on his day - as at wet Suzuka in 1994, for example - had greatness in him. But although his F1 career began late - when he was into his thirties - he spent four of his seven-and-a-bit seasons in a Williams-Renault, which was undoubtedly the thing to have in that period, and he came out of racing with 22 Grand Prix victories. There have been somewhat greater drivers, I would suggest, with far fewer wins against their names.



Dear Geoff,

At the end of last year, I asked Ron Dennis why he had decided to switch McLaren to Michelins, and this is what he said: "First of all, we have not switched to Michelin because we felt we couldn't win races on Bridgestones. The change was made because we wished strongly to take to a new level our technical understanding, in respect of the role played by the tyre in the performance of the car and its suspension. And that required a level of technical transparency that we could not achieve with Bridgestone, and we could achieve with Michelin. Linked to transparency is trust, and we couldn't achieve that with Bridgestone."

That distils to the fact that an open working relationship was more possible with Michelin than Bridgestone. But did Dennis think Bridgestone had shown perference to Ferrari? He pondered a moment or two. "Well...we always raced on the same tyres as they did. All F1 teams have levels of paranoia, and I don't think we're the exception. So you scratch your head, and you wonder... I have to say that we never came across any piece of factual evidence that would support the view that any team had any advantage over us. The decision was about the future, not the past."

If all the Bridgestone runners had the same tyres as each other, still the suspicion remained that those tyres were being tailored very much to suit the Ferrari, rather than any other car, and perhaps Ron suspected - rightly, I'm sure - that that situation would continue in 2002. As of now, Ferrari is the only major team to be using Bridgestones, so it's reasonable to assume that this year they truly do have 'bespoke' tyres. Frankly, for Bridgestone to take any other course would be illogical, for - barring Act of God - Ferrari are their only realistic hope of winning races this year.

Are Williams and McLaren at a disadvantage because Michelin take a more even-handed approach, rather than tailor their tyres to suit one specific car? No, I don't think so. It's perfectly true that Frank Williams was less than thrilled when he learned that McLaren were to use Michelins in 2002, but as ever he put a positive spin on it when we discussed it in December.

"The thing is, Michelin are here not to please the teams, but to please team owners like Renault and Toyota, and engine suppliers, like BMW and Mercedes - that's why they came back, to work closely with them, for all the obvious business reasons. Yes, it's true that Williams, and others, committed to Michelin as soon as they said they were coming back, and others didn't, but the writing was always on the wall: this is business, folks!

"I suppose to some extent that we've had to sit in a freezing room while the fire warmed up, but...putting that personal, spoiled brat, reaction aside, McLaren's presence will, I believe, help accelerate the pace of development.

"I wasn't altogether surprised at McLaren's switch, because I suspect that Ron was unhappy - uneasy - at sharing the same development programme with Ferrari, and, as well as that, he's always been a staunch Michelin supporter.

"We changed to Michelin because our technical philosophy has always been to have strong technical partners who worked with us, and for us, if you like. And to have a tyre company coming back into F1 - be it Goodyear or Michelin - and wanting to run with us as one of their leading teams was infinitely better than being one of 12, and definitely subordinate to Ferrari and McLaren. We had to make the move - it was the most obvious thing. Not a difficult choice at all.

"Our contract - and probably everyone else's - says that we all have parity, but, as is normal in these things, they will obviously focus their development on whichever team, or teams, that have the best chance of winning. I don't believe that anyone will get treated favourably - although if anyone did in '01, it was certainly us!"

To your last point: would the racing side of F1 be better off with a single tyre manufacturer again? Yes, perhaps. There's a school of thought that tyre wars muddy the picture, introduce another 'variable', into Grand Prix racing which it could well do without. That said, it's not as though we have a single engine supplier, is it? At the moment there are eight of them, with something approaching 100 horsepower between the best and the worst.

Tyre wars are good and bad, I think. When one company has a monopoly, development does not freeze, but undoubtedly - for reasons of cost - it cools a good deal. Competition between two or more companies, on the other hand, inevitably means softer compounds, which in turn means higher cornering speeds, which in turn means constant rule changes to keep those cornering speeds in some sort of check. And you will also get race weekends where one company gets it absolutely right - which means that teams using the other make are effectively out of contention. Given the current superiority of Bridgestone's wet tyre, for example, Michelin runners must necessarily dread the prospect of a rainy Sunday afternoon.

This last point - one tyre being markedly better than the other in a given race - can also, ironically, figure on the plus side, in terms of the World Championship, if not in terms of that Grand Prix. At present, for example, in light of the apparent superiority of the Ferrari F2002 that we must pray for plenty of 'Michelin' days this summer; we do not, after all, want the championship settled by mid-August, as was the case last year...



Dear Allan,

First of all, let's remember it was not only traction control which was once more 'legalised' at Barcelona 12 months ago, but also launch control and fully automatic gearboxes. Suddenly, the drivers had much less to do.

As to whether the racing has improved or regressed since these systems were officially allowed again, I think the fundamental problem with the quality of the racing lies elsewhere, quite honestly. Simply, I believe that 'aerodynamically-generated grip' is wagging the dog these days, that it should be hugely reduced, and that 'mechanically-generated grip' should be increased. In other words, I'd like to see diffusers, barge boards and so on, banned, and wing regulations substantially changed, and I'd like to see the cars back in 'wide track' specification, complete with slick tyres. A pipe dream, I know, but I do think F1 the regulations need a fundamental going over.

Max Mosley used to refer to the likes of traction control, launch control and fully automatic gearboxes as 'driver aids', and he was right - that's exactly what they are. He also used to say that, in his opinion, they had no place in something calling itself 'Grand Prix racing' - indeed, he banned all such devices at the end of 1993, and I was one of many who applauded loudly. Never found a driver who disagreed, either.

The problem, of course, is electronics. Not only is sophisticated software capable of performing certain tasks better than any human ever could; it is also well capable of being 'hidden', 'wiped', whatever you want to call it. As well as that, of course, in this day and age ultra-sophisticated engine mapping - while not strictly constituting 'traction control', as such - can achieve similar results. The question of what was 'legal' and what was not thus became furred.

Ron Dennis always maintained that traction control should be legalised on the grounds that you shouldn't have a rule you couldn't police, and, much as I hated the idea of software doing the job of the driver's right foot, I found it hard to argue against him. I'm sure that Max Mosley, deep down, has not changed his opinion about the desirability of 'driver aids' in F1, and that he legalised them once more only after accepting that the FIA was unable to police them satisfactorily. There is no doubt that all the rumour and innuendo about certain teams' 'cheating' was doing F1 a lot of no good.

In the end, while I accept that we're stuck with them, I think that 'driver aids' are bad for racing because they substantially reduce the mistakes a driver can make. Traction control, for example, makes the cars considerably easier to drive, particularly in the wet, and gear changing is now a thing of the past. Time was when you had to look after your clutch, and had to observe rev limits if you were not to blow your engine. Traditionally, it was said that the only way to pass at Monte Carlo, for example, was to pressure your rival into missing a shift. Can't happen now.

Earlier this year Frank Williams asked me if I still felt so militant about traction control. I said yes - but added that I was getting weary of being a voice in the wilderness. As I said, we're stuck with it. But if Ayrton Senna truly loathed the 'driver aids', there was a good reason - and that remains good enough for me. When he tested a CART Penske at the end of 1993, he loved it: "It's a human's car!" I don't care to see anything that diminishes the driver's role in our sport, and there's an end to it.



Dear Joe,

Yes, Imola was incredibly dull, as you say, but it happens sometimes, always has, and always will. However, I think there's a little more to it than the layout of the track, and in part I dealt with it in the answer to the previous question. Simply, the rules concerning aerodynamics militate against good racing, because they make overtaking so incredibly difficult. I'm not saying it should ever be easy - but certainly a little more so than it is at present.

As for Imola, yes, it's true that the current layout is not conducive to overtaking, but even before Ayrton Senna's fatal accident it had long been apparent that something needed to be done about Tamburello, which was a flat-out left-hander, with minimal run-off. An accident there was always going to be a big one, as such as Nelson Piquet, Michele Alboreto and Gerhard Berger discovered before 1994.

Problem was, nothing could be done about the run-off area, because behind that wall there is a river. Therefore, the corner had to be fundamentally changed, and it duly was.

That said, having put in a chicane at Tamburello, there was no need to insert a further one - ironically named after Gilles Villeneuve - on the blast down to Tosa, traditionally the best passing spot at the circuit. And I hear now that there is some question of removing the Villeneuve chicane before next year's race. Hope it comes to be.

As for dropping Imola from the World Championship, I'd be very sad to see that happen, because, as you say, the place has so much charm, and also a good deal of history. And, let's face it, if circuits lacking overtaking opportunities were dropped from F1, we'd have a pretty thin schedule, wouldn't we? The Hungaroring, for example, could have been binned the day after it was built.

Lest we forget, there was, of course, another reason why Imola was so boring: the Ferraris are too bloody quick...



Dear Andy,

Looking at one or two of the drivers who have been let into World Championship Grands Prix in the last 15 years or so, you might reasonably conclude that the rules concerning qualification for a Superlicence are...malleable, let's say. Either that, or they're simply not strict enough in the first place.

True enough, Alex Yoong does indeed seem somewhat out of his depth in F1, but I'm afraid you're deluding yourself if you believe that more trenchant requirements for a Superlicence would automatically lead to 'more chance of the best drivers getting into F1'.

Once in a while, a Senna or Prost or Schumacher or Montoya happens along, and their talent is so overpoweringly obvious that there is no need for them to entertain driving for the smaller teams - indeed, the big ones immediately fight over them.

For most drivers, though, it's not like that. To get into F1, they must start with a small team - and, given that small teams are perennially short of money, their chances are immeasurably increased if they can 'bring a budget'. And that, to be brutal about it, is why Yoong is in the Minardi team.

Sad to say, toughening up the requirements for a Superlicence would not in itself guarantee an F1 drive for guys like Justin Wilson. Life isn't like that these days - and perhaps it never was: even in the '50s, Enzo Ferrari was not averse to running the odd driver who could...pay his way, let's say.

In the case of Justin, there is an additional problem, of course, which is that his height effectively precludes his being able to share a T-car with another driver, and so that counts against him. On talent, I have little doubt that he belongs in F1, but unfortunately it ain't the Superlicence regs that have left him out in the cold.