Ask Nigel: April 3

Nigel received many questions regarding the first lap Interlagos clash. This is the subject of Fifth Column in AUTOSPORT magazine this week so, to avoid repetition, we have not published his views in this column. To check out Nigel's opinion, see this week's magazine, on sale from Thursday.



Dear Michael,

Good question, isn't it? I'm sure that if Michael Schumacher has any say in the matter - and we know that, in all matters Ferrari, Michael has more say than anyone short of Luca di Montezemolo - then, yes, Barrichello will stay. Given that this is a team with a very firm, unquestioned, number one, Rubens has shown himself the ideal 'other driver', for he is very quick in his own right, an extremely hard worker, and also honest and loyal, both to Ferrari and to Schumacher.

Michael and Rubens get along well, too, and have a better rapport than Schuey had with, say, Eddie Irvine. All these things being so, he could wish for no better team mate than Barrichello.

Ross Brawn also rates him highly: "Rubens is a bit up and down in qualifying, but at his best he gets as close to Michael as anyone has ever been - closer than, say, Eddie Irvine was. I like Rubens a lot, and I think he's a very talented racing driver, but of course he's in the shadow of Michael, and it tends to reflect on him somewhat."

This is not, of course, any guarantee that Barrichello will stay for a fourth season. For one thing, Montezemolo and Jean Todt may have other ideas, although it is frankly difficult to see who they could get who would be both better - and acceptable to Michael.

As well as that, anyone in whom they might be seriously interested - notably Juan Montoya or perhaps Fernando Alonso - is already contracted elsewhere. I know that these days it is said that a contract is nothing that can't be made to go away if enough gelt is offered, but I somewhat doubt that Frank Williams, for example, would be prepared to let Montoya go. It is not, after all, simply a matter of losing a driver, but also of having that driver working against you in the future.

Is it possible, then, that Barrichello might himself decide on a move? Yes, it is - but I think it's unlikely. At any given time, there are never more than two or three teams worth driving for, in the sense of possibly winning races, and if Rubens were to leave Ferrari, it's pretty unlikely he could find a berth with either Williams or McLaren.

In some ways, he's in an invidious position. Yes, he's a firm number two - whatever Ferrari might publicly say - and all that that entails: in Austria last year he plain outdrove Michael, yet was ordered to give up his second place to him on the run up to the line. He didn't like it, but still he did it.

On the other hand, is he better off as a Ferrari number two than he would be as number in most teams? Undoubtedly, yes. It seems a silly thing to say just now, when his car has failed him in the last two Grands Prix, but as a general rule a Ferrari is more reliable than any other car, which guarantees you a bundle of points over a season, and perhaps - on the rare occasions when Schumacher's car fails him - the odd victory here and there.

Put it this way: in four years with Ferrari, Irvine had four wins, and scored 156 points, which averages out at 39 per season. Since the team dispensed with his services, and he moved - granted, at unbelievable money - to Jaguar, as number one driver, he has scored 13 points in two and a bit seasons...



Dear Fred,

It's a pretty good crop of rookies this year, I think. It's particularly gratifying to see Allan McNish going so well in the Toyota, because he's already 32 years old - as was Damon Hill when he got his chance with Williams in 1993 - and is showing that they were right who said he should have been in F1 years ago.

Mark Webber, too, is something of a known quantity, for he had already made something of a name for himself in F3000. In a team as 'financially disadvantaged' as Minardi, it's not easy to make a great impression, but it can be done, as Fernando Alonso proved last year. Mark got off to a terrific start in Melbourne, and just last weekend, at Interlagos, he out-qualfied Bernoldi's Arrows. Very promising.

So, too, is Takuma Sato, but at present he's trying too hard, perhaps over-driving, and making too many mistakes. In time, he'll learn that, to some degree, 'slower is faster', but the fundamental talent is there, of that there's no doubt, and he certainly shows more potential than any other Japanese driver to date.

Last, Felipe Massa, and here perhaps is the biggest surprise, because, as with Kimi Raikkonen last year, Sauber brought in a young driver of strictly limited experience, and he is proving extremely quick and confident. The Brazilians are calling him 'the next Senna', which is a very heavy yoke for a 20-year-old to carry, but undoubtedly he's a boy with a big career before him.



Dear Gordon,

This is going back more than 20 years, but I will always think it a pity that we never saw AJ Foyt and Parnelli Jones, in their prime, in F1 cars. Jackie Stewart still believes Parnelli was the best he ever saw at Indianapolis: "He was incredible - he drove like silk around there. It would have been fascinating to see him in an F1 car."

Concentrating on the last 20 years, however, the name that screams out to me is that of Rick Mears. Many consider Mears the best oval racer there has ever been, but - until his Sanair accident, in which he severely injured his feet and ankles - he was also a very considerable road racer. As Stewart says of Parnelli, so Rick drove 'like silk', and I think his style would have suited F1 to a tee.

In fact, he did drive an F1 car once. At Riverside, in 1980, he tested a Brabham BT49. This was a car very different from anything he had driven before - this was the 'ground effect' era in F1, and the cars had aerodynamic 'skirts', together with virtually no suspension - yet Mears, on very brief acquaintance with it, lapped faster than the car's regular driver, Nelson Piquet. Herbie Blash, conducting the test, was stunned. "To this day," he says, "I think of Rick Mears as the great lost World Champion." Herbie has been around the block a time or two: his words have weight.

Mears was 27 at the time, and a great career in F1 seemed to be beckoning. My understanding is that an offer was made by Brabham (then owned by Bernie Ecclestone), but that when Rick learned he would have to bring money to the team, he decided, on balance, no thank you very much. He had, after all, already won the Indianapolis 500 once, and a career with Roger Penske looked more inviting. Now retired these many years, he works for RP still.



Dear Antonio,

Much as I'd like to agree with you, I somewhat doubt that Carlos Pace could have been World Champion in 1977, with the Brabham-Alfa BT45 - in fact, I doubt that anyone could! As John Watson frequently showed, it was a very quick car, but also a chronically unreliable one, and I don't think Carlos, or anyone else, would have been able to score many points with it. By the end of the season, Watson had only nine - six of them scored in one race, at Dijon - and Niki Lauda, who won the World Championship, had 72...

As you say, I think there are comparisons to be made between Pace and Chris Amon, both of whom were 'talented, but unlucky', but I have to say that, on natural ability, I think Chris was better than Carlos.

They were very similar in many ways, both very quick, both with a lot of flair, both fun-loving characters - and both perhaps not as fit as they might have been!

As a matter of interest, both Amon and Pace were once in line for the same drive. By mid-1974, Chris's own Amon F1 project, disastrous from the start, had virtually disintegrated, and when Rikki von Opel - Brabham's wealthy renta-driver - decided to retire from racing, Amon was asked to partner Carlos Reutemann in the team. Feeling he should remain loyal to his financial partner, John Dalton, Chris turned down the offer - whereupon Bernie Ecclestone signed Pace, and there he stayed for the remainder of his career.



Dear Robert,

I can't disagree with you! There are those who insist that it is unrealistic to expect geniuses to conform to patterns of behaviour considered normal in the real world, and there have been times, I must admit, when it has seemed to me that a great racing driver needs qualities that might be considered...insufferable in, say, a colleague or a neighbour.

It is invariably said that common to all the great drivers is a fundamental arrogance, ego, call it what you will, but this is not strictly true. When I interviewed Juan Manuel Fangio in the late '70s, for example, what struck me more than anything was his humility - and this was a man who had won five World Championships, and virtually 50% of all the Grands Prix in which he drove!

Although I met Jimmy Clark a couple of times, it was only as a worshipping fan, for he died at Hockenheim in 1968, and I didn't begin working as a journalist until 1971. Therefore, I have no personal recollections of him, beyond the fact that he was charming on the occasions when I briefly spoke to him.

I have, however, talked at length over the years with people who knew him well, and there seems no doubt that Jimmy - while very well aware of his place in his sport - was indeed in the Fangio mould, essentially a shy man who could simply do this one thing better than anyone else on earth. "It came so easily to him," Brian Hart once told me, "that I really don't think he could understand what all the fuss was about. I'm sure he wondered why everyone else had such trouble getting near him!"

"Part of it," said Jackie Stewart, "was that Jimmy absolutely loved driving anything he could get his hands on. We'd do the Tasman Series in the winter, and you'd find all kinds of weird and wonderful 'specials' down there. He'd drive things I wouldn't even sit in! He just couldn't help himself, and it always amazed me that Colin Chapman let him do those things.

"The truth was that, in a car, Jimmy liked to show off a bit, and that was in total contrast to his normal character. He dreaded making speeches, for example, and you had to push him into a VIP lounge at an airport. He'd never do it on his own."

These days, of course, we talk frequently about the relationship between Michael Schumacher and Ross Brawn, and there is no doubt that the one has contributed hugely to the successes of the other: they complement each other perfectly. But the relationship between Clark and Colin Chapman was perhaps the most potent racing has known. Never, in his eight seasons of Formula 1, did Jimmy race other than a Lotus.

I spoke only once with Chapman about him. It was the late '70s, a decade after Hockenheim, and still it was difficult for Colin to accept Clark's loss. "For me," he said, "Jimmy will always be the best. In time someone else will come along, and everyone'll hail him as the greatest. But not me."

These days, Grand Prix drivers almost never race elsewhere, but Clark - like Stirling Moss and Mario Andretti - excelled in everything. "Think of Indy," Chapman mused, "and the sports cars, F2, saloon car races with the Lotus Cortina...

"Once or twice Jimmy came close to retiring, and I had mixed feelings: the idea of going racing without him was almost unthinkable, but at the same time I desperately didn't want him to hurt himself."

You could never confuse Chapman with an overly compassionate man, but clearly Clark had a place alone in his affections. "He had more effect on me than anyone else I've ever known," he said. "Apart from his genius as a racing driver, he was genuinely a good man - intelligent, honest, rather old-fashioned in many ways, almost humble. Racing changed for me after '68."

This was a side of Chapman I had never seen before, nor ever would again. We were in his office at Ketteringham Hall, and at one point he almost broke down. When his secretary brought in tea, he turned away, pretending to look for something while composing himself.

Years later, at a Silverstone test day, I was having lunch with Alain Prost in the McLaren motorhome. As rain battered the windows, we fell to talking about heroes. At the time of Clark's death, Alain had been 13 years old, playing about with karts.

"I saw Jim as someone fantastic," he said, "so much better than anyone else, so smooth, so easy. Something I have always admired is a guy who's really quick, but doesn't look it. Stewart was the same. But I think maybe Clark was the best ever."

Think of 1965: 10 races in the World Championship, your six best results to count. At the Nurburgring Clark took his sixth win, putting a seal on the title by early August.

The race was actually the seventh of the year, but Jimmy had missed Monaco - he was in Indianapolis that weekend, winning the 500...