Ask Nigel - August 2

Dear Marc,
I'm interested to know why you should describe Coulthard's start on Sunday as "merely protecting his position" by "swerving across the track". Where have those words come from? A newspaper or what? If David said them, I certainly didn't hear him.

In fact, he claimed that he "got too much wheelspin", and undeniably that was true. That said, however, I don't really doubt that he was making a big point at Hockenheim, trying to give Schumacher some idea of how it is to have a car come straight across your path - it is, after all, something Michael does on a regular basis, not least because starting is the only low card in his hand. The irony was that DC was so intent on doing it that it cost him time - and Hakkinen zapped past both of them...

After Schumacher's start at Magny-Cours, Coulthard and others went to see FIA Race Director Charlie Whiting in an attempt to establish what - and what was not - permissible. Whiting said that Michael had merely made use of the unwritten 'one move is allowed' rule, and thus had done nothing wrong. It wasn't the answer Coulthard and his colleagues had been hoping for, but at least now they knew where they stood.

I confess that I was as taken aback as they were. The FIA has been obsessive about safety in the last few years, to the point that now probably the most dangerous moment in a Grand Prix comes in the first few seconds because the cars are tightly bunched, and - thanks to the silly technical regulations and the layout of most of today's circuits - this is the best chance of overtaking the drivers are going to have all afternoon. When it comes to the start, though, it seems as though safety doesn't matter.

Having attended Grands Prix since I was a kid, more than 40 years ago, I don't think I need to be told that this is supposed to be a sport for men, rather than little children crying to whomever will listen. But I guess my idea of a sport for men is Ronnie Peterson flat out at the old Nurburgring in the wet, rather than somebody swerving at any driver presumptuous enough to try and pass him.

I'll say it again: I think Ayrton Senna, for all he was a genius, fundamentally rewrote the ethics of Grand Prix racing, and emphatically not for the better. And I think Schumacher has continued that tradition. Perhaps his most vociferous critic is Jacques Villeneuve, unquestionably the bravest driver around today. That should tell us something.

The paradox is that the huge advances in safety have led to the drivers' behaving more dangerously than would have been conceivable at one time. A great many drivers from the past actually feel that the sport is now too safe, in the sense that their modern counterparts feel invulnerable, and drive accordingly.

I asked Phil Hill, the 1961 World Champion, how he accounted for some of the 'tactics' employed today. He said this: "Well, they can get away with it, I guess. That's the only possible explanation. If guys drove like that in my time, they usually sorted themselves out pretty quickly with a big accident - or else somebody else did it for them. Some of the stuff that goes on today... I just don't know what to think. In my day, it was just unthinkable to touch another car - even accidentally! - because of the potential consequences. I know it sounds corny, but those were the facts."

As for 'crying to whomever will listen', when we finally have a major accident at the start - and, at this rate, assuredly we will - don't let us pretend we never saw it coming. In the early 80s, we wrote endlessly of the unnecessary danger of restricting cars to two sets of qualifying tyres, on the grounds that it effectively precluded their being able to back off, to abandon a quick lap. Nothing was done - and it was in precisely those circumstances th at Gilles Villeneuve crashed to his death.




Dear Tim,
You're not the only one who finds it "slightly tedious" to have McLaren and Ferrari so far clear of the rest - in fact, as one who gets on a plane every other week to go and see yet another re-run, I'd put it rather more strongly than that!

I could be wrong, but I don't see any other team consistently challenging them in the short term; looking a little further down the road, I can see increasing opposition to them coming from Williams-BMW and Jordan-Honda, and maybe from Benetton when it becomes Renault.

As things stand, the pity of it is that we positively know that, all things being equal, the first two rows will be occupied by Hakkinen, Coulthard, Schumacher and Barrichello - and we also know that one of them will win the race.

You're right: it is an absurdity that such as Villeneuve and Frentzen are left to fight over fifth place or whatever, but that's the way it is. The possibility no longer exists for a great driver in a good car to beat a good one in a great car. Think of last year: in a Ferrari, Eddie Irvine was almost able to win the World Championship!

All that said, you can hardly blame McLaren and Ferrari for simply doing the job better - it's up to the rest to improve to the point that they can offer a serious challenge. To shake up the staleness which has set in, what we need for 2001 is Villeneuve and Juan Pablo Montoya in competitive cars - and I'd add Alesi, too. In the right machinery, Jean would still be formidable.




Dear Simon,
When we're talking of "favourite driver pairings", what do we mean - two really good guys, or two really great drivers? If it's the former, I'd go with Berger and Alesi, and also suggest that Renault's pairing of Derek Warwick and Patrick Tambay in 1984 and 85, would take a bit of beating; if the latter, you'd have to choose Fangio/Moss or Senna/Prost.

I agree with your other choices, as well, particularly Andretti/Peterson and Villeneuve/Reutemann. And what of Moss and Brooks at Vanwall together in 1957 and 58 (together with the underrated Stuart Lewis-Evans)? Ten Grands Prix counted for the World Championship in 1958; Moss won at Buenos Aires, Zandvoort, Oporto and Casablanca, and Brooks at Spa, the Nurburgring and Monza. Not too shabby a record, that - even if, thanks to the points system, they were both beaten to the title by Mike Hawthorn, whose Ferrari won only at Reims...




Dear Ben,
I doubt it! For one thing, Bernie has about as much interest in the past as I have in Leo Blair (or his father, for that matter); for another, I suspect that, for a TV company, such a project might prove... how can I put this... costly.

Like you, I have long taped the Grands Prix - or at least the highlights - and have pretty well every one since 1980, when first I bought a video recorder.

Prior to that, who knows how much footage of the Grands Prix exists - and where? Countless people have told me, for example, that they have never - before or since - seen anything to rival the coverage of Jochen Rindt's incredible chase of Jack Brabham in the closing laps of the 1970 Monaco Grand Prix. The angles at which that Lotus 49 was thrown through Casino Square is something they have never forgotten, but I never saw it - because I was there at the race, watching at the Gasworks Hairpin, where Brabham hit the barrier on the last lap!

Years ago at one of the races I asked a BBC man if someone could do me a video of Monaco 1970, and he said he'd look into it. Back came the answer: the tape no longer existed - it had been re-used (the company's regular habit in those days) for a qualifying round of the Horse of the Year Show...

Maybe, maybe, in Italy or France or wherever, that footage still exists, but, if so, I have never seen it. It would be very high on my list of re-runs, together with Gilles Villeneuve and Rene Arnoux at Dijon in 79 (of course!), Stewart and Rindt at Silverstone in 69, Clark making up a whole lap on the leaders at Monza in 67, Moss holding off the Ferraris at Monaco or the Nurburgring in 61, and Fangio's pursuit of Hawthorn and Collins at the Nurburgring in 57.

As I say, though, how much of this stuff exists? Really, it's only in the last 20 years or so - in this country, anyway - that the Grands Prix have been televised as a matter of course.




Dear Jon,
An interesting question. Yes, with minimal experience, Jenson Button has come straight into F1 and done a very reasonable job, as you say; he's clearly very talented, if not perhaps, as some rather precipitately suggested, 'the next Senna'.

Conversely, his predecessor at Williams, Alex Zanardi, did a wonderful job in CART, yet flopped when he returned to F1. The modern Grand Prix car, he said, with its narrow track and grooved tyres, was decidedly not to his taste.

Ron Dennis recently suggested that today's F1 car was harder to drive than anything in the past, but those who have driven both - like Jean Alesi - laugh at that. So, what to believe?

For one thing, the format of a Grand Prix itself is far more simplistic today than it was, a matter of sprint-stop-sprint-stop-sprint. Physically, that makes it very tough for a driver, but he has less mental work to do these days, because he has people on the other end of a radio to do that for him - to tell him when to speed up and put in some quick laps, for example, because he's coming in for fuel and tyres soon, and so-and-so's already made his stop.

As well as that, because his car is in light 'sprint' mode at all times, he needs to give relatively little thought to saving his brakes or tyres - and none at all to his clutch or gearbox: when the lights come on, he flicks a lever, and that's it. As Alesi points out, time was when Monte Carlo was effectively a one-handed race track, because your right hand was always occupied with the gear lever.

I don't belittle the task facing today's Grand Prix drivers - far from it - but I do believe that the jump to F1 is rather less now than once was the case. To come - as say, Gerhard Berger did - straight from an F3 car to a turbocharged F1 car, producing 1100bhp for racing, and perhaps 1400 for qualifying, must have been extraordinarily daunting.

Then, too, the driver had to weigh up the many different options that were constantly available to him, not least using his fuel allocation wisely and selecting the right tyre compounds for the right moment in a race. What made the races more interesting then, of course, was that different cars tended to be quick at different points in the afternoon, and that made the races rather less predictable than the 'packaged for TV' events we have now.





Dear Peter,
Yes, you're quite right, BAR has indeed done very much better this year than last - but then that was probably no more than inevitable. In 1999, after all, the team failed to score a single point.

By and large, it is a truism of Formula 1 that the second year for a new team tends to be harder than the first - Jackie Stewart, as you say, and Eddie Jordan, too, can tell you all about that.

Both Stewart and Jordan had surprisingly successful first seasons, so it wasn't too difficult to go briefly downhill; BAR, though, made a lamentable showing. What made it worse was that one of the world's top drivers - Jacques Villeneuve - was on board, and that the PR blurb put out in advance rather suggested that BAR was ready to take on the world, and beat it. As a consequence, there was an unusual degree of glee from the other teams at BAR's poor showings.

This year, though, there have been clear signs of lessons learned. For one thing, the build-up to the season was rather more low-key; for another, even though the BAR chassis significantly lacks mechanical grip, it has Honda's V10 to push it along. Villeneuve's speed and commitment has somehow never been compromised through 18 very difficult months, and I hope he doesn't have cause to regret his decision to sign a new contract.




Dear David,
Clearly, we're not alone! In the Hockenheim paddock last weekend, I was amazed by how many people said they agreed with me about British Eurosport's CART coverage. Like me - and perhaps you - they, too, had installed the digital equipment specially because they'd been told they would need it if they wished to see all the CART races live and in full.

When it comes to complaining to British Eurosport, you're obviously far more of a zealot that I! On occasion, my blood pressure rising dangerously as a penalty shoot-out between Ghana and Christmas Island eats into the opening laps of Long Beach or wherever, I have telephoned them - and on occasion actually got an answer. Not that it did me any good, of course. I'm grateful that they televise the CART races - just wish they'd do it better.

Yes, my heart will always be with Formula 1 first, I suppose, but I've always loved Champ Car racing, too, back to the days when it was sanctioned by USAC. Thanks to clashing schedules - and lack of time - I rarely get to more than one CART race a year, and this season haven't been to any: Milwaukee, which usually fits perfectly (the weekend before the Canadian Grand Prix), was run the same day as Monaco.

I was delighted when it was announced that there would be a CART race in England next year, but initially a touch concerned to learn that it would be in September - first, because of the weather, and second, because I feared it would clash with a Grand Prix.

Back in October 1978, two USAC races were run here, at Silverstone and Brands Hatch, and they clashed with the Canadian and American Grands Prix. On that occasion, I skipped Montreal and Watkins Glen, and covered the USAC events.

The first date I heard for the Rockingham race in 2001 was September 15, and at that my heart sank, for it was also the date of the Italian Grand Prix, and Monza is the one race weekend I could never bring myself to miss. Imagine my pleasure, then, when Gordon Kirby told me that, no, it is to be Lausitzring on September 15, with Rockingham the following weekend - when there is no Grand Prix.

Monza, however, is one thing. If it were a matter of missing, say, Barcelona or the Nurburgring or Budapest, I wouldn't hesitate for a second...