Ask Nigel: August 22

Dear Ivan,
A marvellous bloke, Mo Nunn, and one I've known for going on 30 years.

These days he operates his own team - Mo Nunn Racing - in the CART Champ Car series. Based in Indianapolis, the outfit campaigns Reynard-Hondas for Tony Kanaan and Alex Zanardi. Nunn's partners in the venture are Bruce McCaw, the president of PacWest Racing, and Rod Campbell, a Detroit marketing executive, whose links with Mo go back to the Ensign Formula 1 days.

It's all a far cry from the last team Morris owned. Ensign competed in Formula 1 from 1973 to 1982, and even by the standards of the day operated on a minimal budget. There never was any doubt that Mo's involvement stemmed primarily from a love of racing.

In fact, he was a pretty good driver himself. "Until I was 24," he said, "I'd never even been to a race, never given it a thought. Then I happened to see a Cooper-Climax in a showroom window, and I bought it, for £850, and went racing. By 1966, I was in Formula 3, which was incredibly competitive in those days, and three years later Colin Chapman offered me a drive in the factory Lotus F3 team."

In his last race for Chapman, at Brands Hatch, Nunn won, beating such as James Hunt and Francois Cevert in the process, and he hoped that maybe an F1 drive with Lotus might be forthcoming. When it failed to materialise, he thought things through, and reasoned that he was probably not going to make it all the way as a driver.

"I didn't want to stop, but I didn't see how I could progress to the next stage. I was already 31, and there wasn't much sponsorship around in those days - you couldn't just go and buy a drive. There were only 16 or 18 cars competing in F1, and drivers tended to stay put. Unless someone got killed, there just weren't any spaces in there.

"After deciding to stop driving, I didn't know what the hell to do with my life. I was 32, with a wife and children, and I just sat at home, staring at the fire. Then one day it came to me: there was another way into F1. I could build my own car eventually, become a constructor..."

Logically, the best way to start was with what he knew, F3, and in today's ultra high-tech world his memories of those days seem more than faintly surreal.

"I had my savings - about £800 - and I went along to a firm nearby, in Walsall, and bought a load of one-inch square tube. Then I got back to the garage, sat on the floor, said to myself, 'This is how wide I want it at the bottom', laid two tubes down there, and went along like that.

"Then I started to measure, cutting up the steel as I sat there, and I tacked it, and worked out where the dash was going to go, things like that. Not one thing was drawn on that car! Then I started to make the chassis..."

The car was finally finished in November 1970, and taken to Silverstone; within 10 laps it broke the F3 lap record, and the following year won several races. Then, before the '72 season, a big break came Nunn's way.

"I heard about this wealthy guy, Rikki von Opel, who'd just ordered a couple of Marches. I worked out that, for the same money, I could run him in a works Ensign, and called him up.

"He had a flat in Grosvenor Square, and our appointment was for 8.30 in the morning. There he was, sitting alone at this huge table, servants waiting on him, breakfast all laid out - I'd never seen anything like this! I told him my proposition, and said it would cost £9000. He agreed immediately."

Von Opel was no great shakes as a racing driver, but he tested assiduously, and eventually began to win the odd race. "Then we began to talk about 1973," Nunn remembered. "We were driving to Thruxton in his Rolls - he and his girlfriend were in the back, and I was driving - and we were discussing F2 and F5000, and couldn't make a decision. Then I suddenly said, 'What about F1?' By the time we got to the hotel, it was all agreed!"

After a single season in F1 with Ensign, von Opel accepted an invitation to spend his money elsewhere in 1974, and departed to Bernie Eccestone's Brabham team. The parting with Nunn was entirely amicable. "Rikki was very good to me. He'd bankrolled the whole thing, and he took his Cosworth engines to Bernie, but he left me with the cars, and said I could run someone else."

Over the next few years, a number of drivers came and went the way of Ensign, but it wasn't until the middle of 1975, when Morris persuaded Chris Amon, late of Ferrari and Matra, to come out of semi-retirement, that the team truly began to progress.

"Chris was a fantastic driver. He always reckoned he was long past his best when he drove for us, but we made tremendous progress with him. We had no sponsorship at that time, and couldn't afford to go testing, but Chris was incredibly quick, and always used to qualify near the front. I think he'd lost some of his determination to race by then, though; I wish we'd run together a few years earlier."

It amuses me now, as teams' pre-season presentations get ever glitzier, to think back to the 'launch' of the Ensign in 1976. Three people were present: Nunn, Amon and myself. Chris and I had driven up to Walsall, to the little garage, and Mo opened the doors, and rolled out this gorgeous little red car.

Producing my camera, I suggested they pose with the car, and the proprietor, seeking to fend off the cold, went to find a jacket. The only one to hand bore the logo of an oil company.

Even with my non-commercial mind, I could see a problem here. "Morris," I said, "you can't wear that." He wanted to know why. "Well, because the only sponsorship you have on the car is Valvoline - a different oil company." He was a bit nonplussed: "D'you think they'd mind?"

It was an endearing facet of Mo's personality, that lack of awareness of the commercial aspects of motor racing. The man you meet today is very much more worldly, but still genial and friendly, still one who regards this primarily as a sport.

After Amon's retirement, he signed another ex-Ferrari driver, Clay Regazzoni, and the two became firm friends. "He wasn't as talented a driver as Chris, but all his racing motivation was intact, and we had a marvellous time together in '77."

Regazzoni would leave, first for Shadow, then for Williams, but he returned to Ensign in 1980, only to crash disastrously at Long Beach, suffering injuries which have since confined him to a wheelchair. It was, not surprisingly, the worst day of Nunn's professional career.

At the end of 1983, broke and disillusioned by the path F1 was following, Morris closed Ensign's doors for good, and went off to America in search of a new life. Assuredly, he must be one of few Grand Prix constructors to leave the business poorer than when he started. "When I went to the States," he said, "I had my Barclaycard, and that was about it."

For all that, it was the best move he ever made. Immediately he got a job with George Bignotti's team, and he has worked in Indycar racing ever since. By 1989 he was with Patrick Racing, whose lead driver was Emerson Fittipaldi, and it was a moment of supreme satisfaction for him, when Emerson took the team's Penske to victory in the Indianapolis 500 - in the process beating the factory cars, of course.

The drivers who have worked with Nunn express an extraordinary faith in his ability. "Mo's background was European racing," said Fittipaldi, "yet, for some reason, his real genius lies in making a car handle on the ovals. I've never really understood that, but it's a fact: no one I ever worked with had that same ability, and it was fantastic for a driver's confidence, because at a place as quick as Indy or Michigan, you really need a car that's working with you."

After leaving Patrick, Morris worked for Vince Granatelli in 1991, then joined Chip Ganassi the following year. It was to be a long and hugely successful association, the team winning the drivers' championship four years on the trot, with Jimmy Vasser (1996), Alex Zanardi (1997 and 1998), and Juan Montoya (1999).

Eventually, though, the challenge of running his own team again proved irresistible to Nunn, and I have to confess that surprised me at the time.

In 1998 Morris told me at Milwaukee how much he enjoyed working with Zanardi, and suggested that, as and when Alex left to go to F1, he would probably call it a day. It was the constant travel, he said, that had started to wear him down. Very happily married, for the second time, he had his beautiful house in Florida, his Ferrari, his obsession with getting his golf handicap down...

"The thing is, financially I'm all right now," he said. "I can stop work. I'm over 60, and I admit that, after all these years, I've got sick and tired of the way the airlines screw you around. That's been my biggest problem, and I got to the point of thinking, 'I've had enough of this'."

When Zanardi announced his intention to leave (for what proved to be a disastrous spell with Williams), Nunn did indeed tell Ganassi that he was going to stop at the end of the '98 season. "Then Chip calls one day, and he says, 'Morris, Alex is going to test the Williams at Barcelona. Would you like to see him test? And they've got this other kid there, this Montoya' - who I'd never heard of - 'and we could have a look at him at the same time. He's a possibility for the future'.

"Well, because I was going to quit, I said, 'Oh, Chip, I've just finished the season - I don't want to spend another day on an aeroplane.' He says, 'Well, think about it.' Then, two or three days later, he rings again, and he says, 'Well, what if we went on Concorde?' I said, 'OK!' I always wanted to go on Concorde, just once, so really that the only reason I went.

"So we got to Barcelona, and I met Juan, and spent two days trying to figure out whether he was arrogant or just very confident. I went out on the circuit, and started watching him carefully, and I was very impressed; he was ahead of the car - he knew what it was going to do, and was making the corrections to allow for it.

"I went back to Chip, and said, 'This kid may be over-driving a bit, but he's got incredible car control'. I suggested we give him a test, and he was very quick right off - in fact, a little bit scary, especially in his first run on a oval. We were telling to slow down, and he insisted he was taking it easy.

"I said, 'Don't give me any bullshit. You've got to slow down - you're making me nervous!' He wouldn't have it, so I quietly told the guys to fill the car right up with gas, then I said, 'Right, that'll slow you down - now go and learn the bloody track...'

"He's a very calm young man. Perfect Formula 1 material. I thought he could win by Long Beach, and Chip signed him up. Then I felt a little bit guilty about quitting. I'd tested with him, after all, and they were all saying, 'Come on, we can win the championship four times running...'

"I thought, 'Well, if Chip tells me to get lost, I'll just go and play golf'. So I asked him for a big chunk of money, and then said I wanted a private 'plane at my disposal: no problem, he organised a Lear for me!

"So in the end I stayed, and I'm glad I did. And now, far from thinking about leaving the business, here I am with my own team. Long way from the Ensign days, though, isn't it?"





Dear Iain,
Being part of the '60s generation, my tastes in rock music not surprisingly incline more towards the Beatles and the Stones than Robbie Williams, so I don't have a clue about his Supreme single, I'm afraid, let alone a video of it.

However, the film of which you speak is called 'Weekend of a Champion', and it covers in detail Jackie Stewart's Monaco Grand Prix of 1971. Roman Polanski was a great friend of Stewart's, which was how the movie got to be made in the first place; he directed it, and conducted all the interviews with JYS.

I've seen it many times over the years, and remember once talking to Ken Tyrrell about it. The Grand Prix in question was actually the second race I ever covered, and at the time it looked like a straightforward Stewart weekend. He started from the pole, took the lead from the start, and stayed there to the finish, in the process shaving a full second from the lap record.

"He was ill, you know, physically sick in the last part of the race," Tyrrell said, "but that's a matter of record. What no one outside the team knew about, though, was his other problem. In the last bit of the film, you see him lock a wheel into Station Hairpin - not the sort of mistake he would normally make.

"There was a reason for that... At the end of the warm-up lap he told the mechanics there was something wrong with the brakes, and they found the brake balance bar was broken - actually broken! There was no time to do anything about it then, of course, so he had to get on and race with it like that. And for the whole of the Monaco Grand Prix he had no rear brakes at all! He did the entire race - at Monaco, of all places - with front brakes only. Afterwards we removed the rear pads, and they were like new, untouched..."

This story comes back to me periodically, usually when I hear of a driver retiring from a race because he was, 'Unhappy with the handling...'




Dear Paul,
The 'FISA-FOCA War' was fought out in the winter of 1980/81, between Jean-Marie Balestre, newly elected as president of the FIA's sporting arm (FISA), and the daunting combo of Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley (representing FOCA). Balestre felt that FOCA's power had grown way too much, and it was time for the governing body to start governing again.

After a lot of sabre-rattling talk about a breakaway championship, and the like, compromise was reached, and thus the first Concorde Agreement was drawn up, in April 1981. Announced as 'a working document, under which Formula 1 is run,' it was swathed in secrecy from the beginning, but its essentials were clear.

One was that, "The FIA is the sole international body governing motor sport. Its Statutes have delegated this power to FISA, which governs the organisation of the FIA Formula 1 World Championship, which is the exclusive property of the FIA."

Fine. But there was a trade-off, the governing body granting, "The exclusive right for FOCA to enter into contracts with the organisers/promoters of FIA F1 World Championship events, in the best interests of all competitors." Henceforth, in other words, Balestre (FISA) would look after the rules, and Ecclestone (FOCA) the deals.

Ultimately, of course, the poachers moved into the gamekeeper's lodge. Bernie still does the deals - and, for the last 10 years, Max and himself have also been the lynchpins of the FIA!




Dear John,
No, it's not a stupid question. Most of the F1 teams make a profit - in varying degrees, of course - but if you'd care to talk just now to, say, Alain Prost or Paul Stoddart (of Minardi), they will tell you that making ends meet is not the work of the moment for a team without major sponsorship.

Sponsorship apart, many of the major teams which have 'an engine partner' receive income from them; that apart, all the teams' major source of income is from TV monies from across the world, which are negotiated, on the FIA's behalf, by Bernie Ecclestone, and from which, of course, he takes a very sizeable slice.




Dear Helen,
Down the years, the World Championship scoring system has changed many times. For a long period, for example, a race winner got only eight points, so that the gap between first and second (two points) was no more than that between second and third. Ridiculous, that always seemed, and later the winner's reward was increased to nine points, then finally to 10.

There used, at one time, too, to be a point for the driver setting the fastest lap, and I always liked that idea. Apart from anything else, if you had a problem which killed your chances in the race, and that problem could be fixed, you could still get something from the day.

These days you get to keep every single point you score, but it wasn't always so; back in 1988, for example, Alain Prost scored 105 points, to Ayrton Senna's 94, yet Senna won the World Championship 90-87, because it was based on a driver's best 11 results in the 16 races. Alain had seven wins, and seven second places, yet lost the title to Ayrton, who had eight wins, and three second places. Didn't seem quite fair at the time, and it still doesn't.

However, I think there is a good case to be made for changing the system, along the lines of CART, where points are awarded like this: 1st , 2nd , 3rd , 4th , 5th , 6th , 7th , 8th , 9th , 10th , 11th , 12th . Personally, I think there should be a greater discrepancy than that between the points for first, second, third, fourth and fifth, but I like the general idea of rewarding more than only the first six finishers, as in F1. I'd like to see the FIA award points down to, say, 10th.

Quite apart from anything else, it would give the smaller teams some tangible sign of their worth. No one ever remembers who finished seventh or lower in a race, because their positions are not reflected in the point standings, and with Ferrari, McLaren and Williams delivering as they are, in the normal course of events it needs at least one of those six cars to retire for anyone else to score even a single point. For engine manufacturers, in particular, this can be dispiriting, to say the least.