Ask Nigel: August 29

Dear Terry,
I don't necessarily think Schumacher expects Ferrari to dominate the next few years - it's surely inconceivable, for example, that McLaren-Mercedes will screw up next season as much as they have done this one, and, as you say, there's no doubt that Williams-BMW are on the rise.

More likely, I think, is that Michael, when talking of 'a new era at Ferrari', was referring to the stability the team has achieved in the recent past. That, to my mind, has been decisive in the successes which have come their way. Through most of the team's history, 'stability' has been conspicuously lacking, after all!

The other weekend, in Budapest, I talked to Ross Brawn about life at Ferrari these days; this is a little of what he had to say.

"For the last few years, apart from the challenge of trying to build a new car for the following season, we've been faced with championships that have run through to the end of the current one - every year. So we've had to keep developing the car we've got, along with designing a new one, and I think it's a bit of a measure of the depth of an organisation if you're able to achieve that. With all due respect, you've got a number of teams which don't have to make that effort, because they get to a certain stage of the season, and they say, 'Well, that's it now for this year - we'll get on with next year's car'. Teams like ourselves, McLaren, Williams, we can't afford to do that - we have to develop all the way through to the last race. Even this year we're doing it - and it pleases me that at Ferrari now we have the depth of organisation to do that.

"We've got very, very good stability in the organisation now. This is Rory Byrne's fifth season, for example. Guys like Paulo Martinelli, Aldo Costa, Giorgio Ascanelli, have been at Ferrari longer than I have, and that goes for a lot of others, too. We don't have many changes, fortunately, and I think that brings a lot of stability to the team - you know each other's strengths and weaknesses, when to push, when to hold back.

"It was in the knowledge that that organisation was going to stay together for a good many years to come that I was very happy to agree to stay. And I think the fact that we did all agree to stay helped this year a lot. Actually, it was all done a long time before it was announced.

"We looked at last year's car, went over it bit by bit, said this needed improving, and that needed changing - it was another evolution, not a revolution. In my mind, the cars have been getting better and better and better - and I think next year's car will be even stronger, from what I've seen of what we're doing.

"As for the drivers, well, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Michael's greatest single quality is that he drives at 100 percent the whole time he's in the car. The thing about Michael is that he just enjoys it so much - and people don't always see that. I mean, he loves driving a racing car, and he loves racing.

"I don't detect any lessening in that at all. He's just committed to a new contract, and it wasn't a difficult process, I promise you. We've just had a break, since Hockenheim, and I know he's been doing some karting - he just loves driving. You say to him, 'Have a couple of weeks off, Michael', between the races, and you'll get a phone call after a few days: 'How's the testing going? Any chance of trying it?' And he'll be down! With some drivers, you've got to give them a schedule for the whole year, and pick out the days they're going to go testing - and then if you change it, it's, 'Oh, I've made my holiday plans', or, 'I was going to do this or do that'. I'm afraid my reaction to that sort of thing has always been, 'Look, mate, this is your job'...

"It will be very difficult to work with another driver after Michael, because his professionalism, his level of ability, all those things...I mean, he's just the best, so of course if you haven't got the best, it's more difficult. People know Michael is committed, and doing the best job he can, so naturally the people around him do the same - you don't have to motivate people very much when he's around.

"It's very difficult to get motivated unless you go to a race knowing you've a chance of winning - every race I've been to with Ferrari, I've had that feeling. What I always say - and I mean it - is that it's always tougher at the bottom than at the top..."

The crunch may come at the end of 2004, when various contracts come to an end. As Brawn says, Rory Byrne may well retire at that point, as may Jean Todt - and Schumacher...

Looking to the more immediate future, though, there's no reason at all why Michael and Ferrari cannot go on to more World Championships. That said, McLaren-Mercedes surely will not hand them over as readily as in 2001 - and Williams-BMW, indubitably, will have something strong to say. Down the road, I see the partnership of Ralf Schumacher and Juan Montoya as the strongest in the business; the trick will be to manage them...




Dear Bob,
In my dealings with him, over more than 20 years, Alain Prost has never once told me something which subsequently proved to be untrue - and, take my word for it, there are few in the paddock of whom I can say that. As far as I'm concerned, his behaviour off the track has always matched his behaviour on it - as a driver, he was of the now sadly 'old-fashioned' school, which believes in ethics. As he once said, "Jesus, this is supposed to be a sport, not a war..."

It's for this reason that I will never consider Michael Schumacher - even if he wins 100 Grands Prix - on the same level as Alain. It's not just winning; it's how you win. Not for nothing is Juan Manuel Fangio held in reverence by all who raced against him.

However, Fangio raced in different times, when values were not as they are today. Prost never attracted anything like the acclaim his talent warranted, largely, I think, because this is the era of the anti-hero, when people who fight fair are sneered at, and regarded as wimps.

When Prost bought the Ligier team, Keke Rosberg told me he doubted it would turn out well in the end. "Alain," he said, "is far too nice a guy to run an F1 team successfully..." When, much later, I related that to Prost himself, he just smiled, and said, yes, maybe Keke was right.

There have been occasions on which he has contemplated moving his team to a base in England, because it's the home of the Formula 1 industry, and in so many ways, he says, it would make his life easier. As it is, he has stuck it out in France, despite all manner of union and labour problems, and the sad fact is that the French 'motor sport industry' has never backed his team as it might have done.

During the uneasy partnership with Peugeot, for example, the company showed insufficient commitment both to the Prost team and also - as had been the case from the beginning - to Formula 1 as a whole. And unfortunately Gitanes, who stuck with Guy Ligier through countless unsuccessful seasons, finally decided to get out of Formula 1 at the end of 2000.

The whole thing snowballs, that's the point. Prost has lost substantial backing just at a time when he found himself in the position of having to pay - extremely highly - for his (Ferrari) engines in 2001. When a team is drastically short of money, it has to cut back all over the place, and something that inevitably suffers is testing. What happens when you don't test? You don't progress. When you don't progress, you don't get results - and when you don't get results, you don't easily pull new sponsors. On it goes.

In Hungary, however, Prost was in a much more upbeat frame of mind than I have seen for a long time, apparently confident that the corner had been turned, that a major new sponsor - as yet unannounced - was on board for 2002. I hope so, because there's no team I would rather see succeed.




Dear Tom,
Having little interest in contemporary football - which means these days that there's little point in turning on a TV set - I'm afraid I don't have a great deal of interest, either, in Premier 1 Grand Prix.

What I don't understand is why - as you say - a supporter of Manchester United or Arsenal or whomever is going to trail to a track to watch motor racing, any more than a fanatical McLaren or Williams fan is going to feel a pressing need suddenly to hike off to Old Trafford or Highbury.

However, if it works, it works. We'll see, but is it, in answer to your question, 'a true threat to F1'? Please...

When it comes to something different in motor racing, what interests me far more is that hardcore racing fans should go to Rockingham next month to see the Champ Cars. With such a dearth of major race meetings in this country these days, it delights me to see another important 'single-seater date' on the British calendar, and I hope that there will be enough of a turn-out at the Rockingham 500 for it to become an annual fixture. Champ Car racing has genuine roots, and is not a 'marketing-driven' (forgive the awful phrase) invention.




Dear Simon,
Alfred Neubauer, the Mercedes team manager of legend, always said that, in his opinion, the greatest driver of his era was not Tazio Nuvolari, nor Bernd Rosemeyer, but Rudolf Caracciola. Very well, perhaps he would say that, being a Mercedes man through and through, but there is no doubt that, at the very least, 'Rudi' was worthy of comparison with Nuvolari and Rosemeyer, and you can't praise a racing driver more highly than that.

Perhaps he didn't have the all-or-nothing flair of the other two, but there is no doubt that he was blindingly quick, and made uncannily few mistakes. He was regarded as unquestionably the best wet-weather driver of the 1930s, and when you think of what was involved in driving a 640-horsepower car, on skinny, rock-hard tyres, on the slippery cobbles of a circuit as fast as Bremgarten (Berne), obviously you're talking about skill on a sublime level.

Towards the end of the 1930s, it was becoming apparent that Caracciola was not quite the driver he had been, and that the true Mercedes team leader was now Hermann Lang, but Rudi was still good enough to win the German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring - for the sixth time.

In truth, he was by no means in the best of health. A terrible accident at Monaco in 1933 - when he was driving an Alfa Romeo, in the temporary absence of Mercedes - caused him severe leg injuries, and thereafter he walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. He was also blighted by personal tragedy, when his wife Charly, a skiing fanatic, was killed in an avalanche. Later, he married Alice 'Baby' Hoffmann, who had had formerly been involved with his great friend Louis Chiron.

Although he resumed racing after the war, another serious accident - in testing at Indianapolis in 1946 - left him in a coma for 10 days. It would be two years before the after-effects cleared up completely.

Nothing daunted, though, Caracciola continued to race, now in the factory Mercedes 300SL sports cars. In 1952, he finished fourth in the Mille Miglia, in a 300SL coupe, and this is how - in his autobiography - he described a thousand miles round public roads in Italy, in the wet...

"It was delightful to race in a closed car for the first time, dressed only in a pair of slacks and sports shirt, smoking an occasional cigarette, and wearing a crash helmet, of the pattern worn by racing cyclists." Different days, were they not?

A few weeks later, in a race at Berne, Rudi crashed his 300SL, when a rear brake locked on solid into a corner. The car hit a tree, and there were more serious leg injuries, which kept him in hospital for eight months, and forced him to call a halt to one of the greatest careers in motor racing history. In 1959, aged only 58, Caracciola died.

Was he the 'Prost' of his day? I can think of no better way of describing him.




Dear Laurence,
You watched the Hungarian Grand Prix and the CART race at Elkhart within hours of each other, so you did indeed get two extremes. The Hungaroring unfailingly produces boring races, and this year's was particularly wearisome - Jean Alesi's pass of Pedro de la Rosa was the only overtaking manoeuvre in the entire Grand Prix! I would go so far as to say that it was the most dreary F1 race I can ever remember attending.

The race at Elkhart Lake was a strange one, too, was it not? With that river pouring across the circuit, the event should never have been started when it was - this was presumably due to TV schedules. It was asking for accidents, and they duly came. Then followed a long period, after the race had been stopped, while they made a makeshift dam to contain the torrent pouring down from the woods, and finally the race was restarted.

Quirks apart, the differences between the two events were indeed painfully obvious. First of all, the Hungaroring is a silly little circuit, which might have been designed to prevent overtaking, and the 'gizmos', such as traction control and automatic gearboxes, meant that driver errors - which alone permit passing at this track - were far less likely to occur. We expected a dirge, and we got it.

Elkhart Lake, by contrast, is one of the great open road circuits in the world, long and fast, with every type of corner and gradient, rather similar in style to Spa-Francorchamps. Juan Montoya, who drove in two CART races there, thinks the place fantastic, and says he would love to see an F1 race there. This will never happen, of course, not least because the track's run-off areas would not be acceptable to the F1 community.

Then, of course, there is the difference in the cars. Compared with F1 cars, Champ Cars are bigger, heavier, and more powerful. They run on slicks, rather than grooved tyres, and, rather than being flat-bottomed (as in F1), shaped underbodies - which create downforce - are allowed. This means that a CART car is not wholly dependent on wings for its downforce, and therefore can run close to another through a corner without losing as much grip in the 'dirty air' generated by the first car. Thus, it can come out of a turn right behind another car, and have a good shot at passing it before the next corner.

Not only are traction control and automatic gearboxes banned in CART, but so also are carbon brakes. Add in the greater weight of the CART cars, and braking distances are obviously considerably longer than in F1 - and it's under braking, of course, that passes are traditionally made.

The essential difference between the two series is that F1 prides itself (justifiably) on its ultra-high technology, while CART (equally justifiably) claims to have the best racing on earth. A CART car is far less sophisticated than an F1 car, but on the other hand it is far better looking, and races much more effectively. I cannot wait for Rockingham in three weeks' time.

Drivers who have raced both types of car, such as Montoya, find CART cars more satisfying to drive, in the sense that there is much a driver can do to compensate for a car which is not quite au point. A longtime dream of mine has been to see a race with the F1 drivers in CART cars...

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