Ask Nigel: December 12

Dear Chris,
Lordy, I hope not, because I've spent many happy days at CART races over time, and I still think they provide the best racing to be found anywhere.

Much, I think, depends upon whom they choose to run the series, and as far as I'm concerned there's only one man for the job: Chris Pook. They could have appointed him a year ago, and I wonder if their failure to do so will prove to have been a seminal mistake. So much has gone wrong this season, after all, and I think it might have been very different if Chris - a man who knows racing inside out - had been at the reins. Certainly, I have to wonder if, had that been the case, Roger Penske would now be decamping to the IRL.

Over the last couple of seasons Marlboro Team Penske's results have been spectacularly good, with Gil de Ferran taking back-to-back championships, and he and Helio Castroneves winning many races. This year, Penske ventured temporarily into IRL country, taking his team back to Indianapolis, and his boys finished 1-2.

When Tony George split from CART at the end of 1995, and formed the IRL, 'Indycar racing' was instantly split into two, and since then the profile of single-seater racing in the USA has been hugely diminished. Although the star teams and drivers remained with CART, still it was a fact that Indianapolis 500, downgraded or not, remained far and away the biggest open-wheel race in America. It is, after all, an institution, like Le Mans.

Maybe, if CART had continued to grow and to thrive, the absence from its schedule of Indianapolis might have been manageable, but in recent years the series seems almost to have had a death wish, and now team owners are beginning to defect, not because the IRL is booming, but because they have become disillusioned by CART's lack of direction, and the same goes for companies like Philip Morris, Penske's major sponsor for many years.

Roger's departure to the IRL is of enormous significance. To an outlander like myself, it looks like a distinct step down, but Roger will have sound commercial reasons for his decision, not least that he is the second largest shareholder in the International Speedway Corporation, which owns six of the tracks on which the IRL competes.

On the face of it, everything looks pretty gloomy for CART at present, with engine manufacturers announcing their intention to quit, more and more teams heading back to the Indy 500, and perhaps hedging their bets with the IRL for the future. On the plus side, three new races are on the schedule, in Mexico City, Denver, and Montreal, and the likelihood is that all will be highly successful events.

I don't know where it's going to go, quite honestly, and I have to say I hate the idea of a 3.5-litre normally-aspirated engine formula: a great part of the appeal of the CART cars has been that wonderful turbocharged sound, to say nothing of 900 horsepower.

Still, I had lunch with Bobby Rahal the other week, and found him far less pessimistic about the situation than I had expected, so let's hope. If CART passes up Pook again, however, I think they have only themselves to blame...



Dear Gilbert,
First of all, nice to hear from you again.

No, conditions at Silverstone are nothing like as bad as some would have you believe. That said, the British Grand Prix is very far from my favourite race weekend, and I do think that some of the criticisms of Silverstone are justified - not least the daunting admission prices. A friend of mine, who has gone to the race, with his wife and two sons, for the last 11 years, told me recently they wouldn't be there in 2002, because it was now simply too expensive. Add in the cost of hotels, meals, petrol, and everything else, he said, and you were looking at around £1500.

The other thing is that the traffic situation at Silverstone has been appalling for as long as I can remember, and I well understand why the well-heeled arrive and leave by helicopter. However, it's not as if the traffic problems are anything new, so quite why they have suddenly - in the last year or two - become unacceptable to the powers-that-be, I don't fully understand. Do these people think it's the work of a moment to get into Spa, for example?

Most laughable of all is that Interlagos goes through on the nod every year. It may be a great circuit, albeit appallingly surfaced, but its facilities are from the dark ages, and they're not that wonderful at such as Montreal or Suzuka, either. So why is Silverstone constantly singled out? Some say there is a hidden agenda here, that it has to do with 'personality clashes', but surely there has to be more to it than that. Doesn't there?



Dear Dave,
Patrick Depailler was a man I very much liked and admired. We seemed to hit it off from the beginning, perhaps because Jean Behra had been Patrick's schoolboy hero, just as he was mine, a fact that emerged the very first time I interviewed him. Behra had been killed in Germany on August 1 1959; by cruel coincidence, the same fate befell Depailler exactly 21 years later.

James Hunt once told me he thought Depailler had a death wish, and I asked him why. "Well, look at the way he lived his life," James said. "Riding motorbikes without a helmet, all that sort of thing. He seemed to need to find risk in everything."

It was true that Patrick was never a man to give a thought to safety, in racing or in anything else, but still I couldn't agree with Hunt's contention that he had a death wish, and neither did Nick Brittan, his manager for many years. "No, no, not at all. Patrick loved life more than most people - but what he did, he accepted the inevitability of death."

Depailler's life ended in a testing accident. There was only the scream of a single Alfa Romeo V12 to be heard at Hockenheim that Friday morning, which is how they knew of the disaster as it happened.

Patrick died almost instantly, within seconds of taking in that something had broken in the front suspension. The Ostkurve was then a top gear corner, taken flat, and the Alfa never even started into it, striking a guardrail head on, then vaulting over it.

If I disagreed with Hunt that Depailler had had a death wish, so I always doubted he would retire. Brittan concurred: "He knew he floated right out to the fine edge - I think he knew it was going to happen one day. There was never any question of retirement in his mind.

"Patrick was almost like a professional soldier - a combat soldier. He absolutely loved what he was doing - there was nothing better in the world than being a bloody good race driver. He was the nearest thing to a sort of automotive SAS man, and people like that, you know, are aware there's a good chance one day you're not going to pack your kit bag. But that's not the same as having a death wish - far from it."

Most of Depailler's F1 career was spent with Tyrrell, and Ken always spoke of him with great affection: "Patrick was very French - never without a cigarette, loved red wine - and in a lot of ways, he was a little boy all his life, always wanting to go skiing or motorcycling, things like that. And he had this trusting belief that everything would be all right in the end. He lived for the present.

"I gave Patrick his first F1 drive, at Clermont-Ferrand in 1972, and then offered him a third car for the North American races in '73. This was a big chance for him - and 10 days before he breaks his leg, falling off a motorbike! Later, when he was driving full time for me, I had it written into his contract that he had to keep away from dangerous toys."

Depailler won at Monaco for Tyrrell in 1978, and it was one of those rare days when everyone in the paddock was happy with the result. So many times before his fingertips had been on the hem of victory, but always it had slipped away.

At the end of that season he left for Ligier, and with sorrow for Tyrrell was like family by now. But the Ligier looked a more competitive proposition, and so it proved. After winning at Jarama, the fifth round, Patrick shared the lead of the World Championship with Gilles Villeneuve, perhaps his nearest kindred soul in the sport.

Ligier's JS11 was the fastest car of the moment, but Depailler's rivalry with his team mate, Jacques Laffite, was very definitely that: a rivalry. There were no team orders, and at Zolder the two of them ran away from the rest - and into tyre troubles. Jody Scheckter's Ferrari won, and Guy Ligier was furious.

Patrick was bemused. "If you are a racing driver," he shrugged, "surely you race..."

If Ligier was angry in Belgium, however, a few weeks later he was apoplectic. Unlike Tyrrell, he had not precluded 'dangerous toys' from Depailler's contract. Following the Monaco Grand Prix, Patrick went hang-gliding, and severely injured his legs. He had flown too close to a mountain, he said, and turbulence had pitched him into the rockface.

The general reaction to Patrick's accident was chillingly hard-nosed. In purely commercial terms, perhaps that was inevitable, but on a human level I found disturbing the lack of sympathy for a man perhaps staring at life in a wheelchair.

When I spoke to him about it, he said that the worst thing about the weeks in hospital was not knowing if he would recover properly. "For a long time there was the chance of amputation, and I was very frightened. Not for five months was I sure to drive again."

Without that, Patrick seemed to be saying, life would be insupportable; in his terms, being alive meant being a racing driver.

I was fond of Depailler not least because his attitude to life and work was refreshingly haphazard in a world where dour automatons increasingly peopled professional sport.

Racing had a narcotic hold on Patrick. I remember his speaking sadly of the end of his marriage: "She is scared of what I do - how can I blame her for that? But how can I stop this? First of all, it is necessary to be honest with yourself."

After the hang-gliding accident, he thought only about coming back to F1. There is a belief that no driver is ever quite the same again after dreadful leg injuries, but Patrick was the exception. He may have hobbled unsteadily down the pit lane in the early races of 1980, but on the track he was unimpaired.

His hobbies were such as scuba-diving, skiing, sailing and - as we know - hang-gliding. He would look askance at his colleagues as they boarded flights, tennis racquets under their arms. "Le sport dur!" he would say. That was where the appeal lay. Other drivers would speak with reverence of Borg or Connors, but, Behra apart, Patrick had only two heroes: Jacques Anquetil and Eddy Merckx, both five-time winners of the Tour de France.

Francois Guiter, Elf's competitions boss for so long, had a special affection for him. After the British Grand Prix in 1980 they holidayed together in the Azores. "I never knew him happier than then," Guiter said. "He was with a girl he loved, and completely relaxed and at peace. And then, of course, he went back early to do the test at Hockenheim."

Nick Brittan recalls a dinner with Patrick at Zandvoort. "We were in a little restaurant, talking about getting his finances into shape. 'Patrick', I said, 'we really ought to think about the future. And I remember he smiled at that. 'No, no', he said, 'The future is for other people...'"



Dear Tom,
It's not always easy to pinpoint quite what it is you see in a young driver, particularly when he isn't driving a competitive car. All right, if it's someone like Juan Pablo Montoya, at the wheel of a Williams-BMW, you know from the outset he has what it takes, because he's up there at the sharp end, doing the times, but it's less straightforward when the young guy's car is from the other end of the grid.

The first thing to say about Alonso is that, in his first season in F1 with Minardi, he was only twice out-qualified by his team mate, the much more experienced, if unremarkable, Tarso Marques. It is a fact that one expects to find the Minardis occupying the last row of the grid, 21st and 22nd, yet only on only six occasions did Fernando start from there; six times, in fact, he qualified 18th, and once, at Indianapolis, 17th, ahead of Villeneuve's BAR, both Arrows and a Prost, as well as his new team mate Alex Yoong.

These may not be startling statistics, but they are quietly impressive. In their own Minardi days, Sandro Nannini and Jarno Trulli were able to show they were more than ordinarily promising newcomers, and it's exactly the same with Alonso.

If a particular memory of his season comes back to me, it's the in-cockpit footage I saw of him during practice at Monaco, in particular the movements and corrections on the steering-wheel as he came out of Casino Square. "Look at that!" someone said. "Jesus, it's like Gilles!"

A little over the top, perhaps, but I knew what he meant. Given that he started in F1 the same year as Montoya and Kimi Raikkonen, it says a great deal for Alonso's talent that he was not completely overlooked. We shan't see him racing next year, for he is working as Renault's test driver, but if he isn't in the team in 2003, I shall be extremely surprised.



Dear Steve,
I'm also a northerner, and for the first 20 years of my life Oulton Park was my local circuit. I still think that, in its prime, it was the best track in the country, and it pleases me that someone like Stirling Moss thinks the same.

So what are my memories of the place? Well, for a start, August 7 1954 is a seminal date in my mind, for it was my first day around Grand Prix cars, and the day I resolved somehow to spend my life around them.

My father loved motor racing, and took me to the Gold Cup at Oulton. Already my hero was Jean Behra, and there he was, in the blue Gordini. In delight I watched him lead the first couple of laps; in despair I watched him pull off, magneto broken.

There was, however, much else to see, notably S. Moss, whose Maserati 250F had arrived from Italy only that morning, obliging him to start from the back. By lap four he was at the front, away into a race of his own.

I was eight, and knew it all. "There's Moss," I said to the kid next to me at the fence. "There's Salvadori... Parnell..." A blue Connaught went by. "There's Daddy," the kid said.

In a single day, therefore, I not only fell in love for life, but also learned the beginnings of humility. The sight and sound of Grand Prix cars - particularly that red Maserati - captivated me. And it was only a month or two before I forgave my old man for being a doctor, rather than a driver.

Memory sometimes plays you false, of course, but that first Gold Cup meeting I recall as one of those days that come only a handful of times. "Give me Goodwood on a summer's day," Roy Salvadori once said, "and you can keep the rest of the world." I felt the same about Oulton.

We used also to go to Aintree, but I never developed the same affection for it. Where Oulton swooped through parkland, the Liverpool track was flat and soulless, its spectator areas too far from the action.

In comparison with today, I suppose, 'safety' was horribly primitive. I think now of the sand traps and debris fences, and then consider how it was in the '50s. In the Gold Cup programme there was merely a polite reminder that, 'The earth banks around this circuit have been erected as a crash barrier for your protection. It is forbidden to stand, sit or climb on them'.

The drivers took their chances. Earth banks may have protected spectators, but they were not good things to hit. And elsewhere worse awaited. That afternoon Salvadori's Maserati had its throttle stick open, and the car went into trees, which lined much of the track. It was the first racing accident I had ever seen, and it seemed impossible he could have survived. But an hour later, in the paddock, there he was, sandwich in one hand, shandy in the other. Could I have his autograph? Yes, I could. It's faded now, but legible still.

The following year was better yet: factory Maseratis for Moss and Luigi Musso, a pair of Lancia D50s, entered by Scuderia Ferrari, for Mike Hawthorn and Eugenio Castellotti, a new BRM for Peter Collins, three Vanwalls, Alfonso de Portago in his own Ferrari... for a non-championship race, the entry was sensational.

The race, too. Moss won again - as he seemed always to do at Oulton - but this time there was real pressure. Lap times were four seconds quicker than the year before, and I became aware, for the first time, of the delicious spectacle of a racing car in a drift. Stirling seemed to do a minimum of his steering with the wheel.

Musso, too, although without Moss's certainty of touch. It would have been a Maserati one-two, but the Italian pulled off in front of us, with five laps to go. He behaved as heroes were expected to behave, kicked the car's rear wheel, then walked to the fence, asked if anyone had a cigarette. My mother duly produced a packet of Player's.

After 54 laps Stirling took the flag, and waved to the crowds through Old Hall. At the exit, he floored it, and out stepped the tail of the 250F. A flick of the wheel, and the car was straight again. Through the whole manoeuvre, his left arm remained raised in salute. You don't forget a moment like that.

Moss, as I say, was unbeatable at Oulton. Wherever else his lousy luck pursued him, it seemed to give him a break when he went there, but if any other driver comes instantly to my mind at the mention of the gorgeous Cheshire circuit, it is Archie Scott-Brown, who twice won the British Empire Trophy there. In 1957 a Lister-Jaguar was a fearsome thing, and how Archie, with his withered arm, whirled that car around as he did, no one quite understood. He seemed like a magician to me.

Through the '50s and '60s, I never missed a major race at Oulton Park. Some years there were two Fl races there, one in April, the other in September, and the images are unforgettable - Jackie Stewart twitching the BRM H16 up Clay Hill, Chris Amon's gloriously oversteering Ferrari at Old Hall, the Surtees Honda bellowing painfully down towards Cascades, Clark elegantly outbraking into Lodge.

I remember, too, when Jochen Rindt won the second part of the Gold Cup in 1970; how he immediately brought the Lotus 72 to a halt at Old Hall, hopped out of the car and straight into a waiting helicopter. It was the first stage of a journey back to Austria, for a guest appearance at a hillclimb the following day. As we watched him walk from the car, removing his helmet, we were watching the end of his last race.

By this time, Oulton Park's great days were essentially done, although Pedro Rodriguez memorably flung his BRM to victory on Good Friday in 1971, and the following year Niki Lauda gave notice of intent with a brilliant wet weather display in the spring F2 meeting.

That September Lauda placed second to March team mate Ronnie Peterson in the Gold Cup, but by now, under the ownership of Motor Circuit Developments, Oulton was changing for the worse, with the emphasis on such as Formula 5000. Bacon sandwiches were giving way to cheap hamburgers.

I have been back only once since then. One Wednesday in June of 1975 Chris Amon drove me round in the glorious Ferrari 330P4, steering on the throttle as ever. It was the perfect way to take my leave of a place where all my memories are fine ones, all my gods intact.

An appropriate tribute to Oulton on its 50th anniversary? Why, have Stirling drive a 250F around there once more...