Ask Nigel: December 13

Dear Ian,
Yes, I miss Riccardo, too, for, as well as being an extremely good driver - and on occasion a great one - he was as pleasant a man as I have known in racing. Invariably we run into each other at Imola or Monza, but there's rarely time for more than a brief chat, and I always regret that.

The great thing about Patrese is that he's such a well-rounded individual, with an awareness of life beyond F1, and it doesn't surprise me that he has dealt with retirement rather more readily than some of his colleagues. "At Williams we won't hear a word said against Riccardo," says Frank Williams. "Guy's an absolute gentleman, and he'll always be welcome here. Can't say that about all the people who've driven for us..."

Indeed, it's actually quite rare for a driver to be remembered so fondly by a team. They recall so-and-so's speed with awe, but quite often they will balance that with memories of what a pillock he was out of the car. You can tell a lot about a driver's real self from what his mechanics have to say about him, and the Williams boys always adored Riccardo.

Over five seasons with Williams, he tested endlessly, with enthusiasm, and he never made waves. While his natural ability may not have been at the level of a Senna or Prost, he had periods of pure inspiration; we should remember that in the first half of 1991 he outqualified team mate Nigel Mansell at every single race, and on occasion - as in Mexico - squarely beat him.

At Estoril, later that year, Patrese jumped into the spare Williams-Renault at the very end of qualifying, took one warm-up lap, and put the car on pole. Won the race, too.

The other thing was that Riccardo was never avaricious, a quality much appreciated by F. Williams. "I know some other drivers make a lot more than I do," he told me once in an interview, "but, you know, I can have a very good life on what I earn - and look at the fun I have earning it! I think Frank is very fair with me; what he pays me is appropriate for a driver of my record."

Can't say fairer than that, can you? In general, Grand Prix drivers have a reputation for being, er, close with a dollar, but at the end of each season Patrese would take the entire team - Williams and Renault personnel - out to dinner in Adelaide. On one occasion someone suggested that his team mate - I won't name him, but suffice it to say he was a man earning many times more - should split the bill; it fell on deaf ears. No wonder the mechanics remember Riccardo well.

"I always put racing drivers into two categories," an F1 luminary said to me a while ago. "Those I'd be happy to sit next to on a flight to Australia, and those I wouldn't. As a rule of thumb, the second category is the guys you'd hire to win the World Championship for you." And the first? 'Oh, they're the ones who wouldn't quite get there - but would have fun on the way.' A thought we may reserve for Riccardo, I think.




Dear Jay,
A good week for questions, this - all of them seem to be about drivers for whom I have great affection! As you say, Emerson Fittipaldi has indeed been one of the great all-rounders in motor racing - a man, really, who had two entirely distinct careers, separated by a brief period of retirement.

I can still remember the shock I felt, watching the 1996 Michigan 500 on TV, when I realised that the man who had just had the colossal accident was Emerson, then closing in on his 50th birthday. He was very seriously injured, and although he ultimately recovered well, I was mighty relieved when he announced that he wouldn't race again. "That day at Michigan," he said, "I got a very strong message from the Lord, and it was time to stop."

It was no surprise that his doctors said his astonishing rate of recovery owed much to his high level of fitness. Having attended many Indycar races over the years, I was always struck by the difference between the buoyant and obviously healthy Indycar driver and the morose, patently unfit, man who'd left Formula 1, almost unnoticed, at the end of 1982.

Emerson was indeed demoralised when he went back to Brazil all those years ago. The great driver of the early 70s, twice World Champion, had been almost forgotten. At the end of 1975, on the point of turning 29, he'd had given up his McLaren number one status, and thrown in his lot with the Brazilian-based team launched earlier by his brother Wilson.

It was the end of Fittipaldi as a contender in F1. For years he dragged a succession of uncompetitive cars around the Grand Prix circuits of the world, and it made for an uncomfortable sight. Finally, when the outfit was in its death throes, he gave up driving altogether, and concentrated on management, but after two more seasons, desperately short of sponsorship, the project was put out of its misery. At Fittipaldi Automotive's last appearance, in Las Vegas that autumn of '82, the lone car, driven by Chico Serra, failed to qualify. It had happened a lot that season.

In his F1 days, Emerson always used to say that when he retired from driving, that would be it; there would be no coming back, not even for celebrity 'fun' races and the like. Indeed, the impression when he left, his first marriage failing, his finances low, was that here was a bloke we were unlikely to see at a race track again.

By 1984, though, he was back - and carrying a helmet bag, too. Having been talked into a one-off drive in the Miami sports car race, Fittipaldi found the experience so pleasurable that he decided to embark on a new racing career, but now purely as a driver. "Building and racing my own cars," he reflected, "was the biggest mistake of my whole life. Now I just want to enjoy motor racing again for what it is."

When first I encountered Emerson at an Indycar race, I almost didn't recognise him. Gone was the puffy, haggard, face from the late F1 years. "You look literally 10 years younger," I said, and he replied that that was nothing compared with how he felt: "I feel like someone born again, and I can't believe my luck. I enjoy every day of my life now."

After that I saw him at many more CART races, and was always struck again by the transformation in the man, by the perpetual smile. It pleased me especially to be there at Indianapolis in 1993, when he won the 500 for the second time.

His memories of F1, Emerson conceded, were coloured by the later years, by the financial struggles and rows, by the uncompetitive cars, the constant battles simply to get into the race. But all that was past him now; he simply loved his 'second' career in CART, and hated to see some in F1 apparently getting little pleasure from what he again saw as a sport.

Fittipaldi may have retired, but the fire in his belly is still there, and so is all his flair at the wheel - you only have to watch him take a Penske up the Goodwood hill to know that. It's always such a pleasure to see him again. One of the greats, without a doubt, as far as I'm concerned.




Dear William,
Here we go again! Eddie Cheever and Stefan Johansson, splendid fellows both.

They fit precisely, these two, in what I was saying earlier on about 'people you'd be happy to sit next to on a flight to Australia', for while neither was ever going to be World Champion, both were - and are - engaging fellows, with a wide variety of interests, and a great sense of humour. Each one was a delight to interview, not least because neither ever had an 'us and them' attitude to journalists.

Of the two, Eddie was definitely the more complex. It always seemed to me that his biggest failing, as a racing driver, was that it was too important to him, that he thought too much about it, was too obsessed with it. In consequence, I don't think he ever did justice to his talent when he was in F1. Cheever's dark moods were very dark indeed.

Usually, though, they didn't last long. I always liked his willingness to speak his mind - that and his irreverence. I remember once talking to him in a motorhome, with his team owner hovering about. "Oh, yeah, it's going to be a great team, this, really coming along," he said, giving me the odd conspiratorial grin. "And ****** is a really great guy to work for..." The man turned his back for a second. "You f****** bastard!" Eddie whispered in his direction... I still get a laugh from that tape today. It gave me real pleasure when he won Indy in 1998.

Stefan was altogether less intense, although never one afraid to voice his sometimes strong opinions on racing matters and people. In his F3 days, he was a real wild man - one of few people I have seen get involved in a two-car accident after taking the chequered flag! - but later he became a very polished professional.

Untypically extrovert for a Scandinavian, he's one of the funniest people I've known in the sport, and it didn't hurt that we always seemed to like - and dislike - the same people in the paddock. He's a brilliant mimic, Stefan - you wouldn't think a Swede would be able to do a convincing Birmingham accent, but take my word for it, he can!

For all their successes elsewhere, neither of them, unfortunately, ever won a Grand Prix, although this was not because - on a given day - they didn't have the ability. While neither was from the top drawer, in the Senna/Prost/Schumacher sense of the word, undeniably both were very quick on occasion, but never had the cards fall for them. Shame.




Dear Steve,
What a cynical fellow you must be, to think of something like that...




Dear Simon,
Like you, I'm all for combining driving and engineering ability in F1, but I think, in light of the 'electronic' rule changes likely to be introduced in 2001, the pendulum has swung way too far away from the driving. Traction control is an abomination, in my opinion, and cuts across everything Grand Prix racing is supposed to be.

That said, I don't blame the teams for voting for its return, because all they're seeking is a level playing field: understandably, some of them have grown weary of being beaten by others who have been cheating. "If they're using it - and they can't be caught out - then we should all have it," one technical director said to me last week, and I couldn't argue with that. I'd like them all to be the same, too - with the proviso that I'd like them all to be without traction control, as the rules originally demanded.

My feeling at the moment is that F1 has reached a seminal fork in the road - and it's taken the wrong turning. The drivers don't want more 'driver aids', and neither do the people who pay to watch them. It's that simple.

Forgive me, but I laughed when I read your remark, "I wish we had more technical info", for the very good reason that so do I! As the major manufacturers become ever more important, a Grand Prix becomes ever more a televised marketplace; the money goes steeply up all the time, and the resulting paranoia keeps pace. Teams are incredibly secretive about technical details these days - I've written before, for example, that it's been years since journalists have been allowed to see an F1 car with its rear bodywork off.

Compared with some, I have to say that Renault have tended - in the past, anyway - to be relatively open, so it may be that we'll be given details at some point about the decision to take a revolutionary route with the new V10. But I wouldn't bank on it. Sorry.




Dear Andrew,
First of all, I presume we're talking only racing books here...

This is a tricky one to answer, not least because most of my favourite racing books are long out of print, and therefore difficult - and probably expensive - to find.

Of relatively recent ones, I'd recommend 'The Death of Ayrton Senna', by Richard Williams, who writes brilliantly of many sports for The Independent , but has a lifelong passion for racing. I know of no one who writes better - more movingly, more simply - of this sport.

Then there is 'It Beats Working', by my old friend Eoin Young. When relating a tale, Young can take the word 'laconic' to a whole new level, and when he's at his best, he writes as he speaks. Loosely, I suppose, this is an autobiography, but he concentrates on racing, on the people and places he has known since coming to England from New Zealand in 1961, to work for Bruce McLaren. I suppose it's a favourite of mine, to some degree, because Eoin writes very much of 'my world'. Very funny, and sometimes very pithy, too.

There have been many 'driver books' in the last few years, as the cult of personality has grown, but to my mind the last great autobiography was 'To Hell and Back', by Niki Lauda, which was published after his retirement, and therefore left him absolutely free to express his true feelings about a variety of people and events. A lot of racing folk squirmed when this one came out...

As for biographies, I loved 'Gilles Villeneuve', by Gerald Donaldson, perhaps for obvious reasons. I was close to Gilles, and it's true to say that I've never felt quite the same about racing since his death, in 1982 - certainly, I've felt inclined to keep friendships with drivers at a certain arm's length, anyway, safe as the sport is these days. Gerry is a friend of mine, but that doesn't colour my attitude to his book; simply, I thought he did a wonderful job on it.

Going further back in time, 'BRM', by Doug Nye, would definitely be on my 'Desert Island Books' list, packed as it with both technical detail and human anecdote, and dealing primarily with the 50s, a very under-documented era in racing. I was never a great BRM fan (except when my childhood hero, Jean Behra, was driving for them), but this book - surely one of the great labours of love - I adored.

'Racing Mechanic', by Alf Francis, is another great favourite. Francis was regarded as one of the great 'improviser' mechanics, who could turn his hand to anything, and for many years he worked on Stirling Moss' cars. If you want some insight into how motor racing was in those days, before there was any money in it, this is the book to have.

Next, 'The Chequered Year', by Ted Simon. He was a guy who followed a single season of F1 - 1970 - and then left it for ever. As a consequence, he was able to write exactly what he saw, knowing he would never have to face any of the F1 crowd again! Clearly, he kept very copious notes, and had a good deal of access to the drivers and personalities of the day. A great read.

I must include, too, 'The Racing Driver', by Denis Jenkinson, a close friend of mine, and a man I miss to this day. 'Jenks' wrote the book in the late 50s, but its fundamentals remain relevant today, and there are countless great anecdotes. It's worth adding that this was a book devoured by Ayrton Senna...

Now we really do get specialised. I have a consuming interest in the 'roadster era' at Indianapolis (from, approximately, 1952 to 1964), and a couple of books which would assuredly make my 'Desert Island' list are 'Fabulous Fifties - American Championship Racing', by Dick Wallen, and 'Indy 500 Mechanic', by Clint Brawner and Joe Scalzo.

Wallen's book, like Nye's, comes into the 'labour of love' category. It's huge, beautifully illustrated, and comprises a complete record of the decade, with a report of every race, interviews with several of the drivers, and a thousand good stories. Expensive, but worth every cent - as also was Wallen's later book, 'Sensational Sixties'.

Joe Scalzo is one of my very favourite writers on racing, and his book with Brawner, an Indy mechanic of legend, is simply a wonderful read, with an abundance of anecdote. Brawner worked with many great drivers, notably Jimmy Bryan and, later, the young Mario Andretti.

A pretty catholic list, all in all, Andrew. Hope you can find one or two of them.