Ask Nigel: December 5

Dear Youssef,
First of all, Mario Andretti's comments were not made to The Sun, but were taken from the pages of a new book about Mario, called 'A Driving Passion', by my friend and Autosport colleague Gordon Kirby. The book I recommend without hesitation; it's superb.

In 1978, the year he became World Champion, I also wrote a book with Andretti. We've been friends for nearly 30 years, and he is one of the best people I have met in motor racing, as well as the greatest all-round driver there has ever been. No one ever won races in as many different types of car as Mario, and no one ever will.

Now, Nigel Mansell. Through most of his career, I thought him an odd individual, with an extraordinarily high opinion of himself, but most of the time he was affable enough, and none could deny that - when he was in the mood - he was a hell of a racer. When he took his Ferrari past Ayrton Senna's McLaren at the Hungaroring in 1989, for example, it was a move of brilliant opportunism, and I cheered loudly.

The relationship with Ferrari went sour in Mansell's second season with the team, when Alain Prost, previously the one man in motor racing for whom he had not a critical word, arrived - and invariably beat him.

Paranoia about his team mates, notably Prost and Nelson Piquet, both of whom, he darkly suggested, devoted every waking moment to undermining him, became wearisome, but it was only in the last couple of years of his fulltime F1 career, when he returned to Williams, that I, and others, came actually to dislike him.

Late in 1992, the year of his World Championship, after learning that Prost would be coming to Williams in 1993, he failed to agree terms with Frank for the coming year, and took himself off to America, signing to drive for Newman/Haas in the CART series.

In '93 Nigel did a superb job, winning many races, and ending the year as CART Champion. I saw him race that year at Indianapolis, and also at Milwaukee, where he won, and was mighty impressed by the way he tackled the ovals.

That year, though, a Newman/Haas Lola was very much the thing to have, whereas the following season was all Penske. And in that situation Nigel appeared many times simply to give up, as sundry team members attested. This time there not the hint of a single victory. "In the best car he's fantastic," said Carl Haas, "but not a guy to have with you when you're up against it."

By now Mansell's thoughts were on a fulltime return to F1, with Williams-Renault, for Ayrton Senna's death had left the team without an experienced star, and Renault's chequebook was wide open. As and when the CART schedule permitted, he took part in four Grands Prix, and hoped that he would be retained for 1995. As it was, Frank went for David Coulthard, and Nigel went to McLaren. After two races in an uncompetitive car, he parked it at Barcelona, and left the team forthwith.

Andretti retired from CART at the end of 1994, just as did Mansell, which left Newman/Haas needing two new drivers for '95. That year I went to Milwaukee, and talked to Mario about his two seasons with Nigel, and why he had decided to quit.

"I knew I probably could have gone on another year," he said, "that all I needed was a sabbatical of about two months. Probably I could done with it a year earlier.

"The thing is, my state of mind was not a happy one, those last two seasons, because there was no harmony whatsoever within the team. I was totally depressed about the whole thing, and I just felt, 'It's not worth it - I'm not having fun any more'. Never felt that in my life before.

"By the end of '94, after a couple of months' break, I felt completely refreshed, and then I just got this craving to drive again - all the motivation I'd lost had come back. But you can kid yourself sometimes, you know, and I still feel I made the right decision, even though it was with a heavy heart.

"It saddened me a lot that, thanks to Mansell, my last two years were not happy ones. Many times I asked myself if maybe I should have been more tolerant, and then, in the same breath, I said, 'No way'. Why? Because the person you were dealing with was totally irrational, in my opinion, anyway, and if you cannot have a decent conversation without the other side getting paranoid - I mean, give me a break! But that's the way it was, so you could never have a friendly, warm, conversation. It was just a shame.

"I never had a real problem with another team mate throughout my whole career. Not once. I'll admit I'm as selfish as anyone, no question, and I don't say I'm super-tolerant, but on the human side, if I respect someone, I respect them, and that's valuable. I mean, as difficult as Carlos Reutemann was, in some ways... it was tough to socialise with him, but everything else was OK.

"The thing that disturbed me more than anything was that when Mansell arrived here, it was like he was the Messiah, right? The team, the press, everyone, just bowed to him alone, and I was tossed in the corner like a piece of leather."

At one point Carl Haas walked into the motorhome, and caught the end of the conversation. "Ah," he murmured. "The Mansell story..."

"And that was the thing that really hurt," Mario went on. "You could see how he used people, to his own advantage, and at first they just didn't realise it. It was a matter of letting it run its course. In Formula 1 he was for ever saying he was not like Senna or Prost, that he was no politician. Ha! That's all there was! But it's all history now, Thank God."

You ask me if I agree with Mario's assessment, Youssef. I think
you can draw your own conclusions.




Dear Andre,
Judged on race results alone, Craig Pollock's performance 'at the helm of BAR' doesn't look too good. Even though Jacques Villeneuve, one of the very best drivers in the world, was on board, the team failed to score a single point in its first season, 1999. And it must be said that, following all the publicity and razzmatazz surrounding the BAR launch, there was a good deal of schadenfreude evident in some rival teams.

In 2000, though, BAR progressed well, scoring 20 points, and finishing equal fifth in the constructors' championship, ahead, for example, of Jordan, who had been at this F1 game since 1991. This season BAR slipped to sixth, with 17 points, just behind Jordan.

The results have been anything but spectacular, I grant you, but I think there is clear evidence of the team's need for new blood in the design staff, and I don't doubt that the recent recruitment of Geoff Willis, from Williams, will make a difference over the long term. BAR has yet to produce a decent car, it's as simple as that, and neither were Villeneuve and Olivier Panis helped this year by a Honda V10 which had fallen way behind the best engines.

All that said, I think one must consider the enormity of the task Pollock took on. To create a major F1 team literally from nothing is some achievement, even if it has yet to yield much in the way of results, and I find it significant that a man like Ron Dennis has a lot of time for Craig, and rates him highly.

On a personal level, I have always liked him, much admiring the fact that, no matter how he is criticised, he remains good-humoured and optimistic. If he has a fault, it is perhaps that, with certain of his employees, he has been too loyal and tolerant for too long.




Dear Garry,
John Watson was always a driver I admired, and always a bloke I liked. Still do, in fact.

His natural talent was very high, I think, and when he was on top of his game, really confident, he was extremely formidable. When I think of him now, the picture that comes to my mind is always from 1977, when he drove that huge, heavy, Brabham-Alfa to such great effect. He had some incredible battles that year, such as with Mario Andretti's Lotus at Dijon (where his car let him down on the last lap), and with James Hunt's McLaren at Silverstone. It was grossly unfair that he never won a race in that car.

I think it's fair to say that Watson was one of those drivers for whom the car had to be 'right', rather than, say, a Peterson, who would simply make the best of what he had. There were times when one thought John simply fiddled too much; times, too, when one felt he allowed outside influences to compromise his huge driving ability.

He was - and is - essentially a shy man, without the bullish self-confidence of a Hunt or a Lauda, and to some extent was made to suffer for that: he was an easy target, if you like, and I always had considerable sympathy for him in that regard.

Something else I've always liked about Watson: he is genuinely a tremendous enthusiast of motor racing, one who grew up imbued in the sport. There are few drivers remotely interested in any era of racing bar their own, but John's knowledge of racing history is considerable.

A good bloke, in sum, and one whose results did not do justice to his talent. I remember the early laps of the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix, at the daunting Montjuich circuit; John was at the wheel of a Surtees, and he had that thing up in second place for as long as it lasted. His bravery that day left an indelible mark on all who witnessed it.




Dear Rich,
I am an avid collector of racing books, ephemera, memorabilia, and what have you, and over the years have accumulated quite a collection - I really would not care to calculate how much money I have spent along the way.

Much of the collection is made up of material to do with American open-wheel racing in the 1950s and '60s, an era with which I have been obsessed for as long as I can remember. Just as Jean Behra captured my imagination when I was a young kid, so also did Bob Sweikert, of whom I became truly aware when he won the Indianapolis 500 in 1955.

This was just after my ninth birthday, and a terrible time in motor racing. Alberto Ascari was killed testing a Ferrari sportscar at Monza on May 26, and four days later Bill Vukovich died at Indy. A couple of weeks away was the disaster at Le Mans, in which Pierre Levegh and nearly 100 spectators lost their lives.

In the midst of all this, I 'adopted' Sweikert, just as I had Behra, read anything about him I could lay my hands on. A year later, in June 1956, he was killed in a sprint car race at Salem, Indiana, and although America was to this schoolboy light years away, another planet, I was stunned when I heard the news.

In June of this year, during the week between the Milwaukee CART race and the Canadian Grand Prix, I did my usual thing, and went to Indianapolis. And one day, in company with Donald Davidson, a longtime friend who runs the museum at the Speedway, I drove the 100 or so miles south to Salem, to visit the track where my schoolboy hero died.

While I would agree with you that the contemporary sprint car is not a thing of beauty, I think the cars of the '50s and '60s were glorious creations, and that is where my love of sprint car racing began. For that matter, I think most of today's F1 cars - narrow track, high nose, barge boards etc - are hideous-looking things; when I fell in love with F1, as a child, my favourite car was the Maserati 250F, the epitome of beauty and elegance. For that matter, I think the same of many of the Indy roadsters from the same period.

Perhaps what I love most about sprint car racing is that it has remained fundamentally true to its roots. Mario Andretti has always said he thinks roll-cages an abomination, ruining the appearance of the cars, and 'encouraging a lack of discipline in the drivers', and while that may be an extreme view, I can understand why he feels that way. Roll-cages are unsightly, but they had to come, and I understand that. What I cannot abide, though, is wings on sprint cars, for although they hugely increase cornering speeds, to my mind they remove the finesse from what, at its highest level, is an art.

Each year I go to the Hoosier 100, at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, and while this race is for the slightly larger championship dirt cars, rather than sprinters, the game is very much the same. The first Hoosier 100 was run in 1953, and was won by... Bob Sweikert. Subsequent winners included Jimmy Bryan, AJ Foyt, Parnelli Jones, Mario, Al Unser, and on and on. There's history there.

What do I love about sprint car racing? The noise, the sight of cars being steered on the throttle, the overtaking, the hot dogs, the beer, the dust that hangs in the air...absolutely everything, in fact! I am never happier than when in America, and for me a dirt oval under floodlights is pure Americana.




Dear Anthony,
I don't think there's a rule of thumb, quite honestly. Over time I've seen all manner of young prodigies, for whom great things were predicted, yet when they got to F1 they failed to make much of an impression, and simply faded away.

Occasionally a real prodigy happens along: Ricardo Rodriguez, for example, was only 19 when he made his F1 debut, for Ferrari, at Monza in 1961 - and he stuck the car on the front row, second quickest.

Then you get a driver like Keke Rosberg, who was always blindingly quick in whatever he drove, yet failed to land a decent F1 drive until Williams, having been notified very late of Alan Jones's intention to retire at the end of 1981, signed him for '82, primarily because all the 'stars' were already committed elsewhere. Keke was 33 at the time, and had despaired of ever getting a topline F1 drive. And what happened? He won the World Championship...

Similarly, Damon Hill was 32 when Williams picked him to partner Alain Prost for the 1993 season. Prior to joining the team, as test driver, Damon had been considered good, but few saw him as a potential World Champion. In 1996 he won the title. His father, Graham, was twice World Champion - and he didn't even learn to drive until he was 24!

The times were different, obviously, and I'm not suggesting direct comparisons can be drawn, but remember this: Juan Fangio's strike rate of 24 wins from 51 Grands Prix will never be equalled, and he didn't even come to Europe until he was 38...

Age, therefore, does not have a great deal to do with it, although obviously the earlier a driver gets into F1, the better, particularly these days, when Olympian fitness is needed.

What a driver achieves before he gets into F1 is some guide, obviously, but no more than that. I've seen drivers who won countless F3 races, for example, and the made little or no impression in F1, and the same is true of various karting champions over the years. A glittering career in the junior formulae can indeed be a pointer to the future, but by no means is it always so.

If you have a question for Nigel AskNigel@haynet.com.