Ask Nigel: Feb 28

Dear Nigel,
There are just days to go before the first Grand Prix of the new season. How excited are you? I must say that unlike certain other writers, you don't give the impression of being a cynic when it comes to Formula 1, but coming into a new year, is there a sense of deja vu after covering the sport for so long?
George Everson, Wigan, UK

Dear George,
I'm delighted you should say that, 'Unlike certain other writers, I don't give the impression of being a cynic when it comes to Formula 1'! I rather think my colleagues, and not a few others in the paddock, would take issue with you on that...

In truth, I must own up, at least a little. When it comes to some of the people in F1, I am distinctly cynical - or jaundiced, let's put it that way. I've been around long enough to remember when most F1 folk were in it primarily because they loved it, and such is not the situation today, I'm afraid. In fact, it's not necessarily a criticism of racing per se, more that racing is no different from any other activity in this 'me, me, me' world of today.

At lunch last week with Rahal and Lauda, I listened to Bobby going on about his attempts to keep traction control from being reintroduced to F1. He had no support whatever from any other team owner. "Well," he sighed, "I guess I'm a purist, and maybe purists have no place in the world any more." Mirrored my feelings exactly, I'm afraid.

That said, as a new season approaches I indeed get those pangs of anticipation. Hope springs eternal, I suppose, that this year maybe the natural order will be disturbed a little, so that we don't have an entire season completely dominated by one or two teams. Common sense tells me that McLaren and Ferrari will remain clear of the rest, but until we actually get to the first race, there is always the hope of something other than red or silver on the first two rows of the grid.

Yes, there is perhaps inevitably a sense of deja-vu, after covering well over 400 Grands Prix, but if I've lost enthusiasm for sitting on a plane for 26 hours (and, as a freelance, paying for it myself!), I certainly haven't for racing itself. Come three in the morning, or whatever it is, on Sunday, I'll be glued to the box, notebook at hand, ready to write a column about Melbourne the following day.




Dear Andre,
I agree entirely with Michael Schumacher's opinion that Formula 1 should stay on terrestrial TV, available to everyone, at no extra cost. The involvement of Kirch in F1 is indeed a potential worry, for 'pay-per-view' figures very strongly in this company's thinking. That said, I would be prepared to bet a pretty sizeable amount that there will always be 'free' coverage of F1 on terrestrial TV.

Why? Because this is what everyone - apart from Kirch, perhaps - wants. And when I say, 'everyone', I include Bernie Ecclestone and all the teams and major manufacturers, to say nothing of the sponsors, who would leave the sport in droves if 'pay-per-view' became the only way of watching a Grand Prix on TV.

There was a time, a few years ago, when some confidently suggested that this was the future of TV coverage, not only for F1, but for all major sporting events. Now, in 2001, the facts rather suggest otherwise: in overall terms, 'pay-per-view' has been a crushing failure, with dramatically fewer people prepared to fork out for it than had been expected.

Last year a colleague and I were chatting to the sponsorship manager of one of the major commercial companies involved in F1 (as the primary backer of a leading team). "The other day," he said, "someone said to me how nice the cars used to look in the '60s, when they were all in the plain national racing colours of their country: green for England, red for Italy, and so on. I said, 'Well, you never know, that situation might arise again some day - because if F1 ever comes off 'free' terrestrial TV, all the sponsors will be gone overnight!"

Relax, Andre. After all these years, I truly doubt that 'pay-per-view' will ever take over in F1. The golden goose would starve...




Dear Alan,
You're right to be intrigued by Giancarlo Baghetti's career. It was unique, and will almost certainly remain so. Although Mario Andretti, Carlos Reutemann and Jacques Villeneuve all took the pole at their first Grand Prix, and although JV then very nearly took victory in the race (at Melbourne in 1996), Baghetti is the only man to date who has actually won on his debut.

As a 15-year-old kid, I went to the British Grand Prix in 1961, and I remember that Baghetti looked a little groggy as he stepped from his wrecked Ferrari. It was an afternoon of torrential rain at Aintree, and his car had aquaplaned off the road, appropriately enough at a spot named Waterways.

After leaning against a wall for a minute or two, he set off on the long and muddy trudge back to the pits, dejection itself. Although he had been running only 10th at the time of the accident, the commentator reacted with great excitement. 'Baghetti,' he yelled, 'is beaten at last!'

Baghetti was not a great racing driver, nor ever would have claimed to be, but this charming, raffish, character, who died in 1995, took with him to the grave a place in F1 history. Like such as Francois Cevert, Richie Ginther or Alessandro Nannini, he won only one World Championship race, but Baghetti's victory came in his very first Grand Prix.

I should perhaps mention that the race, at Reims, was not strictly his first F1 outing, for already he had driven in a couple of non-championship events - and both of those, too, he had won! Before Aintree, Baghetti's strike rate was 100%; hence the commentator's raised voice as the Ferrari slithered across the grass.

At the end of the season, in a Porsche this time, Baghetti won another non-championship race, at Vallelunga, thus finishing his maiden season in F1 with four victories. He was never to win again.

When you met Giancarlo, you met very obviously a man who savoured life's pleasures. The son of a wealthy industrialist, he briefly went into the family business, but swiftly decided that he wished to go motor racing. In the late '50s he drove Alfa Romeos and Abarths with some success.

Since the death of Alberto Ascari, in 1955, no Italian driver had emerged at the very top level. Eugenio Castellotti and Luigi Musso had raced with courage and some success, but the prevailing mentality at Ferrari in those days, very much fostered by the Old Man, was to sign a whole clutch of drivers, then to pit them against each other. Castellotti and Musso were both braver than was good for them; each was killed in a Ferrari.

Italy was shorn of world-class drivers, and it was Musso's death, in 1958, which led to the conception of Formula Junior (which ultimately became Formula 3). Baghetti decided this was for him, and in 1960 won the Italian Championship.

The cherished dream, of course, was one day to drive for Ferrari, but at the time there seemed little hope for Baghetti, or any other Italian. In the space of two seasons, Enzo had lost not only Castellotti and Musso, but also Alfonso de Portago and Peter Collins; he and his company had been roundly denounced by large sections of the press.

Therefore, Ferrari was disinclined to sign any more Italians, for when the country's own sons were involved in tragedy, the condemnation was especially vociferous. At the same time, as so often with the unpredictable Ingegnere, this put him into conflict with himself: in his heart, what he wanted most was to see Italian drivers winning for Ferrari.

So there came about a typical Maranello fudge. The works drivers for 1961 were Phil Hill, Wolfgang von Trips and Richie Ginther, but it was put to Eugenio Dragoni (later the Ferrari team manager, but then operating the small Scuderia Sant-Ambroeus) that perhaps he might like to run a fourth car occasionally for a promising Italian. This kept Enzo true to his patriotic stirrings, but also - since it would not be a factory-entered car - distanced him from potential censure, should anything go awry. A very Italian solution.

At all events, a scarcely believing Baghetti was selected to drive the car, and this was the first year of the new 1.5-litre F1, for which Ferrari was prepared, and the British teams were not. Lotus, Cooper and the rest had an early warning of the form the season would take. At Syracuse, Sicily's wonderful open road circuit, there were no factory Ferraris on the entry list, but the 'private' car was down to run, driven by one G. Baghetti.

The race was held on a Tuesday, a Sicilian national holiday, which I remember because that evening at school I was surreptitiously listening to the radio when I should have been doing prep, and on a week day wasn't expecting to hear a race result; most of all, I wasn't expecting to hear that Dan Gurney had been beaten by someone of whom I had never heard.

Next morning the sports pages were full of it. This unknown rookie, and this dramatic new 'sharknose' car, had won at their first attempt, with only Gurney's Porsche offering any real opposition. Ferrari, the papers suggested, were going to waltz away with the season, and they were right, although at Monte Carlo the works cars were beaten by the genius of Stirling Moss.

That same day, Baghetti was in the Naples Grand Prix where - against minimal opposition this time - he won as he liked. His first World Championship race would be at Reims, and there he would get his come-uppance.

He didn't, though. If he qualified only 12th, he made swift progress in the early laps, and when the 'official' Ferraris faltered, for once, the French Grand Prix came down to another fight between Baghetti and Gurney, Dan getting help on this occasion from team mate Jo Bonnier, the two Porsche drivers attempting unsuccessfully to unsettle Ferrari's upstart by crowding him.

Reims was always a pure horsepower track, and Baghetti's car unquestionably had more of that than Gurney's, but on Dan's side were guile and experience. On the long run down to the flag, he put the Porsche squarely in the middle of the road, and held it there. Baghetti feinted left, saw Gurney glance in his mirror, and jinked right, timing the move to perfection.

Dan could have blocked him, but, as he says, you didn't do that sort of thing back then: "He did it just right - he deserved the win..."

Baghetti drove occasionally for Ferrari in 1962, but by now the cars were overwhelmed by the British teams, and after a disastrous 1963 season, with the fledgling ATS outfit, his F1 career simply faded away. Occasionally, as in 1967, when he drove a works Lotus 49, he appeared at the Italian Grand Prix, but he retired for good the following year.

Such a strange racing career, this, with all its success at its very beginning. Perhaps, given his money, his taste for the sweet life, Giancarlo never had the desire of the great ones; perhaps, for that matter, he never had the talent, either. But although you can never say never, I doubt that any man will ever again win his first Grand Prix.




Dear Sion,
I was terribly upset by the death of Dale Earnhardt, for although I had met him only two or three times, I very much liked what I saw. He was the fiercest competitor on the race track, and liked to cultivate a similar image in the paddock, but in reality I think he was a kind man, and one with a great sense of humour. I saw him race in many Daytona 500s, and it was easy to see what the NASCAR experts were going on about: he could do things with a stock car that no one else could. Simple as that. At what he did, he was genius.

I was, of course, rather more personally involved when Ayrton Senna and Gilles Villeneuve were killed, for I knew both of them, and Gilles, in particular, was a good friend.

The world changes, doesn't it? Villeneuve was killed at Zolder, in May 1982, only five weeks before his home Grand Prix, and the crowd in Montreal that year was tiny. All right, the weather was cold and grey, and, thanks to TV schedules, began at the absurdly late hour of four o'clock, but undoubtedly the main reason for the lack of spectators was the tragic absence of the national hero. They were still grieving for Gilles.

Move on a dozen years, to the mid-nineties, and things seemed to have changed. I remember talking to Bernie Ecclestone a year or so after Senna's death, at Imola in 1994.

"After poor Ayrton got killed, everyone said, 'That's it, Formula 1's finished, forget it.' Remember that? 'Brazil,' they said, 'don't even have a race in Brazil.' Well, this year we had the biggest crowd ever in Brazil. The TV ratings have been bigger than ever, and at every circuit the crowd has been up. Now, don't ask me why..."

Don't ask me why, either. The only explanation I can offer is that racing is so comparatively safe these days that a fatality has a hugely greater effect, and not only on the immediate racing community. It serves as a cruel reminder that, for all safety progress that has been made, motor racing is not a game. And when the driver who loses his life, be it Senna or Earnhardt, is pre-eminent in his sport, it becomes front page lead in papers everywhere, the first item on the TV news bulletins. And that, inevitably, puts motor racing squarely in front of many who had previously little awareness of it.

F1 and NASCAR are different worlds, of course, but I would be surprised if the death of Dale Earnhardt has - in the long term, anyway - a negative impact on the popularity of stock car racing. Some, heartbroken at his loss, will never go to a race again, of course, as happened in the case of Senna, but new fans are always coming over the hill.




Dear Mario,
A short answer to this one: like everyone else in the press room, I haven't a clue! Look in a CART or NASCAR race programme, and - so far as I know - the prize monies are still listed, and the same is true of F1 programmes in the pre-FOCA (in other words, pre-Bernie) era. For very many years, though, there has been not a word about fiscal reward.

The teams' payments, for each race, are based on an immensely complicated system, taking all manner of things into account, such as grid positions, places at quarter, half, three-quarter and full distance, as well as positions in the previous year's World Championship, and so on. That's how it was the last time I checked, anyway.

A leading team owner once admitted to me that he, too, was a bit baffled by it. "Sometimes I try and calculate how much I've got coming to me after a given race," he said. "I think I know what the system is, and I work it out very precisely. And d'you know what? When the cheque arrives, it's never within 10 or 20 grand of my figure! Sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more - so over a season it probably balances out..."




Dear Paul,
There's no doubt that improving road safety is a consuming passion of Max Mosley's, and quite right, too. The FIA President works closely with the EU on such matters, and feels, no doubt with justification, that already the FIA has been responsible for very significant strides in passenger car safety, not least in the matter of crash tests.

It is therefore not surprising that Mosley would wish to dovetail aspects of safety in both racing and road cars, and I think we shall more and more evidence of this as times goes on.

Safety is one thing, however. In all other respects, I continue to believe that road and racing cars have little or nothing to do with each other - and nor necessarily should they have. The major manufacturers, I know, are very much in favour of increasing the technological 'gizmos' permitted on F1 cars, feeling that this creates in the mind of the public a more direct link between what they're putting on the race track and what they're selling you in the high street.

This may well be the case, but to me it has no relevance, and in my support I quote no less a man than Niki Lauda, who held forth on the subject at a lunch I attended last week.

"We have to draw a line: this is a Formula 1 car - and this is a road car. In an F1 car, everything is basically automatic these days, and I think that's bad. Now we have traction control coming back, because they can't police it - but, in my opinion, it takes away all the effort of the drivers. Even in the wet, if traction control is done properly, you don't need to worry about sliding - you just push the throttle. I think it's a joke.

"We always say that in motor racing we don't see overtaking, and so on, but as you make the car mechanically so easy to drive - gearshift, throttle, all these things - the only thing you have to worry about now is to brake, and any idiot can do that: when he sees his wheel lock, he doesn't brake so late next time...

"The rest is all automatic. Gearshift is no problem any more - in the old days, if you missed a gear, you broke the engine, and the Grand Prix was gone - either that, or somebody passed you. Now no one can pass, because no one can make a mistake changing gear now.

"The real key thing to me, in the next five years, is to produce circuits and cars where you can see racing. I think this is the big worry F1 has. The circuit layout is part of it, and the cars themselves. I think Mosley and the people who make the regulations must watch: keep overtaking - and not only in the pits."

And how do we achieve that? Lauda had no doubts: "Reduce all this technical bullshit! This is the good thing about racing in the United States: the CART cars are old-fashioned, compared with F1, but the reason is very simple: keep the costs down, and let the drivers drive. In Europe it's gone completely the other way."

That certainly says it for me...