Ask Nigel: Feb 6

Dear Geoff,
Your guess is as good as mine...

I saw Steve Nichols, whom I've known and liked for a good many years, about a week before Christmas, and formed the clear opinion that he was unhappy with his working environment at Jaguar. That, in itself, didn't surprise me, for other team members - rather less discreet than Steve - had previously made it all too clear that the factory at Milton Keynes wasn't their favourite place on earth, and that they greatly regretted the surgical removal of Bobby Rahal late last summer.

Perhaps the first thing we should bear in mind is that Nichols was recruited by Rahal, and was therefore perhaps always on thin ice. Just as when Bobby was shoved out, we've had the usual intelligence-insulting press release from Jaguar, informing us that the split was all very amicable. Yeah, right.

It is a fact that the latest Jaguar R3 has been extremely disappointing in pre-season testing, and as soon as that became apparent, F1 insiders began to murmur that a head would roll somewhere, that a scapegoat would be found.

My feeling is that Nichols is well out of it. Since 'Jaguar Racing' came into being, it has been a Machiavellian nightmare, and I see no end to it, with everyone heaping blame on everyone else. Only the drivers appear to escape censure - which is a mystery in itself!

As things stand, if the team is still in existence in three years'
time, I will be surprised.



Dear Nick,
When Richie Ginther's name comes up, I always think immediately of the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix. This, by common consent, was the greatest drive of Stirling Moss's life. In Rob Walker's old Lotus 18, he held off a barrage of assaults from Ferrari, eventually winning by a little over three seconds. It was not, though, Phil Hill or Wolfgang von Trips, Maranello's established stars, who put Stirling under the greatest pressure that day, but Ginther, driving in only the fourth Grand Prix of his life.

I remember it so well, that Sunday afternoon at school, when a bunch of us sat around a 'transistor radio', vaguely tuned in to a French station. Moss, we understood from the syrupy Gallic voice, was leading, but surely could not resist Ferrari...

I met Ginther only once, a dozen years before he died, tragically young, of a heart attack. A guest of Goodyear at Hockenheim in 1977, he was amazed that folk in the paddock remembered him.

"Well, without any doubt," he said, "my best drive was at Monaco in '61. The race was 100 laps at that time, and lasted going on three hours. I was right on the limit all the way, and I think Stirling was, too. He and I were first and second in qualifying, and in the race we got three seconds under that! Believe me, any time you did well against Stirling, you knew you'd really done something; he was the greatest driver I ever saw - by a long way."

The bare statistics of that race almost beggar belief. In practice Moss and Ginther had lapped in lm39.1s and lm39.3s, respectively. In the race, on a hot afternoon, their average lap time was lm39.5s, and they left the fastest lap at 1m36.3s. If those 100 laps were conceivably Moss's greatest ever, they took Ginther only three seconds longer.

Ginther, born in Hollywood in 1930, became involved in motor racing through a chance meeting with Phil Hill, a friend of his elder brother. The two men were to become close buddies, and when Hill needed a riding companion for the 1953 Pan-American Road Race, Ginther was asked along.

Their car for this long, long, race was Allen Guiberson's 4.1-litre Ferrari coupe, which Ginther remembered as having only two faults: "It didn't stop, and seemed to have a tremendous aversion to going around a corner..."

Hill got the car onto the leader board, however, before it 'refused' at a downhill right-hander, plunging down a steep drop, end over end. Neither man was hurt, and they returned the following year to finish second.

After racing a succession of Austin-Healeys, Aston Martins and Porsches, Ginther himself began driving Ferraris for wealthy enthusiast John van Neumann. It was a successful association, and for 1960 he was invited to join the factory Ferrari team, where he swiftly established himself as a superb test driver, with remarkable mechanical sympathy.

"I never could bring myself to abuse an engine," he recalled. "If I felt the thing tighten, I'd shut it down rather than run another lap and blow it to hell. It was something the Ferrari people found hard to understand...

"At Reims in 1961, for instance, I knew the engine was going to blow and I came into the pits - and, hey, I was leading at the time! Of course, they insisted I go back out, so I shrugged my shoulders and did it. Half a lap later, the engine was wrecked, and I had a long walk back!

"It's a funny thing, you know - how many senses do we have? Five, right? Well, the Ferrari people always thought I had six! That went back to a test day at Monza in 1960, the last year of the front-engined Dino 246. It was just before the Italian Grand Prix, and we were using the full circuit - including the banking. I was supposed to do a series of laps, and I came in early, because I could sense something was wrong. They got agitated, and said, 'It's not time yet, don't you know?' and that sort of
thing.

"I said 'Wait a minute. This thing's going to blow up - there's a vibration in there that's not right.' But the mechanics fired it up again - wham, wham, wham - they revved the hell out of it, then said that everything was OK, and I should go back out. I said no, and so they put someone else in..."

Ginther was trying to be discreet, but I had to know. He burst out laughing. "Well...you asked! It was Willy Mairesse. Poor old wild Willy. Before he went out, I said to all the guys, 'Hey, that thing is going to blow in 12 laps.' And, would you believe, it did! Not on the 10th, not on the sixth, not on the 20th...but the 12th. I mean, I'd just picked a figure out of the air, but from then on they thought I was magic! They really believed that I had some sense that nobody else had."

Back then, you drove for Ferrari for love. "Oh, that's right," Ginther said. "It was a joke, really. I used to get $400 a month, as I recall..."

Overall, his memories of Ferrari were good, but he didn't leave under happy circumstances, having accepted a BRM offer for 1962. "The Commendatore was so angry that I wasn't even allowed to go round the factory to say good-bye to everyone. Fortunately, all the mechanics came to my apartment to see me."

On his day Ginther was as quick as anyone in the business: at the 1962 Oulton Park Gold Cup, for example, he beat Jimmy Clark to pole position, having never seen the circuit before. The following year he finished equal second (with team mate Graham Hill) to Clark in the World Championship.

The BRM years, however, brought no victories, and Richie moved to Honda in 1965. "Unquestionably," he said, "my best memory of racing is the time I spent with the Honda people. They really tried so goddam hard for you, and in a short time they achieved a hell of a lot."

Throughout that year, the transverse-engined Japanese car became ever more competitive, but if Ginther frequently qualified well, he rarely finished. In the high altitude of Mexico, though, the Honda seemed to thrive, and Richie led all the way.

"My car was just flat better than anything else in that race. When Dan [Gurney] began to catch me towards the end, I knew there was no problem. I was letting him come back at me, because I was saving my car, and I knew how much I could let him have. I had a fuel mixture control, and I ran at full rich to protect the engine. If I needed it, I could turn the switch anywhere up to full lean - and the difference was 300 revs on the straightaway..."

He left Honda to join Gurney's Eagle team in 1967, and it looked like a good move. Dan's ambitious plans included both Formula 1 and Indianapolis, and Ginther would drive in both teams. The beautiful hawk-nosed cars made their first appearance at Brands Hatch, in the Race of Champions, and Gurney won, while Ginther - faithful to his creed - shut down the Weslake V12 towards the end, when lying a solid second.

Although he didn't know it at the time, it was to be his last race. "Monte Carlo was part of it, because I didn't qualify. I had a lot of problems, sure, but I was really upset by that - I loved the place, and had usually done well there.

"Then we went off to Indianapolis. I had never been there before, but got along fine, and in practice I was about fifth quickest. Then, on the first qualifying day, I was in the car, waiting in line in the pit lane, and quite suddenly I called Gurney over and said, 'Dan, I just don't want to start this race.' There were no questions from him. He just said, 'OK, fine, I understand,' and I was really moved by that. I thought his understanding was remarkable.

"Well, I got back to my motel room, and going through my mind was the thought that, hey, if I don't want to start that race... I'm a race driver, I should... And I decided to get out before I couldn't; if I kept going with that kind of mentality, I was going to hurt myself. And I never raced again."

I found Ginther an engaging fellow, full of good humour. At the time of our meeting, he had dropped out, and was living in a motorhome, having sold not only a very successful company, but also his house. He was happy, he was free. "I loved my time in racing," he said. "It's one of the very few adventurous lives left, isn't it?"

Ginther was not a great driver, at the level of his fellow Californians, Phil Hill and Dan Gurney, but considerably more than a journeyman.



Dear Michael,
Frankly, I think it's going to take an Act of God for any but Ferrari, Williams-BMW and McLaren-Mercedes to win a race this year, but you never know. Let's remember, after all, that Olivier Panis won the 1996 Monaco Grand Prix in a Ligier...

However, for a freak winner, you need freak circumstances, which in this case means both Schumachers, Montoya, Barrichello, Coulthard and Raikkonen retiring, or, at least, having a problem, and the chances of that happening to all six on the same day are pretty slender.

That said, the Sauber C21 is indeed shaping up very nicely, with both Massa and, even more so, Heidfeld, setting very impressive times. I think there's no doubt that Nick has been on a mission ever since Ron Dennis signed Raikkonen, and when I wrote my season preview for Autoweek a fortnight ago, I tipped him to be the dark horse of the season.

Traditionally, Sauber begin a season well, and then fade away as others progress, but in 2001 that wasn't the case: for the first time, they were strong all the way through, and I expect Heidfeld to embarrass the big shots a time or two. Remember, though, while they have extremely good Ferrari engines, they don't get the same as Michael and Rubens, and running 'customer' motors is always going to be a limiting factor.



Dear Toomas,
You're quite right: Honda did indeed re-enter F1 with Spirit. This was a successful Formula 2 team, which moved up to F1 in 1983, by modifying its F2 chassis to accept Honda's F1 V6 turbo. The driver was Stefan Johansson.

I don't think there's any doubt that Honda looked upon Spirit as a guinea-pig - and I don't think anyone at Spirit was under any illusions about that. A deal, after all, had already been done between Honda and Williams, and Frank's team ran Honda engines for the first time at Kyalami, the last round of the '83 World Championship.

So are Honda looking upon Jordan and BAR in the same way? Not quite, I don't think. Both these are midfield teams, true enough, but the major teams - Ferrari, McLaren, Williams - are obviously committed elsewhere, so Honda don't have a lot of choice. Perhaps they rue the day they quit F1 at the end of 1992, leaving behind McLaren and Ayrton Senna!

Quite honestly, though, Honda now is not Honda then. In 2001 their V10 was nowhere in the horsepower race, and the latest engine, I'm told, is thus far proving a great disappointment...



Dear Marcus,
No question about it, on his day Rene Arnoux was indeed that quick - in fact, when he was in the mood, there was no one faster. Arnoux was not, though, fundamentally in the same class as his team mate, Alain Prost.

As far as the 1982 French Grand Prix is concerned, his victory was controversial. to say the least. By that stage of the season, Prost was the only Renault driver with a chance in the World Championship - Arnoux had but four points, thanks to the cars' woeful unreliability.

At Paul Ricard, Arnoux and Prost qualified 1-2, and before the race Rene volunteered to help Alain in his title quest, suggesting that if the Renaults were running first and second, he would finish behind his team mate.

Prost himself was sceptical about this, but accepted Arnoux's word. In the race, the Renaults lasted for once, and although Prost's car broke a 'skirt' - all the cars had 'skirts' in those days, these forming a seal between the bottom of the car and the ground - and thereafter suffered from a lack of grip, Alain assumed that Rene would honour his word.

When it came to it, though, Rene had a memory lapse. The Renaults indeed finished 1-2, but not in the order the team - and Alain - had expected.



Dear Jack,
I'm all for it - not least because I understand the BSkyB broadcasts are not to be interrupted by commercial breaks, which drive me nuts when I watch ITV's coverage. They don't have them during football matches - people wouldn't stand for it - so why must they have them in a Grand Prix?

What can you expect of the coverage? Well, plenty, I'd say. In the press rooms at the Grands Prix, we are fortunate enough to have the pictures from 'Bakersville', Bernie Ecclestone's portable TV emporium, and take my word for it, they are a very great deal better than you ever see on the 'terrestrial feed'. It is not by chance, for example, that these days you get hardly any 'in car' footage on free TV: for that, you must have the digital feed...

Whether or not it will catch on in the UK is a different matter. Are enough people prepared to fork out every fortnight to watch something they can already see for free? I have no idea. It's been widely available elsewhere in Europe for some time now, and - I'm told - not really set the house on fire. That said, there may be more F1 fanatics in the UK.

All I will say is that, as and when I give up going to the races, I'll certainly have it. The ability to choose what you want to watch is a particular boon on those days when Michael checks out, and there is no 'race', as such. Terrestrial TV inevitably, and understandably, sticks with the front runners, and good scraps further down the field are never seen. With the digital feed, press a button, and there they are on your screen.

The big problem with BSkyB, of course, is that you won't get Martin Brundle's commentary, which - in my opinion, anyway - is far and away the highest card in ITV's hand. Perhaps the best solution would be to watch the digital feed, and listen to the commentary of Jonathan Legard and Maurice Hamilton on BBC Radio 5...