Ask Nigel: Feb 7

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Dear Colin,
I've been around too long to set too much store by testing times - we've all been fooled by them so often - but, for all that, there seem to be grounds for believing that the Prost team has made a substantial leap over the winter, and that pleases me, not least because Alain is a man I have always liked and admired.

There have been very considerable changes in the team since last season, in terms of personnel, tyres (Bridgestone to Michelin), and, of course, engines. Mercifully, the Peugeot F1 programme is now at an end (although, renamed, and under new ownership, the engine will continue to be seen, in the Arrows cars), and for 2001 Prost not only has Ferrari engines (2000-spec), but also Ferrari's whole 'rear end', including gearbox. The deal is costing Alain an arm and a leg, but, given the Mercedes decision not, after all, to supply him with engines, it was undoubtedly the best option available to him.

Leaving the actual testing times aside, what is particularly encouraging is the enthusiasm for the new Prost/Ferrari/Michelin combination expressed not only by the proprietor, but also by Jean Alesi, a driver for whom I personally have rooted ever since I first saw him in an F1 car, back in 1989, when he arrived with Tyrrell.

So sensational were Jean's drives for Ken - he was fourth in his first GP, at Paul Ricard, after running as high as second - that he was offered contracts by both Williams-Renault and Ferrari, and, had he been a normal, pragmatic, sort of F1 driver, he would have weighed up his options, and gone to Frank. Had he done so, who knows how many Grands Prix he might have won? At that point, Williams were on the cusp of a period of domination, and Jean could have been in the pound seats.

As it was, he went with his heart, and committed himself to Ferrari, where it may fairly be said he wasted five years in usually uncompetitive cars. Alesi insists still that he has no regrets. You mention Williams, and you get a rueful shrug: yes, of course it would have been better for his career, but...there's no point in thinking about it.

After Ferrari, Jean went to Benetton for two years, after which the management decided it should in future go for 'yoof'. This is a policy which has yet to bear fruit.

In my opinion, Alesi has always been among the very fastest drivers, but often overlooked is that, given a half-reliable car, he has also been among the best finishers in the business. In his two years with Benetton he made the podium 13 times.

There followed a couple of seasons with Sauber, a team incapable of doing him justice. Twice, though - in Austria in '98, and Magny-Cours in '99 - Jean started from the front row, and on each occasion a treacherous track surface allowing his other-worldly car control to compensate for middling equipment.

Little needs to be said about last season with Prost-Peugeot. Alesi went there in positive frame of mind, for Alain Prost was not only a man he revered, but also his close friend. In terms of results, the year was a complete disaster, but to me it means something that still Jean was able to shine at two out-and-our drivers' circuits - Monaco (where he qualified seventh) and Spa (where he ran fourth).

"Honestly," Prost said, "Jean's influence has been really good. He has a lot of experience, and he's a much, much, better driver than he was 10 years ago, when we were at Ferrari together. I believe he is still super-quick."

Alesi's longtime team mate, Gerhard Berger, too, remains a fan. "For me, Jean is still underestimated. I think he's really a VERY good racing driver. He doesn't make many mistakes in a race, he has unbelievable car control, he has speed, he has experience, he's quick in the rain... And he's very good finisher.

"His problem is that he has an image of being uncontrollable, but I don't think it's fair any more. I think the way he behaves depends entirely on how he is treated. I really would like to see him again in a winning car."

To me it is extraordinary that the top teams have continued to pass Alesi by. Yes, he can be temperamental, and he tends to say what he thinks - but, in the end, even in this era do you hire a driver for his PR blandness or his speed? Jean is a lovely fellow, and it would be a delight to see him ruffle a few smug feathers this season.




Dear Bob,
Thank you for the compliment - and also for the refreshingly unusual question.

In answering it, I could bring up a great many names, and make a reasonably strong case for each, but in the end I'm going to settle for Professor Sid Watkins, the President of the FIA Medical Commission; in my opinion, he has done more for F1 in the last 20 years than anyone else.

'The Prof' is a very easy man to like. Over time I came to discover that, while regarded as one of the world's leading brain surgeons, he was more down-to-earth than most GPs of my acquaintance.

First thing is, he loves the sport, and always has. Born in Liverpool, the son of a motor trader, his ambition always lay in the direction of the medical profession, but as he trained for neurosurgery he did not neglect his passion for racing. When he worked in Oxford, he acted as a medical officer at Silverstone, and after moving to Syracuse, in upstate New York, he became involved with Watkins Glen, in those days the home of the US Grand Prix.

It was here that Watkins came to know the F1 fraternity, and when he moved back to England Bernie Ecclestone invited him to take charge of the medical aspects of the entire Grand Prix trail. Bernie has never had a better idea. In his new capacity, Watkins went to the Swedish Grand Prix in 1978, and has not since missed a race.

He is known in the business as the only man with whom Ecclestone never argues. The two have always got along, and Bernie accepts the Prof's opinion without question.

"Sometimes you have to do things that make you unpopular," Watkins said. "For example, Nelson Piquet had a huge accident in qualifying at Imola in 1987 - went off at Tamburello, at 16Omph or so. He survived all right, but he got a big bang on the head. There was nothing wrong with him, beyond concussion, but a couple of hours later he didn't even know he was a racing driver...

"As he began to feel better, he decided he wanted to race the following day, and he tried everything to persuade me to let him - pleading, threatening, the lot. I understood, of course, but there was no way I was signing any authorisation for him to drive. 'Nelson, if you black out on the first lap,' I said to him, 'with 20-odd cars behind you, it's not going to be my responsibility, OK?' And then he began to see my point of view."

During the practice sessions, the Prof is to be found, kitted in fireproof overalls, lounging in the back of the medical car, as often as not with a Havana in his mouth. His natural manner is easy and languid, but on one occasion, as I chatted to him, word of an accident came through. The cigar was jettisoned as the car's engine fired up, and Watkins prepared himself for what might be an emergency.

On more than one occasion, the Prof's considerable physical courage has been put to the test. For example, at Montreal, in 1982, Riccardo Paletti had an appalling accident at the start, his Osella hitting the back of Didier Pironi's stalled Ferrari.

As the medical car follows the pack around the opening lap of the race, Watkins was swiftly on hand, within 10 seconds of the impact. The Osella's fuel tank had split, spewing its contents on to the road, but the Prof went straight to the cockpit, and quickly established that Paletti, while very badly injured, had a pulse. A few seconds later the car was ablaze.

The driver, mercifully, knew nothing of this, having lost consciousness from the moment of impact. Releasing him took a further 25 minutes; that done, Paletti was removed to hospital, where efforts to save him ultimately failed.

The loss of Ayrton Senna, a dozen years later, had a very profound effect on Watkins, for the two men were close friends, and there is little doubt that Ayrton had come to look upon the Prof almost as a father figure.

He has no idea why he and Senna became so close. "Just one those things. I hit it off with some of the other drivers, too, of course...Niki, Jody, Gilles, Gerhard. There was no bullshit about any of them, and that's a quality I've always appreciated."

They say that many a physical problem has psychological roots, and the Prof has the most reassuring presence imaginable. There is nothing remotely elitist about him: he may be at a circuit primarily to look after the drivers, but is always available to anyone in the paddock. And his manner is such that when he says nothing is seriously awry, you immediately begin to feel better.

Although my father was a doctor, and I thus grew up in a medical household, my subconscious expectation was always that eminent physicians should have names like 'Sir Lancelot Spratt' (as immortalised by James Robertson Justice in 'Doctor In The House'), and at first 'Sid' seemed to me a somehow inappropriate name for a professor of neurosurgery. In fact, it suits him to a tee, for I know of no one more unpretentious.

Nor more healthily irreverent. The Prof has a very fine sense of humour, sharpened by a loathing of pomposity. At Aida one year, lacking the necessary pass, he dared to venture into the Paddock Club for a pee, and - lacking the requisite pass - was asked to remove himself. "Did you say anything to them?" I asked. "Yes," he replied, deadpan. "Don't get ill."

Never less than good company, Watkins sparkles especially when armed with a glass of red wine and a Romeo Y Julieta. Some of his remedies are unorthodox: "Forget sleeping pills - what you need is a stiff Scotch, last thing..." And he accepts, unlike doctors of the 'give up smoking, and then come and see me again' school, that real people rarely lead sensible, blameless, lives. "I've often joked," he says, "that if you drive Formula 1 cars for a living, the last thing you need is a brain surgeon..."

So there it is. I look upon the Prof as a friend, but also as something of a hero.




Dear Dino,
I have to say that, following the death of Gilles, at Zolder in 1982, it was some little time before I could bring myself to speak to Didier Pironi, and when I did, I was not convinced, let's say, by the sincerity of his responses.

He maintained that if he had done anything wrong at Imola, it was in complete innocence - he knew nothing about any Ferrari team orders, and believed he and Villeneuve were honestly racing, etc, etc. Given the bare facts, lap times, and so on, Pironi's version of events simply did not stand up.

He went to great lengths to stress it had all been a big misunderstanding, that he had revered Gilles, and so on, but those closely involved at the time - notably the late Harvey Postlethwaite - didn't see it that way, and neither did I. Gilles and I were pretty close friends, and a couple of days after Imola spoke on the phone for more than an hour. The conversation chilled me, and although I recorded it - and still have the tape - I have never played it back since transcribing it that same day, to use in the following week's Fifth Column.

Looking back on it all, nearly 20 years on, it seems that Pironi was a Grand Prix driver coming to real greatness, his only problem being that he was team mate to the best there was. If I follow F1 till I'm 100, I will always believe that Gilles was the fastest driver there has ever been. All things being equal, Pironi was never going to get the better of him, and I believe that therefore he turned to other means.

One of the great figures in the sport said to me only recently: "When Pironi stole that race from Villeneuve on the last lap, there was much more involved than a simple victory - and he knew it. He knew Gilles's personality, and the effect this would have on him. I'll always believe what happened at Imola played a huge part in what led up to Gilles's accident at Zolder."

My feelings precisely. Perhaps he did feel some remorse ultimately - he named his twin sons Didier and Gilles - but it didn't change the way I, and others, felt. To me, Didier Pironi, beneath the placid exterior, was an ice man.




Dear Graham,

Thank you so much for your remarks. There are times when I think maybe no one else is interested in this sport's history - certainly you don't find many of them in an F1 paddock, that's for sure!

That makes me sad, actually, because I think it's their loss. And I also think it's rather shortsighted, because any sport is shaped by its past, and racing is no exception.

I'm interested in a lot of sports, and always have been, but not too many, I think, lend themselves to great writing. Motor racing apart, I would go for cricket (when it's someone like Neville Cardus or John Arlott), boxing (AJ Liebling or Hugh McIlvanney) and golf (Henry Longhurst or John Feinstein).

I have, I confess, a particular regard for the really great American sports writers of the past, such as Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon. When the writing is of that quality, they could be describing synchronised swimming, and I'd still be hooked.

My favourite book on sport? Probably, 'Farewell to Sport', written by Paul Gallico in the late thirties. It was re-published a few years ago, and is still available. Read the chapter on Indianapolis, and you'll know what I mean.




Dear Andrew,
You and me both. What has happened to de la Rosa is a classic example of what I hate about Formula 1 in this era: shine the light where the money is.

I really don't need to be told that F1 is expensive, and that 'paying drivers' are a necessity. We all know this is true - let's face it, Pedro himself came with money from Repsol - but what appals me about this particular incident is the timing, the fact that he has been tossed out, to make way for Bernoldi, a month or so before the first race. Every other team, Minardi apart, has had its driver line-up fixed for months, and it's too late for de la Rosa to find anything else at this late stage.

He was nominated by Arrows as one of the drivers on the official entry list for the World Championship in December, and was out testing one of the cars just the week before last.

To my mind, Pedro was one of the revelations of the 2000 season, and, had he been available, would at the very least have been picked up by one of the leading teams as test driver. I think he's too good not to get back into F1, and trust it will happen.

I'm reminded on occasions like this of something Frank Williams said to me years ago, when I asked him if he still regarded F1 as a sport. "Yes," Frank said, "between the hours of two and four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. All the rest of the time, it's just commerce, quite honestly."

Shame, isn't it?




Dear Rob,
As of this minute, I see that Bernie is making clear that even if he sells a stake, be it 50% or whatever, he has no intention of relinquishing his position at the helm of Formula 1. No real surprise, that!

More to the point, the 'Big Five' manufacturers involved - BMW, Mercedes, Renault, Jaguar (Ford) and Fiat (Ferrari) - have no wish to see Ecclestone replaced. As long as he wants to do the job, they want him to stay, and with good reason: no other individual is capable of doing it the way he does it, and that's a fact.

What seems clear is that the manufacturers want to have a stake in F1 because they want security - guarantees for the future of the sport in which they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars. EM-TV, the German media group, bought a 50% shareholding in SLEC last summer, but now - with their shares going through the floor - they want to offload it, and clearly the manufacturers are concerned that some company, with no knowledge of, or interest in, Formula 1, could gain control of it.

In answer to your first question, yes, I think there will still be a place for the 'non-manufacturer' teams on the F1 grid. As to the second, who knows? In one respect, it is very healthy to have the major manufacturers so deeply involved in F1 - but this is a double-edged sword, because these people are not like Frank Williams and Ron Dennis, involved in Grand Prix racing for the duration, and with an abiding passion for it. Bluntly, the manufacturers are involved because they think it's good for business, and the second they don't feel that - by reason of a recession, declining profits, or even longterm boredom - they'll be gone.

In the not so distant past, after all, Renault packed it in (twice), and so did Honda, although both are back - for now. But it may well be that in time other companies will do as Peugeot did, and limp out of F1, muttering that it's 'not fair' that only two teams ever win, leaving the rest to fight over fifth place.

The curious thing about Peugeot's philosophy is that it seems not to trouble them at all that this same situation essentially appertains in rallying, too...