Ask Nigel: January 10

Dear Jorge,
Yes, in a word! Like everyone else, I remain hopeful - and optimistic - that Giancarlo Minardi can get everything in place so as to be able to continue in Formula 1.

Most people in the paddock have a soft spot for Minardi, perhaps because the team is an echo of Formula 1 as it used to be, when people in the business went racing primarily because they loved it - like, say, John Cooper, who sadly died recently. Their attitude is somewhat anachronistic in this day and age, but their enthusiasm never weakens. They work very hard for very little reward, in terms of World Championship points, but they always arrive with smiles on their faces: they are old-fashioned racers, and I love that about them.

Inevitably, given that the team's annual budget is probably less than Michael Schumacher's salary, their efforts are compromised by obsolete 'customer' engines and the constant need to run 'paying drivers', but they always seem to struggle on, and I sincerely hope we haven't seen the last of them.




Dear David,
Lovely to hear from you, and thanks for your good wishes. A very happy New Year to you, too. You're growing older, and missing icons of the sport, like Walter Hayes. Believe me, David, I know the feeling...

For racing enthusiasts who have been around for a while, Christmas was indeed a sad time, for Walter died on Boxing Day, two days after John Cooper passed away. I liked both men very much.

Not many folk seem to know that, before getting involved with cars and racing, Hayes was a senior journalist in Fleet Street, the Associate Editor of the Daily Mail. At that time, in the early Sixties, Ford had a somewhat dog-eared image in Britain, and their cars were regarded as thoroughly unexciting, workaday transport, nothing more.

Walter's recruitment to the company came about when Sir Patrick Hennessy, the chairman of Ford of Britain, asked Lord Beaverbrook for help in finding a man to change the company's public image. Beaverbrook suggested Hayes, and thus the deal was done.

Just at that time, the first Cortina was being launched in Britain, and Walter suggested that its rather dull image could be enlivened by the introduction of a high-performance version. Thus, the Cortina GT came on the scene, and later the Lotus Cortina.

It was this last car which really began to change the way people in Britain looked upon Ford. In his days as a newspaperman, Hayes had come to know Colin Chapman, and he could see the advantages of linking the Ford name with a company which at that time was dominating Grand Prix racing, with Jimmy Clark.

Back then, of course, F1 drivers - even the greatest on earth - did not confine themselves to Grand Prix racing, and Clark, as well as competing at Indianapolis, also drove factory-entered Lotus Cortinas in what was then called the British Touring Car Championship. Anyone who ever saw Jimmy in one of these cars, myself included, has never forgotten it - for sheer sideways spectacle, it was beyond belief.

The times were different. "At the start of the second season," Hayes once told me, "I really felt we ought to be paying Jimmy more than we were, and I told him so. He said, 'Oh, well, yes, if you want to, fine, thank you.' When I checked, I found we'd been paying him £1500 for the whole saloon car season - and he was World Champion at the time! It would never have entered his head to ask for more..."

It wasn't easy, but over time Walter convinced Ford of the advantages of being involved in motor sport. He was solidly behind the idea of Formula Ford, for example, and you'd have to say - 33 years on - that that has been quite a success.

More than anything, though, Hayes will be remembered as the father of the Cosworth DFV project, for he it was who came up with the idea that Ford should build an F1 engine, and he persuaded the company bosses that the cost - £100,000 - would be the best investment they would ever make. Given that the engine would win 155 Grands Prix, from 1967 to 1983, Walter was probably right...

The engine made its debut at the '67 Dutch Grand Prix, powering the Lotuses of Jim Clark and Graham Hill. Although somewhat 'cammy' in its early guise, it immediately had way more power than any rival motor: Hill took the pole, and Clark won the race!

Ken Tyrrell, about to form his own F1 team, was at Zandvoort that day. "I was incredibly lucky with the timing of my plans to move up to F1," Ken says. "I flew over to Holland for the race, and it was clear that this new engine was... the only engine in the race. Everything else was suddenly old-fashioned rubbish. If you wanted to go racing in the future, this was the engine you had to have.

"In those days, it was so simple. You went up to Northampton, you gave them £7500 - and you came away with an engine which could win you Grands Prix. All you had to do was put it into a reasonably competitive car, with a good driver, and you could win the next race - and it continued like that for more than 10 years!"

In another way, too, Tyrrell had cause to be grateful to Hayes. "The timing for me was perfect. Matra were keen to make an F1 car, Ford had the engine - and Jackie Stewart wanted to drive for us. God knows why he did, when he could have driven for Ferrari, but he did. I asked how much he wanted, and he said, 'Twenty thousand pounds'. I didn't have twenty thousand pence..."

Thus, Tyrrell went to see Hayes. He thought he could get the money for Stewart eventually, he said, but needed it now, so as to get JYS firmly on board; it would help considerably in his dealings with Matra.

Walter didn't hesitate. "He didn't have to get on the phone to Henry Ford, or anything like that," says Tyrrell. "He just said yes. I was amazed!"

In fact, Tyrrell ultimately landed £80,000 in sponsorship from Dunlop, and used some of it to pay Stewart. "That," he said, with a sly smile, "left £60,000 to run the team...

"Still, because of the Dunlop money, I never needed the twenty thousand from Walter - and I only found out later that he gave it to Jackie! They don't call the Scots canny for nothing..."

Later in his life, in 1987, Hayes became chairman of Aston Martin, having persuaded Henry Ford to buy the company. It was in fairly desperate straits at the time, and Walter is widely credited for having turned it around, into the success it again is today.

He was always delightful company, with a waspish wit, and his achievements in the world of motor sport have been immense. Characters like Walter Hayes are increasingly thin on the ground in today's world, and he will be very much missed. A one-off, without a doubt.





Dear James,
A very interesting question - to be honest, I'm not really sure of the answer!

On the face of it, I suppose, my logical answer would be no, for when I first became entranced with Formula 1 - in 1954, when I was eight years old - what seduced me particularly was the romance of it all. Racing was highly dangerous then, and I was lost in admiration for these guys who really were risking their lives every weekend - and doing it because they loved it. There was, after all, no money in it, as such: when Phil Hill won the World Championship for Ferrari in 1961, his road car was a Peugeot, because that was all he could afford!

The cars of the 1950s - all (apart from the abortive Bugatti in 1956) front-engined, until Cooper came along - were things of great beauty, to my eye. In fact, for me the most elegant racing car ever built was the 'long nose' Maserati 250F of 1957, which lent itself beautifully to Fangio's unrivalled ability to drift a car through high-speed corners. As well as that, of course, it was plain Italian Racing Red, as were the Ferraris of the time. None of your Tic-Tac mints in those days!

What's happened over time is that racing has become more and more commercialised, and one of the inevitable consequences of that is that some folk have been drawn to it for purely financial reasons, rather than any love of the sport. It has become hugely more impersonal than it was: for example, genuine friendships between the drivers and the journalists were once the norm, but now are very rare indeed, which is not surprising, I suppose, when you consider the rarefied world in which the drivers live these days.

Stirling Moss puts it succinctly: "It used to be a sport, and now it's a business, simple as that."

Having said that, everything is relative. Last week I had lunch with Michael Cooper, a leading racing photographer of the Sixties, who has just produced a fantastic new book on the era. "By 1970," Michael said, "the romance and the fun and the spontaneity were going out of racing, and that was why I got out of it." I pointed out to him that it was not until 1971 that I got into it - and for countless years thereafter it was fun for me!

Yes, F1 has changed literally out of recognition, and I won't pretend that I love it now in the way that once I did - I think any journalist of my generation would say the same. The fun quotient is undoubtedly not what it was.

The thing is, though, I was a young boy in the 1950s, when the world was a very different place. Were I eight years old in 2001, would I fall in love with the F1 of today? I suspect I would - but then I wouldn't be the same child, wouldn't have the same values, and, most important, I wouldn't have any memories of the past with which to compare the F1 of today.




Dear Dean,
Who knows how things will go until the season gets underway, but, yes, I think there is cause to take Dupasquier's fears of endless post-race protests seriously. You're quite right: on not a few occasions in 2000 cars finished a Grand Prix running on as close to slicks as made no difference. That caused a good deal muttering from rival engineers, but now we have a tyre war again, rather than a Bridgestone monopoly, the muttering may manifest itself more robustly, let's say. It's unfortunate, to say the least, that the FIA has not more definitively clarified the rules about minimum tread depth at the end of a race.

It's unfortunate, in fact, that we have grooved tyres at all. For one thing, they're unsightly; for another, it seems a complete absurdity that slicks - the purest tyres for racing, after all - are permitted everywhere, except at the very top level of the sport!

It's been said time and time again: why cannot this business agree some means of keeping cornering speeds in check by drastically reducing downforce, and putting the emphasis once more on mechanical, rather than aerodynamic, grip? If that were done, we could go back to slicks tomorrow. As it is, there's probably more chance of Tony Blair developing a sense of humour...




Dear Alan,
Can't agree with you, Alan, I'm afraid. DC's pass of Schumacher at Magny-Cours was indeed mighty impressive, but to me it didn't hold a candle to Mika's pass of Michael at Spa.

The one thing the manoeuvres had in common was that each came a lap after Schumacher had tried his usual intimidatory stuff, obliging the following driver to back off or have an accident. The difference was that at Spa the whole thing happened at 200mph...

In fact, Schumacher blew it at Spa. Both he and Hakkinen got a tow from Zonta up the hill to Les Combes, but when he ducked out from behind the BAR, Michael went left: had he gone right, there would have been no way for Mika to get by.

As it was, Hakkinen's move, superbly timed and executed, was as fine a piece of overtaking opportunism as I have seen in very many years. It was then or never, after all: he was able to use Zonta to advantage, but had there been no other car there, Schumacher would simply have continued with his blocking game to the end of the race.

Bear in mind that when he chopped across the McLaren's nose, the two cars actually touched, and I think it said much for Mika's composure and determination that he came right back at him in the same place a lap later. Everyone deeply admires Michael's driving ability; not too many - including Mika - feel the same way about his ethics on the track.




Dear Christiaan,
Not for the first time, Ferrari was caught out by technological progress. In 1979, undoubtedly the fastest car of the year was the Williams-Cosworth FW07, but in the first half of the season its reliability very frequently let it down; during the second half, it was virtually unbeatable, but by then the Ferrari drivers had stacked up an impressive number of points, and could not be caught in the World Championship.

In fact, the competitiveness of the T4 - apart from its wonderful reliability - came more from the power advantage of Ferrari's flat-12 engine, plus the driving ability of Jody Scheckter and his even quicker team mate, Gilles Villeneuve, than from the inherent qualities of the chassis.

If the flat-12 engine had more top-end power than its mainly Cosworth-powered opposition, it had to carry a good deal more fuel (no refuelling in those days, of course), which meant a weight penalty. More significantly, though, the shape and dimensions of the flat-12 motor militated against the building of an effective 'ground effect' car.

In 1979 Ferrari got away with it, but for 1980 they continued with the flat-12, and their new car - the T5 - was nothing more than an updated T4. By then everybody else had a genuine 'ground effect' car, and the T5 was completely outclassed: no grip at all.

You need to bear in mind that, 20 years ago, it was by no means the norm for a team to produce a completely new car for each season. There was nothing like the money around then that there is now, and invariably a car, albeit periodically updated, had to last for a number of years. The FW07, for example, was used by Williams in 1979, '80, '81 and the beginning of '82...