Ask Nigel: January 24

For one week only Autosport's US editor Gordon Kirby will be taking over Nigel's reins on Wednesday, February 14. So if you want to send Gordon a St Valentine's message, or better still, if you want his opinion on any topic in motorsport, click here to e-mail your question. But remember to type 'Ask Gordon' in the subject box.



Dear Steve,
No, I absolutely do NOT think refuelling adds to Formula 1, as a spectacle, or anything else. As far as I'm concerned, it was re-introduced solely as an artificial means of - perhaps - creating changes in the order, attempting to take everyone's mind off the fact that changes in order are almost never achieved on the track these days, given the ludicrous specification of today's cars, particularly in the aerodynamics department.

What refuelling has done, in my opinion, is make the format of a Grand Prix extremely crude and unsophisticated, in the sense that a race is now a series of sprints between pit stops. Before refuelling, a driver had to work at a set-up for his car that worked well on a full tank of fuel - 200 miles' worth - and on a virtually empty one, but now such subtleties are unnecessary. He also had to take care of his tyres in the early part of the race, and so on.

I don't see anything terribly exciting about watching a bloke shove a nozzle into the side of a car, I'm afraid. To me, pit stops were far more crucial when it was a matter of tyres only; nowadays the tyre guys are finished long before the fuel has gone.

There's another thing, too. In this, an era otherwise obsessed with safety in F1, refuelling seems to me a wholly unnecessary danger - and the guys who take most of the risk are not multi-millionaire superstars, but mechanics. So far, we've been very lucky in F1, having only had a couple of fires (in which no one was seriously hurt), but I've never forgotten a pit fire I witnessed at the Indy 500 in 1981, when Rick Mears' Penske went up during a pit stop, and several of his mechanics leaped around like crazed marionettes, their clothing on fire. On that occasion, serious burns were incurred, and I wish never to see anything like it happen again, in F1 or anywhere else.

In short, like a great many others in the paddock, I would rejoice if refuelling were banned tomorrow.



Dear Jonathan,
The three you mention are a very good start, but make sure, when you go to Spa, you follow the public roads that made up the old circuit - virtually all of it is intact. The current Spa circuit is far and away the best we have now, but the old one was something else again. Think of it: they AVERAGED 150mph for the whole of the Belgian Grand Prix - and that 30 years ago!

That, plus the old Nurburgring and Monza (try to imagine the latter without chicanes...), should give you a pretty good feel for how Grand Prix circuits used to be, but I'd like to suggest two others, as well, both of them in France. Go to the track at Reims - again it's public roads, and absolutely intact, complete with pits and grandstands (albeit rather tatty now). Reims was an absolute flat-out slipstreamer; if you go there, try to imagine the start of the 12-Hour sports car race they used to have before the Grand Prix: it began at midnight...

You should also make your way, if possible, to Rouen Les Essarts, in Normandy. Again, it's made up of public roads, although sadly - for reasons I cannot imagine - the pits and grandstands were knocked down and removed about a year ago. No matter: go past the pits, and go through the terrifying series of downhill swerves which culminate in a hairpin - and imagine it without barriers, as it was in the '50s and early '60s. The Hungaroring it ain't...




Dear Peter,
Thank you for the compliments - much appreciated, believe me.

I would doubt that the Arrows three-seater is very far up Tom Walkinshaw's list of priorities, and suspect it is the 'toy' of another gentleman associated with the team. Quite why anyone needs a three-seater F1 car I don't truly understand. When Mansour Ojjeh persuaded Ron Dennis that McLaren should build a two-seater, that made sense, for the idea was to give an impression of what it's like to be in a Grand Prix car. What I don't understand is why it's necessary to have two passengers at a time - to me, it looks faintly ridiculous, quite frankly. Still, I suppose it's what they call 'a marketing tool'...

One assumes - hopes, anyway - that the project had a budget of its own, which did not impinge on the F1 racing budget. If it all came out of the same pot, however, then yes, I'm bound to agree with you, the money might have been better spent on moving Arrows up the grid.

No, I haven't been invited to have a ride in the car, and, quite honestly, I think I can probably live without it. I did, after all, have a ride in a two-seater sprint car at the Indiana State Fairgrounds last September, and that really was something else again...



Dear Marios,
You mention reliability, talent and performance, and ask which is most important when it comes to achieving results in F1. The answer, obviously, is all of them!

Let's take talent first. Obviously, you need a talented design team first of all, ideally headed by Adrian Newey, you need a talented bunch of mechanics to prepare the car properly, and you need a Schumacher or Hakkinen in the cockpit.

Performance? Well, clearly you're never going to get anywhere in a hopeless car. It might run all day long without missing a beat, but if it's being lapped every half-hour, what's the point of running it in the first place?

Reliability? Turn the last paragraph on its head. If you've got a car that's a second a lap faster than anything else, that's wonderful - but if it never finishes a race, so what? You only get championship points if you're in the first six, and still running when the chequered flag comes down.

I will grant you, however, that a middling car with a middling driver can have a reasonable season, in terms of results, so long as it is reliable. An ace in a s***box is wasting his time, just as he is in a car that never finishes. 'To finish first, you first have to finish,' is the oldest cliché in motor racing, but reliability alone is obviously not enough.




Dear Matthew,
I'm very fortunate - I don't work for a daily paper, and therefore don't have to go to F1 launches! Actually, I'm inclined to agree with you. They tend to be much of a muchness, and I've never really understood how the 'launch season' has mushroomed the way it has - in fact, I've written about it in this week's Fifth Column.

I still go to some, of course, but not all, by any means. Went to Jaguar last week, primarily because Bobby Rahal is a friend, and I will also go to the McLaren and Williams launches, as well as a big Michelin 'do' in Paris the week after next.

The ones I tend to avoid are those likely to be glitzy, where hype has a considerable edge over substance. I'm told it's the sponsors who insist on ever-bigger launches, but you're quite right: the money could be better spent elsewhere.



Dear Jarvis,
As far as I'm concerned, Stirling Moss is the greatest racing driver there has ever been, and I'm unlikely ever to be persuaded otherwise. I'm interested that you mention drivers' managers, for in fact Moss was probably the first to employ one, a man called Ken Gregory, and certainly in many ways he was the first real 'professional' racing driver.

Almost 40 years have passed since the end of Moss's career as a professional racing driver. The cliché unfailingly trotted out is that he was 'the greatest driver never to win the World Championship'; for me, he was the greatest driver, period. Imagine a blend of the style and ease of Alain Prost and the passion and commitment of Ayrton Senna, and an image of Stirling at his zenith comes into focus.

Denis Jenkinson said that his boyhood hero was Bernd Rosemeyer, adding that, "Of course everyone's hero was Nuvolari". It was just that way in the fifties, too: if Jean Behra was my hero, Stirling was everyone's hero. It simply went without saying.

A clear memory from those days is listening to the radio coverage of the 1955 Tourist Trophy from Dundrod. Sharing a Mercedes-Benz 300SLR, with journeyman John Fitch, Moss won, but it was a terrible day for racing, with three drivers losing their lives.

Perhaps, at nine, I was callous, becoming already inured to tragedy in this sport to which I was in thrall. Whatever, it was not, I am sorry to say, the fatalities which made the biggest impression on me; late in the race Behra crashed his Maserati, and while his injuries were not critical, assuredly he would not be racing for a while. Next weekend was the Oulton Park Gold Cup: I would be there, but he would not.

Then I began to cheer up. Mercedes had not entered for the race at Oulton, and Maserati therefore asked if Moss could take Behra's place in one of the factory 250Fs. In those civilised days, contracts were rarely broken, but often waived, and Mercedes team manager Alfred Neubauer raised no objection.

Stirling won, beating the Lancia D50s of Mike Hawthorn and Eugenio Castellotti, and my abiding memory is of the way he went through Old Hall immediately after taking the flag. His right arm waving in victory, halfway through the corner he poked the throttle so that the lovely red car jinked sideways. It was gathered up in a trice, of course, right arm still in the air.

Moss adored the 25OF. It wasn't a machine efficient in the Teutonic manner, like the W196, but he loved it because it could be over-driven, allow artistry in the cockpit to claim its own reward. In the same way, when the rear-engined cars arrived, he always enjoyed a Cooper more than a Lotus. Of course, if winning were all that mattered, Mercedes and Lotus would get the nod, but for Stirling it was racing which came before anything else.

Although his preference was always for Formula 1, he raced sports cars with equal passion - indeed it was the same, whatever he drove, which is why Mario Andretti, another consummate all-rounder, holds him in such regard.

For the same reason, Moss admired Andretti deeply. "It was very easy for me to understand how Mario went on racing as long as he did, however much he had in the bank. That man is a racer, like Gilles Villeneuve was a racer. And like I was, I think.

"I know the fashion these days is to quit when you've made your money, at 34 or something, but I couldn't have done that - I'd never have been that smart! No, quite seriously, I couldn't. I loved it far too much."

"If Moss had put reason before passion," Enzo Ferrari said, "he would have been World Champion many times." Undeniably so - but he wouldn't then have been Stirling Moss. The attraction of driving, in his last four seasons, for Rob Walker's private team was not simply that he liked the man; there was the added frisson of beating the factory teams.

"I suppose if I were racing today as successfully as I did then," he mused a while ago, "I'd be earning five million or something." (And the rest, Stirling!) "I don't think that's beneficial - I think it's gone too far. A real racer shouldn't need incentives to win. A driver, yes, a racer, no. To me, it was always a sport, not a technical exercise."

Stirling was but 32 at the time of the Goodwood accident on Easter Monday in 1962. I watched the race on television, and began to tremble when they said he had crashed, that the situation was "serious".

Today we have grown accustomed to drivers' survival of huge accidents, but photographs of Moss's Lotus are sobering even now. For 40 minutes they laboured to free him from the spaceframe car, which had folded like a penknife blade when it hit the bank.

He has always kept a diary, and many of the entries are nicely laconic. When his Lotus lost a wheel, during practice for the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, he was badly injured, yet the page for Saturday, June 18, reads thus: 'Shunt. Nose. Back. Legs. Bruises. Bugger!'

Six weeks later, Stirling raced - and won - in a sports car race in Sweden, but there was to be no such miraculous recovery from the Goodwood debacle. In his 1962 diary, we get to the Easter weekend, and he talks of practice, of the three cars he was to race on the Monday. 'Cocktails at the Duke's', he noted, 'then on to a party, bed at 3am'. Next day, Sunday, there was another cocktail party. "And the day after, of course," he remarks, "there's nothing..."

There would be nothing until June 4, and the gaping white void in the pages strikes you like sudden silence at a race track. These were Moss's days of coma, when bulletins from the Atkinson Morley Hospital were the first item on the news.

For almost a month he drifted in and out of consciousness, and was shocked when first coherent enough to take in the date. Little by little, though, he began to mend. The paralysis of his left side had been the consequence of bruising to the brain, and it was six months before he regained full mobility. There were other injuries, fractures and severe wounds, but crucial, as Stirling says, was "the bang on the head". To this day he has no recollection of the accident, or what led to it.

Twelve months after the accident, Moss had physically recovered almost completely, and felt able to try a racing car again. Back to Goodwood, back in a Lotus, this time a 19 sports car. And, in the evening, that sad announcement on the news: "I've decided to retire; I won't drive again."

Once I told him how heartbroken I had been to learn of his decision. "You can imagine, then," he said, "how I felt..."

More than sad was that Stirling came to regret it. He decided to retire, not because all the miraculous skills had gone away, but because now he felt they had to be called up; it wasn't automatic any more. If he wasn't going to be Stirling Moss as was, he wasn't going to race. It was as simple as that.

In fact, he had grossly underestimated the time needed for complete recovery. If his limbs were intact, his eyesight OK, the injury to the brain was far from fully healed. At the time Stirling assumed his relative lack of concentration to be a permanent legacy of the accident. A couple of years later everything was back, and in full working order. By then, though, life had moved on.

Had there been no accident that day in 1962, Stirling reckons he would have raced at least until the mid-seventies, and what a tantalising picture that creates in the mind. Just as tragedy robbed us of a Senna-Schumacher era, so also we missed Moss, still very much in his pomp, against a fully matured Clark.

A cruel sport this is. "I took a lot out of this sport," Moss said in 1962, "but I think that I put a great deal back, too. I feel I gave it all but my life." Indeed he did.