Ask Nigel: January 31

And remember, 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 his unique opinion on any topic in motorsport, click here to e-mail your question. But remember to type 'Ask Gordon' in the subject box.



Dear Stuart
Boy, what a question! There are actually quite a few things in Formula 1 I'd like to change, but the overriding thing is something that may be beyond even Bernie: I'd like to see the introduction of integrity...

By that, I mean that I'd like to see cheating disappear. As things stand, we shall shortly see the 'legal' return of traction control, for no other reason than that certain people have been using it 'illegally' (and to great effect, I might add), with the FIA apparently unable properly to detect it - and therefore unable to punish the miscreants.

At the moment, the general response from the teams is: "We don't like the idea of traction control - but we like it better than the idea of not having a level playing field." Can't say I altogether blame them for that, but what a pity we can't have a situation where NOBODY has traction control.

Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I hate the very idea of technology performing tasks traditionally undertaken by the driver. I think it dehumanises the whole sport. Once the gizmos get the official green light - as seems likely from the Spanish Grand Prix on - all the drivers will have not only traction control, but also launch control (to take care of the standing start) and fully-automatic gearboxes. For me, this is entirely the wrong road for Grand Prix racing to take, and I suppose - given that integrity is out of the question - I'd like to see Bernie ban the gizmos, just as Max Mosley did at the end of 1993. Trouble is, if the cheaters can't be caught, my wish is somewhat unrealistic...




Dear Tangui,
Jo Bonnier is remembered primarily as the man who finally scored BRM's first Grand Prix victory, at Zandvoort in 1959. He was never a great driver, but when the mood took him he could be very quick: partnering Dan Gurney in the Porsche F1 team in 1961, for example, he was quite often close to Gurney's pace, and that had to mean something.

Bonnier was always better in a sports car than in an F1 car, and he won a lot of races for Porsche, including the Targa Florio. In his later years, he concentrated on Lolas, and it was in one of these cars that he lost his life, at Le Mans in 1972.

For a racing driver, he was an unusual man, in many ways. Long before 'safety' became fashionable, for example, he was an ardent campaigner, and for many years was President of the Grand Prix Drivers Association.

It's true, too, that he was unusually well educated for a racing driver, and was indeed fluent in several languages. He had a considerable interest in modern art, of which he had quite a collection, and it's quite true that he had an F1 car - a McLaren, in fact - mounted on the wall in his house.




Dear Dave,
What went down at the Imola FOCA strike, you ask? A question and a half, this one...

This was April of 1982, and the row had been building a while. Through the winter of 1980/81, there had been the FISA-FOCA War, fought out between Jean-Marie Balestre, newly elected as president of the FIA's sporting arm (FISA), and the daunting combo of Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley (representing FOCA). The time had come, Balestre felt, for the governing body to start governing again.

After a lot of empty talk about a breakaway championship, and the like, compromise was reached, and thus the first Concorde Agreement was drawn up, in April 1981. Announced as 'a working document, under which Formula 1 is run', it was swathed in secrecy from the beginning, but its essentials were clear.

One was that, "The FIA is the sole international body governing motor sport. Its Statutes have delegated this power to FISA, which governs the organisation of the FIA Formula 1 World Championship, which is the exclusive property of the FIA."

Fine. But there was a trade-off, the governing body granting "The exclusive right for FOCA to enter into contracts with the organisers/promoters of FIA F1 World Championship events, in the best interests of all competitors." Henceforth, in other words, Balestre would look after the rules, and Ecclestone the deals. Everyone was happy.

Or not. Within the ranks of the constructors there remained deep divisions between those using turbocharged engines and those not. Renault, the turbo pioneer in F1, had arrived in 1977, and while there was an obvious power advantage in their boosted V6, poor drivability - excessive throttle lag - and lamentable reliability kept the rest from going without sleep.

In 1979, though, Renault won a race, and although their cars still retired more often than not, disquiet was growing among their rivals, particularly when it became known that Ferrari, too, were at work on a turbo motor. In 1980 there were three Renault victories, but still the traditional FOCA teams held general sway, by virtue of superior, lighter, cars.

At the end of that year, however, FISA banned the sliding skirts perfected by the best of the British teams in that 'ground effect' era. Cornering speeds were getting out of hand - some things never change - and the governing body decreed that, for 1981, there must be a six-centimetre gap between the bottom of the car and the ground. There would be constant checks, and the rule would be rigorously enforced.

Yeah, right. By the second race, in Brazil, Brabham had side-stepped the rule, Gordon Murray devising a hydro-pneumatic suspension system which made for a 'legal' car at rest, but one which brushed the ground at racing speed. The BT49C also had skirts, (albeit fixed ones), which had supposedly been banned. Immediately way quicker than anything else, the Brabham obliged every other team to follow its lead, and there followed a sick joke of a season, in which every car blatantly flouted the rules.

If F1 were not to become a complete laughing stock, FISA needed to show some muscle, but instead from Paris there was abject capitulation. For 1982 the ride height rule was forgotten, and fixed skirts were officially kosher, which meant in turn that suspensions had to be solid.

All that mattered was crude downforce, and the cars, nasty to drive the previous year, now became hellish.

The problems really started, though, in the Brazilian GP at Rio, where Nelson Piquet won in a Brabham-Cosworth, followed by Keke Rosberg in a Williams-Cosworth and Alain Prost in a turbocharged Renault. After the race, Renault protested Brabham and Williams.

This was late March, an a month later an FIA Tribunal found in Renault's favour, announcing that Piquet and Rosberg had been disqualified and that the new winner was Prost. This was Monday, April 19, six days before Imola. The forces of all hell were about to break loose.

Renault had protested Brabham and Williams on the grounds that they had raced underweight, and about that there was no argument. The FOCA establishment now realised that the Cosworth DFV - after holding sway for 15 seasons - was about to be blown aside. And a hitherto undetected conservative streak in their nature revealed itself: they wanted turbos banned, these same people who perpetually cried that you couldn't stand in the way of progress.

The turbos had always had a considerable power advantage, but the real fear was that now the teams using them were showing signs of building cars close to the minimum weight limit; from a power-to-weight point of view, therefore, chances were that the Cosworths would be outclassed.

It was easy to be sympathetic. Ferrari and Renault, with all their cumbersome and weighty turbo clobber, could just about get down to the limit, whereas such as Williams, McLaren and Brabham had no difficulty in undercutting it. Therefore they took it upon themselves to restore some semblance of equality, by matching lower weight to their lower-powered engines. This was the situation in Brazil, and we had a very good race.

The problem was The Rules. Rightly or wrongly, all parties had signed the Concorde Agreement, thereby accepting the FISA regulations, one of which was that the minimum weight limit was 580kgs. If the rule had been straightforwardly written, there could have been no argument, but it laid itself open to abuse, for it stipulated that this was to be the weight of the car, minus driver, but including normal lubricants and coolants - which could be topped up after the race, prior to the checking of the car's weight.

That being so, for ingenious minds it was the work of a moment to spot a loophole, and what they came up with was 'water-cooled brakes.' The car, equipped with a huge water tank, would go to the grid with the thing full, spray its contents away in the early laps, run the bulk of the race 30kgs under the limit, then have the tank refilled afterwards so as to be over 580 for the check.

Clever stuff - if clearly against the spirit of a rule to which they had given their consent. And perhaps, if they had been slightly less holier-than-thou about it, the FOCA teams might have had more sympathy in the press. As it was, they would insult your intelligence, asserting the merits of water as a means of cooling the brakes. Why, then, did they not take enough for the whole race? Silence.

Only Frank Williams came clean about the aim of the water tank, arguing its case solely on grounds of power-to-weight ratio. That was infinitely more acceptable.

It was one thing, though, for the FIA Tribunal to wipe Piquet and Rosberg from the Rio results; on the heels of the announcement came another, declaring that in future the cars would be weighed as they were when they came off the race track. No more adding of 'coolants', in other words.

A bizarre aspect of the Brazilian disqualifications was that Messrs Watson, Mansell and Alboreto were each promoted a couple of places: all had been driving cars as 'illegal' as the Brabham and the Williams, but they, of course, had not been protested.

Rosberg was particularly incensed by that: "It was crazy to disqualify Nelson and me from Rio - and allow all the other 'water tank' cars to stay in the results. That was the only reason Watson was in contention for the championship at the end of the year!

"Having said that, however, I must say I was surprised at Frank not going to Imola..."

Not only Williams skipped the San Marino Grand Prix. Following the FIA announcement, the FOCA teams decided on a boycott, although Ken Tyrrell was given special dispensation to attend, for his much-needed major sponsor was Italian.

The FOCA heavyweights' argument was that routine topping up had always been allowed, a time-honoured custom, if not actually a rule. That being so, if nothing could now be added, the weight limit was effectively being increased, and that constituted a rule change. On that basis, they said, they felt justified in giving Imola a miss, for they 'needed more time to prepare cars to meet the new rules.' Tyrrell somehow managed it immediately.

The vote to skip Imola was not a unanimous one. Even within teams - McLaren, for example - there were differing views, and much of what went on was close to farce.

It was ironic now to look back to Kyalami, to the team owners' condemnation of the drivers' strike, their insistence that problems be sorted out away from the circuits. Perhaps they believed that the San Marino Grand Prix couldn't happen without them. If so, it was a gross miscalculation: Ferrari were there, and for an Italian crowd that was all that mattered. Attendances were higher than the year before.

More surprising than the absent teams' indifference to letting down the public was their assumption of support from the sponsors, many of whose representatives turned up at Imola, and lost no time in making their feelings known.

If F1 were now show business, then how to ignore its first rule, that the show must go on? In the press room the feeling was that they should have sorted out their turbo equivalence and their water tanks and their weight limits in their own time, away from the public gaze. To penalise the fans could never be right.

As it was, even with only 14 starters, we had a great race at Imola, between the Renaults and the Ferraris, which was marred only by Didier Pironi's underhand decision to 'steal' the win from Villeneuve on the last lap, when Gilles believed they were cruising in for a Ferrari 1-2.

Villeneuve, incensed, vowed never to speak to Pironi again, and I have never doubted that his frame of mind was in part responsible for the accident which took his life, in qualifying at Zolder two weeks later. The FOCA lot were back for this race, and the atmosphere in the paddock was poisonous beyond belief. For some of us, at a time when so much else was awry with F1, the loss of Villeneuve was almost too much to take in.

That - in brief! - was the saga of the Imola strike. I think I need a drink...






Dear Neil,
I'm delighted you find F1 'a fabulous spectacle, with exciting racing, endlessly fascinating technology, and the fittest, most committed, athletes on earth'. I wouldn't agree with you about the 'exciting racing', because I think today's regulations, with their over-emphasis on aerodynamic grip, militate against overtaking, but you're right about the technology and the drivers.

Problem is, to my mind technology is the enemy of spectacle, and perhaps, had you ever seen an F1 car in a four-wheel drift at 165mph, reliant on mechanical grip, and driven by someone like Ronnie Peterson, you might understand why I find the spectacle of racing cars on rails dull by comparison.

I do indeed think that today's wind-tunnel-created cars are ugly, with their grooved tyres, narrow track and raised noses, and it's undeniable that the drivers are less colourful than they were - largely because they have to be, given the constraints put upon them by their teams and sponsors. So it goes with the world of today. Ayrton Senna has only been gone seven years; if he were able to come back now, he would find the sport unrecognisable.

In many respects, however, F1 has never been better - and certainly that is true of the overall quality of the cars on the grid. There are no 'junkers' today, and the man most responsible for raising the standard has undoubtedly been Bernie Ecclestone.

As I said, I'm glad you find everything in F1 so good today, but maybe, yes, you are benefiting from a short history with it. In just the same way, the stands are packed for the Daytona 500 just as they always were, and probably most of those present these days never saw a NASCAR race there before 'restrictor plates' were introduced, so they have nothing with which to compare today's processions...




Dear Ashley,
I'm entirely with you on this. Villeneuve, with his turbo engine, may have had more power than those chasing him, but that particular Ferrari - the 126C - was one of the very worst cars ever produced by the company. Gilles qualified it seventh, and afterwards said it was 'like a big red Cadillac...'

By the beginning of lap two, he was up to second place, behind Jones's Williams, and when Alan shunted, he was into the lead, where he stayed for the duration. Afterwards, John Watson - one of the quartet behind Villeneuve - moaned that the Ferrari had been holding them all up.

I put that to Gilles: "He's quite right," he replied, grinning. "I can't imagine why they didn't pass me..."

Interestingly, Jacques Laffite, the only man to pressure Villeneuve, had a rather different response. "That Ferrari was terrible! How he kept it on the road all that time I just don't understand. One mistake, and we'd all have been past him - but he didn't make any mistakes. Gilles is on another level from the rest of us."

Last word from Gordon Murray, then Brabham's technical director. "I took the day off from the pits," he said, "and spent the whole race walking the circuit. And, I tell you, that is the greatest drive I've ever seen - by anybody..."