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Ask Nigel: June 20

Our Grand Prix Editor Nigel Roebuck answers your motorsport questions every Wednesday. So if you want his opinion on any motorsport matter drop us an e-mail here at Autosport.com and we'll forward on a selection to him. Nigel won't be able to answer all your questions, but we'll publish his answers here every week. Send your questions to AskNigel@haynet.com




Dear Vaughan,
In a perfect world, journalists are supposed to be unbiased, I suppose, but I have to say that I've never met one yet, and nor do I expect to! You take to some people more than others, and that's all there is to it. I try to keep my personal feelings about people separate from my assessment of their professional achievements, but I'd be the first to admit I'm not always successful.

All that said, I should now go on to admit that I've always had a particular affection for the Williams team, and that will always abide. In part, it's because I have known, and greatly liked, Frank Williams and Patrick Head for a very long time, and, in part, it's because I admire the way they go motor racing.

Take the way they launch a new car, for example. As a rule of thumb, it has often seemed to me, the more elaborate the wedding the more short-lived the marriage, and it's an impression I have long had, too, when it comes to F1 launches. Times without number, we've had the fanfare, the cabaret, the dry ice, the interminable speeches, after which the covers are pulled from some vehicle which then goes on to score five World Championship points, or something. On not a few occasions, one has wondered if the money squandered on the launch might not have been better spent on making the car a bit quicker.

The other extreme has always been Williams. Frank and Patrick are no-nonsense individuals, in whose world PR stands first for 'Pure Racers'. When they launch a new car, it tends to be pleasingly haphazard, along the lines of, 'Well, there's the car, and if anyone wants to talk to us about it, we're here, sort of thing'. For years and years, they would do that - and then go off and win the first race.

There are echoes here of the late John Cooper, and it's an attitude I like, not least because it always suggests to me that at Williams they have their priorities right. Frank and Patrick are extremely wealthy men now, but they loved racing every bit as much when they were not.

As well as that, they retain - in this intensely serious age - an ability to laugh at themselves. An example: at the beginning of the year, I asked Patrick how he thought Ralf Schumacher and Juan Montoya would get along. He paused, then grinned. "What can we do to get Ralf and Juan Pablo to collaborate with each other? Well, you know how good Williams are at looking after their drivers..."

After Ayrton Senna's death, in May 1994, Nigel Mansell - who had left Williams to join the Newman/Haas CART team - was brought back, at vast expense, to drive a handful of races for the team, as and when his US commitments allowed. At the end of that season, I asked Patrick if Mansell had delivered as the team had expected?

Typically, there was no pulling punches. "I think it's probably a subject I should stay well clear of... as is fairly well known, I wasn't greatly in favour of his employment, anyway - that was mainly driven by Renault and Bernie Ecclestone. And I suppose it injected a bit of interest, which was exactly what they wanted..."

In these politically correct times, Patrick remains an irreverent joy in the F1 paddock. It is a fact that, over the years, Williams has not always enjoyed the best of reputations when it comes to dealing with drivers, and most in Head's position would seek to disguise something like that. Fortunately, Patrick, for all his ferocious competitiveness, has never lost his sense of humour. Some consider the Williams team dour; in reality, it is quite the opposite.

Head has been involved in F1 for over 25 years now, all of them spent working with Frank Williams. Motor racing was always part of his life, for his father, Colonel Michael Head, raced sports cars such as D-Type Jaguars when Patrick was growing up. He was educated at Wellington College, where another pupil was James Hunt.

After studying engineering at University College, London, Head worked for several companies involved in racing, including Lola, and first met Williams in November 1975.

Frank was interviewing him for the job of Chief Engineer of his struggling F1 team. "Are you prepared," Frank said, "to work 10 or 12 hours a day, seven days a week?" Patrick thought about it. "No, I'm not," he replied, "because anybody who has to do that is extremely badly organised..."

It may not have been quite the answer which Williams was expecting, but, at all events, Head got the job - only to lose it a couple of weeks later, when his new boss agreed a partnership deal with Walter Wolf, who brought with him a more established engineer, the late Harvey Postlethwaite.

After a single season, Williams and Wolf went their separate ways, and at this time Frank set up a new company, inviting Head to remain, now as Chief Engineer once more. Patrick, who could have gone with Wolf, opted to stay put, and has been synonymous with 'Williams' ever since.

Although not a man to dwell on the past, it is not surprising that Head retains a particular affection for those early days of the team.

"In 1977, when we started Williams Grand Prix Engineering, I think we had eight employees at the beginning of the season, and 11 at the end of it - but then we were running a March. In '78, we ran our own car, the FW06, with a total of 18 people, I think."

There were no victories that year, but the car occasionally shone, and a strong relationship was being forged between Williams, Head and the team's new driver, Alan Jones. "We were all about the same age, all coming up the ladder together. We had a lot of fun along the way."

It was in 1979, with the new FW07, that the Williams team truly arrived. At Silverstone, Jones led until he retired, after which Clay Regazzoni comfortably scored the team's first Grand Prix victory. Thereafter, Alan won several more races, and the following season became the first man to win the World Championship in a Williams.

Down the years, there would be six more such: Keke Rosberg (1982), Nelson Piquet (1987), Nigel Mansell (1992), Alain Prost (1993), Damon Hill (1996) and Jacques Villeneuve (1997). As a team, Williams has also won the Constructors' Championship nine times, with 110 Grand Prix victories along the way.

Going into the 2001 season, though, there had not been one for three years. This can happen to the best of teams, as Ferrari and even McLaren can attest, but still Head found it, "pretty horrific - easily the longest period, in the history of the company, that we haven't won a race, and it'll give me great delight when we put that right.

"Undoubtedly, we've under-performed. A lot of that can be put at my door, but I'm not going to chastise myself too much. We had a number of years in which we either won the World Championship, or came close to it, but we'll be pretty disappointed if we haven't closed the gap to Ferrari and McLaren this season."

As he passes his 55th birthday, Head's enthusiasm for what he does remains undiminished. "I enjoy the pleasure of doing a job well, of looking at a technical engineering problem, analysing exactly what's causing it, deciding what to change, then going out on the track, and finding that it's been solved. OK, next problem! That's the biggest buzz for me.

"Solving engineering problems is actually much more enjoyable than it was - maybe it's self-delusion, but you feel you've actually got more contact with logic and technology supporting what you're doing, as opposed to guessing. Back in '78, for example, we never even saw a wind tunnel!

"On the technical side, it's more enjoyable, although the intensity of it is certainly a problem. If you're involved in the marketing side of a team, and all your sponsors are happy, then you can probably go off and have a bit of fun. On the technical side, though, unless you've won the previous 10 races, you're never actually comfortable when you're not at work, making your car quicker. And you have to watch that: if you do that seven days a week, 12 months a year, you'll burn yourself out, and you'll be completely ineffective."

Which takes us back to Head's response to Williams's question all those years ago. Success is wonderful, but you must retain the capacity to have fun along the way. Patrick is a man, after all, who, with a few mates, still rides his motorbike to Magny-Cours every summer...

As for Frank, what does one say? Over the last 20-odd years I have interviewed him at times of high exhilaration - as after Regazzoni's very first Grand Prix victory for the team, in 1979 - and in moments of deep distress, as in 1994, when Ayrton Senna was killed in one of his cars.

He was always a good man to interview, and at one time would say absolutely what he thought. When Alan Jones informed him, at Monza in September 1981, that he had decided to retire at the end of the season, it was rather late in the day for FW to find a replacement for the following year, and he was not impressed.

This is what he had to say on the subject: "Well, he's just a grossly inconsiderate person, and that's all there is to it. Typical Formula 1 driver - thinks only of himself. Every year I take a slightly tougher attitude towards drivers: you have to be realistic about them, to accept that most of them are in it to make as much money as they can. As soon as they're satisfied...gone! Right?"

Back then, Frank was a feisty interview indeed, with strong opinions on everything to do with the sport, and an absolute willingness to express them. These days, though, it's a little different. It's not that he has become politically correct - far from it - but perhaps that time has made him wary. While drivers, as he suggests, change teams at the drop of a cheque, and no one expects otherwise, history shows that - in some cases, anyway - team owners come in for hard flack if they change drivers. Particularly if the driver concerned is 'a Brit'.

When Nigel Mansell, for example, left Williams for Ferrari in 1989, it was considered to be his right, and when he came back to the team, for 1991, it was also his right to hold out for an extraordinarily lucrative deal: Williams needed him, and he held all the cards.

By the end of '92, though, the pendulum had swung. Mansell had won the World Championship, but Frank had Alain Prost coming aboard for '93, and there was no need to accede to Nigel's latest demands: all the cards were now with Williams.

The tabloid press didn't see it that way, though, and castigated Williams for daring to let 'our Nige' go. One imagines he learned a big lesson on that occasion; when the time came to part with Damon Hill, he was ready for the verbal attacks. With FW and Patrick Head, the interests of the team always come first, and quite right, too.

Williams is more guarded these days, certainly when speaking 'on the record'; it is unusual for him to be overtly critical of anyone or anything, although he retains an ability to convey his feelings, sometimes with a grimace, sometimes by leaving a sentence hanging in the air, in the way of, 'You might think that, but I couldn't possibly comment...'

It is now more than 15 years since Frank had the road accident which almost killed him, which put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Always a fitness fanatic, who ran several miles a day, wherever he was, suddenly he was facing, as he put it, "A different kind of life," and he dealt with it in a manner which astonishes me to this day. Not for one second have I ever known him exhibit a grain of self-pity, and I find that beyond remarkable. Of all the people I have known in motor racing, I would bracket Frank with Mario Andretti as the two men who loved it most.




Dear Pedro,
What makes a classic track? All the ingredients you mention - layout, ambience, location, history - come into it, of course.

If you want to talk about layout, I always thought Zandvoort just about perfect. It may not have been a match for the old Nurburgring, Spa-Francorchamps, Rouen les Essarts or Clermont Ferrand, in terms of testing a driver, but for pure RACING there was nowhere like it. I'd stand at the end of the long pit straight, at the entry to the side Tarzan hairpin, and see more overtaking in one afternoon than in the rest of the season put together.

For ambience - and history - I'd always go for Monza, because so much has happened there, and because this place is passionate about motor racing like nowhere else I've ever been. The actual track, in terms of layout, may be a pale shadow of what it was, but for sheer atmosphere there is still nowhere like Monza.

Location? The foothills of the Styrian mountains in Austria are hard to beat - particularly when you were there to watch a race around the old Osterreichring, rather than the current A1-Ring.

As for great tracks in South America, I would mention Interlagos and Buenos Aires - but both in their original configurations. Interlagos, even shorn of those magnificent downhill left-handers after the pit straight, remains a fine circuit today, but sadly Buenos Aires, once a quite superb Grand Prix circuit, is now something of a joke.




Dear Paul,
I think that schemes such as those you mention still are valid today - but I seriously doubt that we'll ever see anything like them again, certainly in motor racing, because they cost a lot of money, and don't yield an instant return for a sponsor's investment. The world has changed in that respect, I'm afraid.

Can driving talent be manufactured? Not as such, no. There must be something inherently there before you start. Having said that, though, over time there have certainly been drivers with rather little natural ability, who have compensated for it with willpower, bravery and sheer determination. And I guess that will always be the case.



Dear Steve,
Either your friend has picked up half a story, or he's winding you up...

When Stirling Moss asked the great journalist Denis Jenkinson to accompany him in the Mercedes 300SLR in the 1955 Mille Miglia, the pair of them decided to approach the race very scientifically - unheard of at the time. The majority of the top drivers would run the Mille Miglia without a 'navigator', but Moss realised there could be great benefits in having someone else aboard.

It was, of course, literally impossible to 'learn' 1000 miles of public roads, so they decided to 'recce' the route very thoroughly, noting down every corner and straight, together with corresponding speed. The forerunner, if you like, of the pace notes routinely used by rally crews today.

All this was noted down on a very long sheet of paper, which Mercedes built into a dash-mounted metal box. As 'Jenks' turned a small wheel on it, so the route map would move on; he would know what was coming next, and make appropriate signals to Moss. Stirling had absolute faith in his passenger, and reckoned he contributed hugely to the victory.

Over time the metal box, and its contents, became known in the business as 'The Bog Roll Holder', which is what your mate has picked up, I guess. But, no, Stirling was not helped to victory by, literally, 'a roll of toilet paper'...




Dear Paul,
A re-make of 'Grand Prix'... If they were to do it now, you ask, which of the current crop of talent should play the major characters? Are you talking about movie stars, I wonder, or actual current drivers? If it's the latter, I guess you'd have to have David Coulthard ('square-jawed British hero'), Juan Montoya ('swarthy Latin American'), Michael Schumacher ('ice-cool German') and Jean Alesi ('flamboyant Italian type' - I know he's officially French, but really he's Sicilian).

If it's movie stars, well, Michelle Pfeiffer has to be in it somewhere, as far as I'm concerned, but if we're talking about drivers, how about Antonio Banderas (who was supposed to play Senna in a biopic about Ayrton), Sean Penn (brooding, introspective, Phil Hill type) and - perhaps inevitably - Hugh Grant (laconic, devil-may-care, Brit)? Whatever else, absolutely NOT Sylvester Stallone!

When Stallone began showing up at the races, in 1997, he had plans for a new movie about Formula 1. It would capture, he said, "All the grandeur and creativity and intelligence which makes this the most exciting sport in the world..."

Hmmm. We thought back to Grand Prix, released 30 years earlier. Plenty of fine racing footage, to be sure, but were we really to take seriously a storyline which had a driver bedding down with a rival's wife? Absurd, we thought. At the time.

And that was really the whole point. The longer one is around motor racing, the more one comes to see that the cliches about life imitating art are actually simple truths. "Stallone doesn't need a plot," someone murmured. "Just make a film based on 1982..."

In so many ways that season was the most disagreeable in memory, and if, by the end of it, the fundamental narcotic of Formula 1 remained, to some degree my feelings for it had shifted, and for ever. It was an ugly year, pock-marked by tragedy, by dissension, by greed, and yet, paradoxically, it produced some of the most memorable racing ever seen: from 16 Grands Prix came 11 different winners, in seven different cars, statistics faintly surreal in the context of today.

In the end, of course, Stallone's plan for an F1 movie fell through, and he went off to the CART community, to make 'Driven'. I haven't seen it, and American friends tell me I should leave it that way.

Why is it so hard to translate motor racing from the track to the screen? I think primarily it's because of the impossibility of making a movie at once appealing to a general audience (very necessary if it's going to make any money) and believable to genuine racing fans. Steve McQueen tried to take the purist route with 'Le Mans', which racing nuts adored for the quality of the footage - but which died a death at the box office...

If you have a question, send it in to AskNigel@haynet.com.

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