Ask Nigel: March 21

Dear Nigel
With the Formula 1 franchise system as it stands, do you not agree that ambitious teams in the lower formulae now have no chance of achieving the dream of Grand Prix racing? Have we seen the last of the Jordans, the Stewarts and the Saubers, or do you believe that ultimately, especially with the EU's stance on restrictive practices, those days will return?
Keep up the good work!
Phillip Graham, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Dear Phillip,
'Never say never' is something I have come to accept after so many years in this business, but on the face of it there is very little chance of, say, an ambitious F3000 team making the move up to Formula 1 in the foreseeable future. For one thing, the limit has been set at 12 teams (with Toyota taking up the last slot next season); for another, you have to build your own car; for a third, you have to lodge many millions of dollars with the FIA simply to indicate your seriousness of intent. These are powerful arguments for staying with what you know.

So, have we seen the last of the Jordans, the Stewarts and the Saubers? First, remember that the last two came in with a very powerful engine partner (Ford in the case of Stewart, Mercedes with Sauber). The likelihood of any 'new' team aspiring to F1 doing a deal with a major engine manufacturer is as good as nothing - even an existing team, like Prost, had a major struggle on its hands to find an engine partner for 2001. And when it did (with Ferrari), it had to shell out a fortune for the privilege.

In my view, then, the sheer numbers involved militate against the chances of another Eddie Jordan being able to come into F1, although things might change in the future, should F1 become less fashionable, or less popular with the major manufacturers. In that event, some teams might fall by the wayside, in which case opportunities for others could open up.

I have to say, though, that I would not wish to see under-funded teams like Simtek and Pacific - to say nothing of jokey outfits like Andrea Moda! - in F1 again. I make no excuses for this. To my mind, F1 is supposed to be about excellence, and one of Bernie Ecclestone's greatest achievements has been to raise the overall standard to the point that there are now no 'struggling outfits' in the field. It may sound harsh, but in my opinion 'little guy' teams do nothing but get in the way, and I'd far rather see them doing a more competitive job in a lower formula.

As for the EU's stance on restrictive practices, no, I cannot see it making any difference at all to the way F1 is run...




Dear Kevin,
While it's true that speeds at Melbourne were dramatically quicker than in 2000, the picture at Sepang was somewhat different: lap times were quicker, yes, but not by anything like as much as in Australia. The reason for that, of course, was that the two Melbourne races were separated by a full 12 months, the two in Malaysia in less than five. By the time of Sepang, in October 2000, Bridgestone were into 'combat mode', preparing for the tyre war with Michelin, and already compounds were getting very much softer - and therefore faster. It would not surprise me to see speeds in Brazil - again 12 months after the last race there - significantly up once more.

Have F1 cars always looked quick, or have there been periods when they looked slow to the eye? As a kid, I remember that in 1961, the first year of the 1.5-litre F1, they did indeed look slow initially, by comparison with the 2.5-litre cars which had gone before. And in 1966, the first year of the 3-litre F1, they looked hugely quicker again, of course. It was a simple matter of horsepower.

Essentially, I guess, F1 cars always look quick in their own time. When I see old F1 cars now, they look pretty slow - but at the time they were the state of the art, and faster than anything else. On the other hand, what is quick - and what looks quick? If we could go back 30 years in time, so that you could see Jochen Rindt or Chris Amon steering their cars on the throttle, cornering in beautiful controlled slides, their actual speed would be hugely less than what we see today (tyres were primitive, and downforce almost non-existent), but the actual SPECTACLE was better by far. Ask anyone who was at Monte Carlo in 1970.

For sheer drama, I don't suppose we will ever again see anything to match the turbo era, when downforce was way less than now, and horsepower was colossal: 1100 or so for racing, over 1400 for qualifying. In qualifying at Monaco in 1986, Gerhard Berger reported that his Benetton-BMW was spinning its wheels - in top gear! - at the top of the hill before Casino Square; out of the tunnel, Berger was travelling at over 190mph...




Dear Arnold,
Sorry you don't like the Tony Blair jibes, but surely you wouldn't deny me my fun in waging a little one-man fight against the BBC. For my part, I don't like living in a totalitarian state. I loathe what political correctness is doing to this country, and T. Blair is its grindingly humourless high priest. As someone said the other day, if William Hague looked like Robert Redford, in today's world he'd win by a landslide, regardless of his party.

Anyway, like you, I digress... Now, Indianapolis and the World Championship. No one seems to know quite why the 500 was included in the World Championship, when it began in 1950, beyond the fact that it was the biggest race on earth, and it was felt only right that America - which didn't have a Grand Prix in those days - should be represented in something calling itself a 'World Championship'.

The 500 was finally dropped from the championship after the 1960 race, by which time a US Grand Prix had come into the calendar.

Indy's inclusion in the World Championship did toss up one quirky statistical snippet. While Fangio's strike record is extraordinary - he won 47 per cent of his World Championship races - even the great Juan Manuel is beaten by a man born the same year, 1911, in Schenectady, New York. Lee Wallard, whose two Indy outings netted a sixth and a first, thus won precisely 50 per cent of the World Championship races he entered. A record, I would think, that is unlikely to be surpassed. If anyone cares...




Dear George,
Over time, you're right, a great many racing motorcyclists have successfully made the switch to four wheels, most notably, of course, John Surtees, many times a World Champion in his bike days, and then World Champion for Ferrari in 1964.

My great childhood hero, Jean Behra, was another who came to car racing that way, having previously been Champion of France several times on a red Moto Guzzi. Bill Ivy, tragically killed on a 125 at the Sachsenring in 1969, was also trying to break into car racing that year, buying himself an F2 Brabham, and displaying, according to Jackie Stewart, 'more natural talent than any newcomer I've ever seen'.

Others, though, were less successful. Geoff Duke and Giacomo Agostini, for example, never really got it together in cars, and Mike Hailwood, although sometimes tremendously quick in an F1 car, never showed the same genius as had been apparent when he was on a bike. Damon Hill, by contrast, was Formula 1 World Champion, but his bike racing career, which came first, had been rather less successful.

If it has ever worked in the opposite direction - moving from cars to bikes - I confess that I've never heard of it, and would imagine that it is much more difficult than to go from two wheels to four.

That said, some drivers, like Gerhard Berger, are remarkably adept on a bike, even when just having fun. In the late eighties, Mario Andretti, then nearing 50, tried Wayne Rainey's factory Yamaha 500 at Laguna Seca, and - wearing only his race overalls, rather than leathers! - set a time which apparently would have qualified him 15th for the US Grand Prix, run not long before...




Dear Helen,
Your impressions of Gunnar don't surprise me, for he was one of the most friendly individuals I ever met in Formula 1 - and, if you'll forgive me, it probably didn't hurt that you were a young girl when you met him!

Mario Andretti once told me he had had only four really close friendships with fellow drivers in the course of his long career: Billy Foster, a very promising Canadian Indycar driver, who was killed in practice for a NASCAR race at Riverside in 1967, Lucien Bianchi (with whom he drove at Le Mans a couple of times), who was killed during the Le Mans test weekend in 1969, Ronnie Peterson, and Gunnar Nilsson, who was his Lotus team mate in 1976 and '77.

Everyone who knew Gunnar remembers him with great affection. As a driver, his natural talent was high, and his victory for Lotus in the Belgian Grand Prix in 1977 would surely, all things being equal, have been the first of very many. As a man, he was wonderful company, like Keke Rosberg untypically extrovert for a Scandinavian, with a great sense of humour, and a huge capacity for having a good time.

He loved his time at Lotus, the two seasons with Andretti, whom he revered, but for 1978 he accepted an offer to join the then new Arrows team as number one driver. Circumstances dictated, sadly, that it never came to be.

Two or three times during the summer of '77, he complained of niggling pains in his back, which seemed to be getting worse. They seemed to have little effect on his driving - he drove a quite brilliant race at the Osterreichring in August, I remember - but, as he later said, without a trace of self-pity, he should have had the pains investigated sooner than he did.

In fact, it was when he was staying at Andretti's country place, in Pennsylvania, that Mario finally persuaded him to go and see a doctor, which led to further tests in London; eventually, we learned of the diagnosis.

Gunnar spent months in hospital, somehow remaining resolutely cheerful for most of the time, and in July of '78 actually came to Brands Hatch for the British Grand Prix. How was he doing? "Good!" he exclaimed. "I'm coming along well." He had lost all his hair, following endless debilitating sessions of chemotherapy, but even managed to joke with me about that: "You think you're going bald? Ha! I'm way ahead of you..."

In fact, he wasn't coming along well at all, and it wasn't long before he knew it was a matter of weeks, rather than months. The raw courage of the man had a profound effect on everyone: in the time left to him, he passed up pain-killing drugs so as to be properly alert, and concentrated such energies as he had on starting a campaign to raise funds for scanning equipment for the London hospital which had looked after him so well. Early in September, he somehow found the strength to go to Sweden for the funeral of Ronnie Peterson, who had been killed at Monza; a few days later he himself died, at the age of 28.

He had a very short time at the top level of motor racing - only 31 Grands Prix - but it was enough to make his mark as a driver. It is as a man, though, as a testament to courage and the strength of the human spirit, that I, and others, will always remember Gunnar Nilsson.




Dear Andrew,
I was only a child in the days when they ran the Tourist Trophy at Dundrod, from 1950 to 1955, so never went to a race there, unfortunately, but I have driven round the circuit, which, as you say, is apparently little changed from the days when they raced there.

A daunting place, isn't it? When I went there, I had the same feelings as when I drove round the Targa Florio course in Sicily: surely they can never have raced around here... Dundrod is, of course, considerably shorter than a lap of the Targa, but even so, at nearly seven and a half miles, is way longer than most circuits, then or now.

Winding and undulating, and comprising 14 right-hand corners and seven left-handers, it was a true driver's circuit, but even in its heyday, when safety was barely discussed in motor racing, Dundrod was considered unforgiving. First of all, the public roads on which it was run were extremely narrow (even by the standards of the day), and it was lined by stone walls, ditches and earth banks.

Stirling Moss adored the place, and not only because he had a remarkable amount of success there. It was, in his mind, what real classic open road racing was all about, and the fact that it was so dangerous only added to the challenge, and to the satisfaction. Stirling's observation that, 'It's no fun playing cards for matches', does not exactly mirror contemporary FIA or GPDA thinking, but nevertheless he meant it. Times were different.

In 1950, for the first Tourist Trophy at Dundrod, the race was a three-hour handicap event, and Moss, in Tommy Wisdom's Jaguar XK120, won it consummately. It was the eve of his 21st birthday, and the biggest win of his career to date.

The following year, now at the wheel of a factory Jaguar C-Type, Moss won again, but in 1952 the Tourist Trophy was cancelled, as the organisers felt that not enough entries had been received.

For '53, though, the race was back on the calendar, still a handicap event, but now over six hours, and counting as the final round of the World Sports Car Championship. From an international point of view, the entry was a disappointment, but a large number of Jaguars and Aston Martins were on hand, and it was one of the latter - a factory-entered DB3, driven by Peter Collins and Pat Griffith - which won, after Moss's leading Jaguar suffered tyre failure in the late stages.

It was in 1954 that the Tourist Trophy at Dundrod really blossomed as a major event. This time there were factory-entered Ferraris and Lancias on hand, driven by such as Juan Manuel Fangio and Alberto Ascari, to take on the Jags and Astons, and one of the Ferraris, driven by Mike Hawthorn and Maurice Trintignant, proved the fastest car in the race.

It did not win, however, for this was still a handicap event - and, on corrected time, the winner was found to be the tiny 750cc DB Panhard of Paul Armagnac and Gerard Laureau, which actually covered 27 fewer laps than the Ferrari!

The 1955 entry was simply fantastic, and now, finally, the handicap rules were slung out, so that the race winner was simply the first car to complete the 84-lap race. On hand were three Mercedes Benz 300SLRs, driven by such as Moss and Fangio, three works Ferraris, a couple of factory Maseratis, and a lone Jaguar D-Type, handled by Hawthorn and the very talented local man, Desmond Titterington.

The race, in mirky conditions, distilled to a battle between Moss's Mercedes and Hawthorn's Jaguar, in which Stirling ultimately got the upper hand, winning the race with American journeyman John Fitch as his co-driver.

Sadly, though, the race was to prove horribly tragic on this occasion. A Mercedes 300SL, driven by the unknown Comte de Barry, was eventually black-flagged for 'unsafe driving', but by that time had done terrible damage. So slow had de Barry been that a queue of cars built up behind him, and Jim Mayers, trying to pass, crashed his Cooper-Climax, and was killed instantly.

Bill Smith, at the wheel of a Connaught, hit the wreckage of the Cooper, and he, too, lost his life. Later in the race, in a quite separate accident, Elva driver Richard Mainwaring was also killed.

It was the end of the road for Dundrod as an international motor racing venue. A few days after that 1955 race, the Royal Automobile Club decided that the track was unacceptably dangerous, and could not be used again.

If you have a question for Nigel, e-mail it to AskNigel@haynet.com.