Ask Nigel: March 7

Dear Nigel,
Having been a fan of Group C sports car racing through the 1980s, I closely followed Jacky Ickx's exploits with Porsche. To me, he never had the speed of, say, a Stefan Bellof or a Manfred Winkelhock, but he was quick, consistent, easy on the car and - obviously - a very successful sports car driver.

My question to you is why did he not achieve more in Formula 1? I know he drove for Ferrari, but did that consistency and easiness on the car hide a lack of something extra needed to succeed in F1? Do you believe that some drivers are just more suited to one thing than another?
Peter Ives, Northampton, Northants


Dear Peter,
Forgive me, but I think you're doing Jacky Ickx a great injustice. In the period of which you speak - the 1980s - Ickx was not, in terms of pure speed, quite the driver he had been, I grant you. In the factory Porsches, he was not as quick as Stefan Bellof (but then neither was anyone else), but as a racing driver he was on a completely different plane from a man like Manfred Winkelhock. A delightful bloke, Manfred, but never a great driver.

And a great driver Ickx undoubtedly was. You have to remember that the 1980s were Jacky's second time around: he had already retired from racing, and then come back. By now he was around 40, and if some of the raw speed had gone, he remained the best overall sports car driver in the business. It was the accident with Bellof, at Spa in 1985, that finally decided him to retire from racing for good, although he did carry on for some years afterwards in events like the Paris-Dakar.

Although Ickx is remembered primarily as a sports car driver, he was also - at his peak, in the late '60s and early '70s - a truly magnificent Grand Prix driver, always at his absolute best on real drivers' circuits, like the 'old' Spa-Francorchamps and the 'old' Nurburgring.

Let me take you for a moment to the 'Ring in 1967. Given the length of the circuit - 14.19 miles - and the consequent long wait between laps, the race organisers, wanting to pad out the German Grand Prix field, ran an F2 race concurrently, with the smaller cars starting immediately behind the F1 brigade.

On this occasion, it was as well that they held to this policy, for it spared a good many blushes: third fastest overall in qualifying was Ickx, at the wheel of Ken Tyrrell's F2 Matra! This was the first time he was to race in a Grand Prix.

Given the staggering of the grids, Ickx effectively started 18th in a field of 25, but by lap four was already up to fifth overall, having dispensed with the likes of Pedro Rodriguez, Jochen Rindt and John Surtees, all in F1 cars, of course. Eventually he retired with three laps to go, but the point had been well made. The following year - at just 23 - he was a Ferrari driver, as team mate to my old friend Chris Amon.

In '68 he won his first Grand Prix - at the daunting Rouen Les Essarts in torrential rain - and then moved to Brabham for 1969, winning at the Nurburgring and Mosport Park. That same year, in one of John Wyer's Ford GT40s, he won the closest Le Mans of all time, outdriving Hans Herrmann in a much faster Porsche 908.

For 1970 Ickx moved back to Ferrari. It took time for the new flat-12 312B to become reliable, but once it did, it was the only thing capable of taking on Rindt's Lotus 72. This would be Jacky's nearest touch with the World Championship, yet he found himself in the position - surely unique in the annals of F1 - of actually hoping he wouldn't win it.

"In the first part of that season," he said, "the Ferrari was not so reliable, but later on it got much better, and we were able to compete with Rindt. By then, though, Jochen had built up a big points lead, and it looked impossible to catch him."

In the final qualifying session at Monza, however, Rindt was killed, and now Ickx found himself the only other driver with the possibility to become World Champion.

"It was a horrible situation. On the one hand, I was a racing driver, and therefore obliged to try and win, for Ferrari if not for myself. If I won the last three races, I would be champion, by one point.

"By now, with Jochen gone, the 312B was the car to beat. Jackie Stewart was there, of course, with the first Tyrrell, but it was new, and not so reliable. I won in Canada, but then I got a broken fuel pipe in Watkins Glen, and finished only fourth - and, I tell you, I was relieved. I didn't want to be World Champion, beating a man who... wasn't there any more, and now I couldn't be. I went to the last race, in Mexico, in a good frame of mind. And I won again."

Ickx's father, Jacques, was among the most prominent of motoring journalists, and later he helped Jacky compose a tribute to the sport's first, and only, posthumous World Champion.

It ended thus: 'Even if one can talk of an untimely death, all I can say is that the duration of a man's life should not be measured in days or hours, but by that which we achieve during the time given to us. There isn't a single one of us who hasn't left his hotel room in the morning well aware that he may not return, but this does not prevent us from achieving complete happiness.

'On the contrary, perhaps it enables us to be all the more so. The knowledge that everything could finish before the end of the day enables us to enjoy the wonders of life, and all that surrounds it, all the more.'

In tone, in sentiment, Ickx's words on the loss of Rindt are not dissimilar from those written by Bruce McLaren a couple of years earlier, following the death of Jimmy Clark, and they serve to remind us anew of how perilous an era of motor racing this was.

If the question of his own mortality crossed his mind back then, however, Jacky stressed that it didn't happen very often, and then not for very long. "I look back on my racing career with great pleasure, and I... I am a survivor, what else can I say? Of course I was young in my best years in F1, and when you are young, you think nothing can happen to you - it will to someone else, maybe, but not you. And, honestly, that was how you had to think: otherwise, you could not have carried on.

"Sometimes, though, I think of those times, and wonder how it was I survived when so many others, more talented than I was, did not."

There were not, I ventured, 'many others more talented' than Ickx. "Mmmm, I don't know. Certainly, there was Jimmy..."

In point of fact, the eras of Clark and Ickx barely overlapped, but Jacky has always remembered an incident at Barcelona in the spring of 1968.

"It was an F2 race. I tried to pass Jimmy at the hairpin on the first lap - and I hit the back of his car. We were both out of the race immediately, and it was entirely my fault. He was the best in the world, and I was this young guy; he could have been very hard, but instead he just had a quiet talk to me. He was a gentleman. And one week later, he was dead.

"You know," Ickx murmured. "If you came to my house, you would not know I had ever been a racing driver. I have all my trophies and everything, of course, but none are on display anywhere. I have just one framed racing photograph on my wall: that wonderful picture by Jesse Alexander of Jimmy's face, completely drained, after a race at Spa."

He was always a man of unusual quality - a gentleman, in the real sense of the word - and it's a pity you missed the best of his career. He never had the dedication of a Stewart, for to Ickx motor racing was merely one of the good things of life, for which he had a God-given talent.

"I don't think I would have survived too well in the F1 of today," he smiled. "I don't mean in the physical sense, because it's a lot safer than it was, but... the PR work, the endless testing, and so on. Between race weekends, you know, I never used to give racing a thought..."




Dear Jose,
Nice to be reminded of Roberto Guerrero and Johnny Cecotto, of Colombia and Venezuela respectively. Both were extremely nice blokes, but neither, I think, had Juan Pablo Montoya's potential for greatness.

Roberto and his delightful American wife, Katie, were on the F1 scene in the early '80s. He had made a name for himself in F2, with the Maurer team, and in F1 drove for Mo Nunn's little, under-financed, Ensign outfit, which became Theodore Racing in 1983. Although Guerrero often showed great flair and courage, he never had the car to compete at the top level, and for 1984 switched to CART, finishing a superb second in his first Indianapolis 500 that same year.

Invariably, Roberto excelled on the ovals, and won several races before suffering appalling head injuries in a testing accident at Indy in the autumn of 1987. After 17 days in a coma, he recovered, and ultimately raced again, but if much of the speed and flair remained, he was never again the driver he had been. Until recently, he continued to compete, now in the IRL, with little teams and uncompetitive cars, and I was sad to see it.

As for Cecotto, I don't think he ever showed the same sort of ability in cars that he had amply demonstrated for years before in motorcycle racing. That said, he never looked less than competent, and, when all is said and done, after spending a year as Guerrero's team mate at Theodore, for 1984 he joined the Toleman team - where his team mate was one Ayrton Senna! It was no more than inevitable that he would look merely average in comparison.

Johnny's F1 career, in fact, ended halfway through that season, for at Brands Hatch, in July 1984, he badly injured his legs in a qualifying accident, and, once he had recovered, set his sights rather lower, concentrating on touring car racing, at which he was to be very successful for a great number of years, invariably at the wheel of a BMW.

Of the two, I thought Guerrero much the more naturally talented, but neither man - even with the right car available - struck me as potential World Champion material.




Dear Florian,
Thank you so much for your compliments - I must remember to tell my good friends Michael Schmidt and Achim Schlang!

As you say, the utter domination of F1 by a couple of teams makes it extremely difficult - barring an Act of God - for 18 of the 22 drivers to put a win on the board. Even if poor reliability comes into play (which it rarely did last year), it's pretty likely that one of the McLaren or Ferrari drivers - Schumacher or Barrichello or Hakkinen or Coulthard - will have a trouble-free run, in which case everyone else is for the moment effectively aiming to be second.

If the domination by these two teams has been extreme in the recent past, really there is nothing new under the sun. Look at the '30s: if you weren't in a Mercedes or an Auto Union, how much chance of winning did you have - even if you were Nuvolari? Almost none.

Mind you, there have been periods when it was a little more democratic. In 1982, there were 16 Grands Prix - and they were won by 11 different drivers, in seven different makes of car! Hard to believe, I know, but true just the same.

By and large, though, you always need to be in one of two, or maybe three, teams to have a realistic shot at victory, and it's more accentuated now than at any time in the past. Thanks to automatic gearboxes, you can't miss a shift any more, so you can neither over-rev your engine nor hurt your clutch. Reliability has been dramatically improved, and the chances of the lesser teams' occasionally cashing in on driving errors from those in the best cars have been hugely reduced.

So... you're right, there is every chance that a great many good drivers will go through their entire careers without winning a Grand Prix. Thank God Jean Alesi, more talented by far than many multiple winners, at least has one victory to his name, but think of Chris Amon. "I have only two rivals," Jochen Rindt said before the 1970 season, "Stewart and Amon." Yet somehow, by never being in the right car at the right time, Chris never won a Grand Prix.

Of the drivers you list - Fisichella, Ralf Schumacher, Heidfeld and Button - I find it hard to believe that Ralf and Jenson, at least, won't win Grands Prix before they're through. Button, in particular, has time very much on his side, and must get into a winning car eventually. But Fisichella, for example, could be a different story...




Dear Andrew,
As a watcher of motor racing, I've been very privileged, and know it. I first went to an F1 race in 1954, when I was eight years old, and I've been going to them ever since, as a fan until 1970, and as a journalist since. I saw Fangio race, and Moss, Clark, Stewart, Rindt... all the great drivers of the last 40-odd years.

As for stepping into your time machine, it's mighty difficult to choose one race only. I'm very tempted by the 1936 Eifelrennen, at the old Nurburgring, won in appalling conditions by the Auto Union of Bernd Rosemeyer, then very much a precocious rookie, and Tazio Nuvolari's win for Alfa Romeo - against Mercedes and Auto Union - in the German Grand Prix, the year before, is another candidate.

I can well understand your choice of Stirling Moss at Monte Carlo in 1961 - no mistakes despite enormous pressure for 100 laps, at an average within a whisker of his pole position lap - but I saw Stirling win many times, whereas I never actually witnessed a Fangio victory. His epic chase of the Ferraris of Hawthorn and Collins - during which he lowered his own lap record by 24 seconds! - at the Nurburgring in 1957, would be an obvious choice, but in the end I think I'd go for the French Grand Prix the same year.

It wasn't one of Fangio's legendary victories, in terms of a battle, for he left everyone behind from the start, but I am very familiar with the Rouen Les Essarts circuit, and would give anything to put the time machine by the downhill swerves after the pits, and watch him pitch that Maserati 250F into elegant opposite-lock slides at 150mph, and more. As Denis Jenkinson said, "He was just having fun - doing it for the sake of doing it..."




Dear Charles,
Thank you for your kind words - and glad you enjoyed the piece on Ayrton and Alain.

Now, why was I watching the Australian Grand Prix on TV at home, as opposed to being in Melbourne - and watching it on TV in the press room? No big mystery here. Simply, after 30 years of being 'on the road', I have had enough of very long-haul flights - they bore me to tears - and decided at the end of last season that in future I would go to all the European Grands Prix, plus those in Canada and the USA, but not the rest.

It's not that I am losing my enthusiasm for racing - for the sheer fun of it, I'm going to the Milwaukee CART race in June, for example - but I really have come to detest the sheer awfulness of travelling in this day and age, and, having covered the Australian GP 15 or 16 times, simply decided to trim my schedule, that's all. Hence, 'my' F1 season starts at Imola, and I'm very happy with that. As I point out to people sometimes, Denis Jenkinson never in his life went to South America or Australia or Japan!

As for the worst Grand Prix I've ever covered, well, Imola '94 comes to mind, of course, for it was a weekend of calamity apparently without end, culminating, of course, with the death of Senna. Monza in 1978, when Ronnie Peterson died, was also another dreadful weekend, but still the worst for me, in a personal sense, was Zolder in 1982.

At that time, a state of civil war existed in F1, with the FOCA teams - Williams, Brabham, Tyrrell, Lotus etc - on one side, and the 'grandee' teams - Ferrari, Renault, Alfa Romeo - on the other. The atmosphere in the paddock was poisonous, and then, in the midst of all this, Gilles Villeneuve was killed in the final qualifying session.

I was closer to Gilles than to any driver since, and chatted to him for only five minutes or so before he went out for the last time. I was stunned by his death, not only because I'd lost a friend, but also because, given the way things were in F1 at that time, he was about the only reason one wished still to go to the races. Writing about the events of that weekend was undoubtedly the worst experience of my professional life.

As for my biggest panic at a race, that would have to be Adelaide in 1986 - or, rather, the day after.

I was in fine spirits as the aeroplane neared Los Angeles, I remember. It had been a long flight from Sydney, close on 15 hours, but I had watched a couple of movies, had a drink or two, and there were only good things in my head. As I had hoped, Alain Prost had won a spectacular Australian Grand Prix, and the World Championship, and all my writing was done for the moment. Immediately ahead lay a five-hour flight to New York, my favourite city, and a few days' relaxation there. I was at peace with the world.

Everything began to unravel when we landed at LA. As we began to disembark, mine was one of several names called out on the PA system: there was a message for me. I went to get it, then read it, then screamed inwardly. My race report had not arrived at AUTOSPORT - or, rather, it had arrived, but was of minimal use, for the paper in the fax machine had jammed, and 6000 words were compressed into a very few, very black, lines.

By now, it was Tuesday morning in London, and time was extremely short. First, I went to the airport's business centre, and asked if they had a fax machine. They didn't - in fact, they didn't even know what I was talking about. I called the office of a Californian magazine for which I occasionally worked, and said I was on my way over. After booking a later flight to New York, I got in a cab for the 60-mile drive, asked the driver to wait, faxed my report to London again, returned to LAX, got on my flight.

The following day, over lunch in Greenwich Village, it occurred to me suddenly how fortunate it was that the message had reached me - and that I had not slung the report in the bin after faxing it from Adelaide. Laptop computers were unknown at the time, and I was still using a typewriter, while fax machines were beginning to take the place of telex. We are talking only 15 years ago...


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