Ask Nigel: May 1

Dear Dominic,

There is indeed much talk of cost-cutting in F1 at the moment, although at Barcelona I noticed that some were much more agitated about it than others - and it did not necessarily reflect their own financial situations.

Attitudes were very different, as you moved from place to place. Eddie Jordan, for example, spoke passionately about the need to restrict testing, and Ross Brawn's response was to say, "If you don't want to go testing, fine, don't go testing."

Max Mosley has said that he is not sure that 'testing', as opposed to 'racing', is within his remit as President of the FIA. Refuelling, though, is a different matter, but it is highly unlikely - barring some major incident in the pits - that it will ever be banned.

Yes, it is obviously potentially dangerous, and you could argue that it is a wholly unnecessary danger, too, a complete anomaly in an age otherwise fixated with safety. If you were to argue that point of view, I would not take issue with you.

However, we need to bear in mind why refuelling was reintroduced, why it was made legal again, after being banned for many years. And whatever reasons are given, the truth is that it was brought back to spice up The Show. Overtaking being so difficult these days, the ploy did at least permit the possibility of order changes during pit stops, and of course greatly increased the scope of different strategies. It was this which prompted Max Mosley to suggest we should think of a grand prix in terms of a chess match, and doubtless that is what some do.

I have never been a fan of refuelling, I must say. Leaving aside the potential danger aspect of it, it has also - inevitably - encouraged drivers to think in terms of 'waiting for the stops', rather than trying everything to get by the guy in front. It has also, I think, made the format of a Grand Prix rather more crude than it used to be, a matter of sprint-stop-sprint-stop. Rather more subtlety was involved, it seemed to me, when a driver and his team had to achieve a race set-up which worked well, whether the car was full of fuel or empty. I think the races were the better for having different cars quick at different stages of the race.



Dear James,

Yes, sometimes one driver in a team does seem to get 'all the bad luck'. Whenever this comes up, I think back to McLaren in 1985. The year before, Niki Lauda had beaten his team mate Alain Prost to the World Championship by the smallest margin of all time - precisely half a point - despite the fact that Alain had won seven grands prix, Niki only five. Simply, Niki's over all finishing record was better.

The following year, though, it was a completely different story. From the beginning, it was pretty obvious that Prost was going to win the championship, and in fact his only real opposition from Michele Alboreto's Ferrari. As Prost won race after race, Lauda, by contrast, could hardly buy a finish.

The situation defied logical explanation. McLaren, perhaps more than any other team, have always had a deserved reputation for preparing two cars to the same standard, yet, for whatever reason, Lauda's kept failing, and Prost's did not.

Finally, we got to the Dutch Grand Prix, at the end of August, and there, for once, Niki's luck held. He took over the lead after Alain lost time in the pits, and although the two of them were literally tied together over the closing laps, he held on to win by a hair. "I'll do everything I can to help Alain to the championship," he said afterwards, "but after the season I've had, there was no way I was going to let him win today..."

Following that race, Lauda's customary 1985 luck returned.

Driving styles can have some effect, of course, but perhaps rather less these days than used to be the case: if you were rough with your clutch and gearbox, for example, you tended not to last very long; if you failed to keep your eye on the rev-counter, you blew your engine, and soon.

It's a fact, too, that mechanics cannot all be of the same quality, and this was particularly true in days gone by. Undeniably, there were teams not particularly adept at preparing two cars to the same standard: in the '60s, for example, it used to be said that the best job in the business was to be Lotus number one, the worst to be Lotus number two: while Jimmy Clark had a fantastic finishing record, his sundry team-mates were hardly ever around at the end of a race.

When the talk is of unlucky drivers, immediately the name which comes to my mind is that of Chris Amon. All right, perhaps I'm biased, because Chris is among my closest friends in racing, but his ill luck dwarfs that of any other driver I can think of. Time and again, he started from pole position, and time and again he had a race in his pocket, only for something to fail on his car. Jochen Rindt once said, "I have only two rivals - Stewart and Amon", yet somehow Chris was never to win a world championship grand prix. Perhaps what says it all is that he won the 1971 Argentine Grand Prix for Matra - and for that year only the race didn't count for the championship...

Had there been any justice, indeed, in 1968 Amon would have won not only several grands prix, but also the world championship. His Ferrari team-mate that year was Ickx, and recently I talked to Jacky about it.

"I felt very sorry for Chris," he said. "He was truly a great driver - quicker than I was, yet it was me who finally got a win. He must, I'm sure, be the unluckiest driver there has ever been in racing."

Whenever, in recent times, though, I have talked to Chris himself about it, he has never expressed any bitterness. "Unlucky? I guess I was - but I'm alive. Look down the grids from those years, and think of how many guys didn't make it..." An unarguable point, I think.



Dear Rick,

Ayrton Senna's test drive in the Penske came at the instigation of his close friend, and former mentor, Emerson Fittipaldi, who was then one of the team's regular drivers. At the time Ayrton was a little disillusioned with F1, and Emerson suggested he might care to think about switching to CART, at least for a while.

Back then Marlboro was the sponsor of both the McLaren F1 team and the Penske CART team, so there was no clash there, and Senna agreed readily to try a Penske. The test was conducted at Firebird International Raceway, a road circuit near the Phoenix oval, and Ayrton, Penske team members have told me, was staggeringly quick - to the point that initially they doubted their stopwatches.

Ayrton loved the car - "It's a human's car!" he enthused afterwards. This was at a time, of course, when F1 cars were becoming ever more gizmo-ridden, with such as traction control, launch control, automatic gearboxes, and so on, while CART cars were devoid of such things, and, in Senna's opinion, allowed a driver much greater scope to express himself.

It's important to remember that Ayrton truly adored driving, for the sake of it, and so the chance to try something quite outside his experience was irresistible. I somewhat doubt that he seriously contemplated a switch from F1 to CART, although he was greatly attracted by the Indianapolis 500 - back then still a race for 'proper' Indycars, of course...



Dear Bentzion,

Hmmm, what a question! Over breakfast in the Barcelona paddock last Friday, Eddie Jordan made an impassioned speech to the British press, explaining his decision to let go 15 per cent of his workforce, including several senior figures. I confess I was stunned that Trevor Foster should have been among them, for if anyone was synonymous with the Jordan team it was he.

Eddie went on at length about the need to make his team 'lean and mean' again, and stressed his belief that it would function better in its revised state. Perhaps he's right. Certainly Jordan Grand Prix achieved better results before it began to gain weight. When I ran into EJ on Sunday morning, he was in a very gung-ho frame of mind, beaming, and saying how great he felt, going back to basics, attending debriefs again, and so on.

However, I think there's no doubt that the circumstances which required him to lay off more than 40 people came up pretty quickly. At Imola, only a fortnight earlier, there was no suggestion - from Trevor Foster or anyone else - that major changes were imminent.

So what does the future hold for Jordan Grand Prix? Eddie stressed that his team was going to come through, that he would ensure it would not go into financial collapse, as did Prost Grand Prix. The horizon, though, is far from unclouded. Paddock rumours strongly suggest that he has already been notified by Honda that he will not be supplied with engines in 2003, so there must be a strong possibility that he will have to Buy engines in the future. It was this handicap - having to shell out over 20m US Dollars for Ferrari motors, having previously had free ones from Peugeot - that speeded the demise of Alain Prost's team.

Can Jordan rediscover their form of 1998-99? On the face of it, at present that looks unlikely - certainly in the short term, anyway. The team won three grands prix in those years, but at the moment even highly-financed teams like Williams and McLaren are struggling to do that.

At present the only teams without a point to their name are Jordan and BAR, the two outfits using Honda engines. 'An informed source' suggested to me recently that the only engine currently producing less power than the Honda was the Asiatech, as used by Minardi...



Dear Jennie,

It's not the first time that Ralf has been...backward in coming forward, let's say, when it comes to admitting to a mistake, and this can be irritating, to say the least, for a team, which needs to have all information possible at its disposal. When he came in for the new nosecone, he had not mentioned his sizeable 'off', but merely mumbled about there being some grass, and stuff, in the nose. A team would far prefer the straightforward 'Sorry, boys, I f***** up' approach of a Juan Montoya - or, for that matter, Michael Schumacher.

Is Ralf too flawed to become a true great like his brother? First of all, despite the results he is achieving this season, I wouldn't say that even Michael is completely without flaws - sooner or later, for example, I suspect that one of his late dives across the nose of a car trying to pass is going to rebound on him. Over time he has been phenomenally lucky not to have been part of a major two-car accident. At the moment, of course, there is no cause for concern, for no one gets near him from the fall of the flag...

No, I don't consider Ralf the equal of his brother, but on his day, when all is right with him and his car, he is a truly formidable F1 driver - remember the battle with Michael in Montreal last year? Montoya, I'm convinced, is fundamentally the better of the two Williams-BMW drivers, and 'a true great' in the making, but at the moment undoubtedly his team-mate is more adept at finding a set-up to suit him. We should remember, though, that this is only Juan Pablo's second season in F1.

During the last few laps of the Brazilian GP, Ralf caught right up to his brother, but one never felt that he was going to take him on, actually put a move on him for the lead. At the time John Watson commented, "I'll bet Michael's glad it's his brother in that Williams, and not Montoya", and that was exactly what I was thinking, too. I have no doubts that Juan would have taken a run at Michael - he might have gone off in the attempt, but he would assuredly have made one.

History shows that Ralf tends to start a season brilliantly, and then tail off in the last few races. It happened in 2000, when Jenson Button began to get the better of him, and again last year. I'll be interested to see if he can maintain his form through the whole of 2002.



Dear Bill,

True enough, the wing failures in Barcelona were alarming, in part, I think, because we don't expect to see such things in this day and age. The fact is, though, that racing cars - even with all the technology of today - are still essentially designed and built by human beings, and human beings will always be fallible. Extraordinarily safe as today's F1 cars are, there will always, for example, be occasional suspension failures. It happens.

Time was when wing failures, too, were common. The first wing on an F1 car appeared on Chris Amon's Ferrari at the Belgian Grand Prix in 1968. The race was run at the 'old', incredibly fast, Spa-Francorchamps circuit - even 30-odd years ago, with only 400 horsepower, they were lapping the place at over 150mph - and although Amon's Ferrari was well down on power to the Cosworth DFV brigade, still he took pole position, by over four seconds!

Clearly, wings were something everyone had to have, and soon they were on every car. In those days, however, technology was somewhat less advanced, to put it mildly, and very tall 'stilt' rear wings were bunged on many cars without any real clue as to the forces going through them.

Failures were commonplace. At the Spanish GP at Montjuich Park in 1969, for example, the Lotus 49s of Jochen Rindt and Graham Hill suffered identical failures at the same point, a 160mph 'yump' on the pit straight.

Both cars had enormous accidents, and it was only by the Grace of God that no one was seriously injured or worse.

At the very same spot, in the 1975 race, Rolf Stommelen's Hill lost its rear wing. This was at a time when the use of carbon fibre was creeping into F1, and it was the carbon centrepost of Stommelen's car which broke. On this occasion, the consequences were much more severe. The Hill hit the guardrail on one side of the track, then vaulted over it on the other. Stommelen escaped with broken legs, but four marshals and photographers were killed, and the race was abandoned.

At the 1992 Hungarian Grand Prix, I watched the race from out on the circuit, towards the end of the pit straight, precisely the point at which Michael Schumacher's Benetton shed its rear wing - which proceeded to flutter over our heads! Schuey's car immediately spun out of control, but came to rest without hitting anything.

So it does happen once in a while, I'm afraid, and probably it always will.