Ask Nigel: May 2

Dear Nigel,
Francois Cevert is for me what Jean Behra seems to be for you. I was six when my father took me to the '73 Belgian Grand Prix and the sight of JYS and FC dominating the race was the cradle of my passion for this sport. In my eyes, there is something magic about this pairing; they were both highly talented and very charismatic yet there was no rivalry between them. This is not what you see today where your team mate is the first man you have to beat. Was it really like that between Cevert and Stewart, and are there other examples of great drivers being team mates before being rivals?
Tangui Van der Elst, Brussels, Belgium

Dear Tangui,
It doesn't surprise that Francois Cevert so captured your imagination. As a driver, he had greatness in him, and he was also one of the most charismatic people I ever met.

Cevert was a man of immense natural charm, and upon those close to him, he made an indelible impression. "Ah, Francois..." Jackie Stewart will smile at the mention of him, and his face tells its own tale, the memory of one he came to regard as team mate, brother, son. For everyone at Tyrrell in those days, too, he has a special place.

The surprise which awaited you, on meeting Cevert, was that he was a good fellow, a gentleman in the truest sense. So often folk who seem to have everything are all too aware of it, to the detriment of their personality. Francois had the sort of gypsy good looks to make girls gnaw at the backs of their hands, yet none of the accompanying arrogance which invariably renders such people insufferable. He took a simple delight in life, and his face reflected it.

"He was a classically-trained pianist," Stewart recalled, "and you never saw a man so serene as Francois when he was playing Beethoven or Chopin or Mozart. He had a real passion for music, but an even stronger one for racing. What he wanted most from life was to be France's first World Champion, and I've never doubted he would have done it."

At the time of his death, at Watkins Glen in late 1973, Cevert had been in Fl for three and a half seasons, all of them spent with Tyrrell, all of them as Stewart's team mate. He won only one of his 47 Grands Prix - ironically at Watkins Glen, in 1971 - but finished second 10 times, half a dozen of those behind Stewart.

Jackie he regarded as very much his mentor, and over time he came to model his driving style on Stewart's as nearly as possible. In this era of over-the-kerbs and questionable ethics in Fl, fluency in a racing car is considered boring by some, yet I recall footage, shot from a helicopter, of Stewart and Cevert at the Nurburgring in 1973, the two Tyrrells proceeding in effortless echelon, perfect of line, with no other car in sight. Artistry, it used to be called.

By the middle of that summer, there had been some shift in the driver balance, Cevert coming to believe that, at least on some occasions, he had his team leader's measure, and Stewart tacitly admitting as much to Tyrrell. By now Jackie had resolved to retire at season's end, after which Cevert would take over as number one.

Given those circumstances, a lesser man than Francois might have moaned to the press about 'team orders', implied that, had he been allowed, he could have won this or that race. But Cevert had too much class for that, too much respect for the great driver in the other car. His own time, he felt, was coming. At Watkins Glen, from the beginning of practice to the moment of his accident, his was the fastest of the three Tyrrell drivers.

It was an accident of extraordinary violence, at the top of the Glen's daunting uphill esses, taken nearly flat by the brave and the best. Cevert, having just lapped faster than Stewart, and looking to go quicker still, got into the first part of the corner slightly off line, which put him wrong for the rest of it. He did not lift, and nearly got away with it, but at the top of the hill his car brushed the guardrail, and all control was gone.

Like Rindt, Peterson, Depailler, Villeneuve, Cevert left a mark on those with whom he worked, so that he is recalled not only with professional respect, but also with fondness. To Stewart he remains, "The most fascinating racing driver I've ever known".

I've no doubts at all that Francois Cevert was good enough to become World Champion. A little story from Ken Tyrrell: "The car Jackie won his last championship with, in '73, was 005, and it was a very quick car - he and Francois finished 1-2 on several occasions, including at the Nurburgring - the old Nurburgring. Now you've heard how Jackie helped Francois - he couldn't have done more, told him everything, OK? At that race at the Nurburgring, they went round together, start to finish, first and second - and afterwards Jackie said to me, 'Francois could have passed me any time he liked...'"




Dear Darren,
Like you, like anyone who knew him, I also was stunned to learn of Michele Alboreto's death last week. I have written about him in this week's AUTOSPORT, but to give you an idea of the sort of person he was, let me tell you about a dinner in Estoril in 1987.

This was Michele talking not about himself - he was never the self-obsessed type - but it might get across the wit of the man, and his love of racing. He was a wonderful raconteur, and that night he had me, and everyone else at the table, in near hysterics, as he regaled us with 'Brambilla stories'.

The Brambilla brothers, Tino and Vittorio, citizens of Monza, were around a long time in motor racing - considerably longer, in fact, than anyone anticipated, since their track behaviour frequently suggested they may not have been a hundred percent steady in the head. Tales of their exploits are legion, and Alboreto came up with one or two I hadn't heard.

"You know the one about the F3 mechanic at Monza? No?" Michele smiled in anticipation, this clearly one of his party pieces.

"It was in the days when Tino was in F3, with a Tecno, and Vittorio was his chief mechanic. They were testing alone at Monza one day, and Vittorio hears the engine cut out, round the back of the circuit. 'I think he's run out of fuel,' he says to Pino, the young mechanic. 'Sounds like at Lesmo. Take some fuel out to him.'

"So Pino sets off, reaches Lesmo, and Vittorio is right: the car is parked, out of fuel, Tino standing next to it. They put the fuel in, and the engine starts. 'Get on the back, Pino,' Tino says, and I'll take you back to the pits...

"So, OK, they start off. Into first... then second..."

Sadly I cannot on paper do justice to this part of Michele's story, to the engine sounds, the rising revs, the gear changes. Suffice it to say that Tino gets the thing into fifth, and seriously so...

"So, Tino comes into the pits. 'You were right, Vittorio,' he says. 'I was out fuel. Thank you for sending Pino out to me.

"'No problem,' Vittorio says. 'But... where is Pino?'

"Tino hits his forehead with the heel of his hand. 'My God,'he says, 'he was on the back...'

"You know what?" Alboreto smiled, "it took them an hour to find him. He was face down in the run-off area at Parabolica!"

Tino, it seems, had arrived there in fifth gear, and turned into the corner at normal racing speed, a path the hapless Pino, clinging desperately to the roll-over bar, had found himself unable to follow...

Did he survive, we asked? "Oh, yes," Michele said. "He was a bit knocked about, you know, but OK - in fact, he still works for the Brambillas!"

Not all of the evening was given over to reminiscence, though. Alboreto was that rarest of men, a straightforward racing driver. You could interview him, reach a controversial point, volunteer to switch off the tape recorder, and he would say not to bother: "No, it's OK. No secrets..."

It was a gentler time, in many ways. Alboreto, I remember, spoke glowingly of Prost, the man he ran close for the championship for much of 1985.

"Alain is unbelievably quick, and clever. He's also very relaxed now, and because of that he's much more dangerous as a rival than before. When he was looking for the World Championship, he was very nervous like me now. But now he's relaxed, and it's made him even quicker. He makes fewer mistakes than anyone."

For Ayrton Senna, though, there was less enthusiasm. Michele did not at that time care for Senna, and did not much care, either, who knew it.

"I've never had a problem with anyone else, not like with Senna. And it's not possible to talk with him about it. He is still the same as he was.

"There is a limit, that's the point. You cannot push people off on the grass because you don't want to lose a position. In Hockenheim I was furious. At one point he missed a gearchange, and I went to overtake him on the right - he chopped across. So I went to the left - and he did the same again. Right again - and the same thing happened. We were this far apart, flat in sixth, and I could have been in the trees! This is sport, you know, not war. If you make a mistake you must expect to lose a place. I think he has to change: he is so good and so quick that he doesn't need to do things like that. He is one of the best - he can win anyway."

Alboreto, you can see, said what he thought - including about Ferrari, which was particularly brave for an Italian - and I always admired him for that. In terms of loving racing for the sake of it, he was very similar to Mario Andretti - indeed Mario remained his hero throughout his life.

He left F1 at the end of 1994, and after that I saw little of him for a few years, but when I bumped into him at the Goodwood Festival of Speed a couple of years ago - he was there to drive the Audi sports car and also an Auto Union - we picked up as easily as if we'd chatted only the weekend before.

Michele, in the right mood, was a magnificent racing driver, and I'll remember him as a really fine man, one of the best I have known in this sport. As Gerhard Berger said last weekend, "So many times I said to him that he should retire, but he loved it too much - he just couldn't leave it. And he died doing what he loved."




Dear Tom,
You're right, the restricting in qualifying to 12 laps per driver was originally introduced 'to keep costs down'. I thought the reason somewhat fatuous then, and still think it so now. In an activity as awash with money as Formula 1, any move 'to keep costs down' has something of a hollow ring, particularly when applied to something like tyres. Most F1 teams, after all, do not pay for tyres, and never have done.

That said, I think there is a case to be made for having a limit on the number of laps a driver may do. Back in the 1970s, there was no such thing - and, at the same time, we had qualifying tyres, which were usually good for one flat-out lap. At Brands Hatch in 1978, trying to beat his Lotus team mate Ronnie Peterson to pole position, Mario Andretti went through 11 sets in the hour, as far as I remember. "I was gettin' through 'em like Carter's Little Liver Pills!" was his comment at the time.

If you don't have a limit on laps, you tend to have a very crowded race track for virtually the whole hour, and while this may be desirable for the spectators, it is anything but for the drivers, who are constantly in search of 'a clear lap'.

The other extreme, of course, was when each driver was restricted to two sets of tyres for qualifying - and we still had qualifying tyres, which effectively meant that a driver had only two shots at a banzai lap. That being so, he frequently had to take absurd chances in traffic, for if it were his last chance of setting a quick time, he couldn't afford to abort it.

It was in just these circumstances that Gilles Villeneuve crashed to his death in qualifying at Zolder in 1982. When he came up on Jochen Mass's March, which was cruising back to the pits, ordinarily he could have backed off, but it was his final qualifying run. Mass saw Villeneuve in his mirrors and moved right to get out of his way, but by then, sadly, Gilles had already committed himself to going the same way.




Dear Dick,
Mario Ilien and Paul Morgan were both originally Cosworth employees, but in the '80s left to form their own company, Ilmor Engineering, aiming primarily at servicing the CART market. In quick time, they were very successful, their engine first 'badged' by Chevrolet, then, when General Motors had pulled out, by Mercedes-Benz.

In the fullness of time, Mercedes decided to go into Formula 1, and it was only logical that Ilmor should be asked to design and manufacture their engines. That is the situation to this day.

I don't doubt that there is some exchange of technology and information between Mercedes and Ilmor, but primarily the Mercedes part of the partnership is cash: the engine may be designed and made in Northampton, but it bears the Three Pointed Star.

Interestingly, I have noticed that, since BMW came back into F1, the company's personnel like to remind people - quietly, but firmly - that their engine is designed and built in Germany. By BMW...




Dear Gary,
I can't lay hands on that particular race report at the moment, I'm afraid, but if memory serves, when I wrote those words, I was referring to the 'revised' line the drivers were required to take through the tunnel.

This situation occurred because of a fire in the Loews Hotel on race morning. As the hotel was situated above - on the next floor, if you will - the tunnel, the large quantities of water and so on used by the fire fighters dribbled their way down into the tunnel, making the regular 'line' through the tunnel wet, and obliging the drivers to take a wider line, which was obviously not ideal.

Given that not one driver had any kind of accident in the tunnel that day, I was most impressed by their skill and ability to improvise - and I guess that's what I was talking about when I wrote that sentence. If it was something completely different from that, I can only apologise!




Dear Nicholas,
First, I'm very grateful for your comments about the column.

When it comes to Porsche and Formula 1, I think the company's abiding problem has always been a - relative - lack of cash. Porsche have traditionally built high-performance sports cars, and originally went racing for the usual reasons: to learn engineering lessons, and to promote their products.

Sports car racing was their thing, in other words. Then, additionally, largely at the suggestion of Jean Behra, they eventually became involved in Formula 2, and when, following a major rules change, Formula 2 effectively became Formula 1 in 1961, they fielded a team in the Grands Prix, with Dan Gurney and Jo Bonnier as drivers. The four-cylinder cars were not strictly competitive on horsepower, but good handling - and the brilliance of Gurney - enabled Porsche to score some good results, including second places at Reims and Monza.

For 1962, a new car - and new flat-eight engine - were produced, and again Gurney and Bonnier were the drivers. At Rouen, Dan won what was to be the only Grand Prix victory for Porsche per se, but it was a fortunate win, and everyone knew it: again, on power the car was no match for the Climax and BRM V8 motors then in service. A more remarkable achievement, perhaps, was Gurney's pole position at the Nurburgring.

The company quit F1 at the end of that year, and the name of Porsche was not seen again in Grand Prix racing until late 1983, when - badged as a TAG - a new 1.5-litre V6 turbo engine appeared in Niki Lauda's McLaren at the Dutch Grand Prix.

This was not because Porsche, in their own right, had decided to come back to F1, but because TAG had commissioned the company to build an F1 engine. Porsche has always willingly accepted outside commissions for engineering, and this was just another job, albeit a very big one.

Designed by Hans Mezger, it was a jewel of an engine. At the time, John Barnard was the Technical Director of McLaren, and his approach - as he designed a wholly new car for 1984 - was revolutionary, in the sense that he conceived the car, and then gave Porsche instructions as to the dimensions and layout of the engine he required them to build. The engine, in other words, had to fit the car; prior to that, in F1 it had traditionally been the other way round.

In the four full seasons it which the engine competed - 1984-87 - it was phenomenally successful, taking Lauda to one World Championship, and Alain Prost to two. Thereafter, McLaren signed an agreement with Honda (whose engines came free, of course), and Porsche forgot about F1 until 1991, when the Arrows team did a deal to use a 3.5-litre version of a V12 engine originally designed for sports car racing. For F1 use, it was overweight and under-powered, and proved a complete disaster. After only four races, Arrows reverted to the venerable Cosworth V8.

You ask why Porsche has not stretched its legs more in F1, and essentially the reason is financial. This is not a huge company, on the level of Mercedes, Renault, Ford, or even Honda, and it simply doesn't have the resources to get into an F1 programme - unless, that is, a company like TAG commissions an engine, and picks up the bills.

As a Porsche devotee, I very much regret that, but facts are facts. Keep in mind that the company even temporarily shelved its sports car racing programme, so as to concentrate resources on its wretched forthcoming people-carrier...