Ask Nigel Roebuck: April 21

Dear Meng,

It's fact that I have several times written about 'Honda then' and 'Honda now'. During the company's initial involvement in F1, from 1964 to '68, I was not in the business, but merely a youthful fan. When Honda returned, though, in 1983 (initially with Spirit), I'd been on the scene for some years, and was in a position to see - at close hand - what Honda were all about.

Although Honda supplied other teams, including Lotus, their main concentration was first on Williams, from 1984 to '87, and then on McLaren, from 1988 to '92, and throughout that period I could hardly have been more impressed. You had the impression of a company in which engineering came first, and marketing a distant second, which is how I - as a racing purist - feel things should be. Honda's engines were never the smallest, or the lightest, but they were invariably the most powerful, and the most bullet-proof, and powered the World Champion, after all, in 1987, '88, '89, '90, '91 and '92.

They got out of F1 for no reason other than they had achieved all they wanted to achieve, and decided on a break. When they returned - I mean, as Honda-Honda, rather than Mugen-Honda - in 2000, with BAR, I was not alone in detecting a change of emphasis. During the period of their absence from F1, there had been major changes among the top management, and now the concentration seemed more to be on marketing than anything else.

Perhaps I'm doing them an injustice, but that's how it came across. And in the years since Honda engines have been neither among the most powerful or the most reliable.

Now, though, there are definite signs of a swing back. It's a fact that BAR have produced their first truly competitive car, and that Jenson Button is driving extremely well, but I'm not sure that tyres have had much to do with the team's successes this year - to this point, indeed, Bridgestone seem to have the upper hand in 2004. As for the Honda engines, there remain some reliability worries - not a few went bang in pre-season testing - but I really would say that the company appears to be back on the right track.

Can Honda make it to the top again? Having seen what they've been capable of over the years, I never doubted they could do it. Whether or not they will remains to be seen.




Dear Tim,

Jacques Villeneuve used to say he reckoned 'traditional' manual gearboxes - with a lever and a foot clutch - would be out of the question now: with the revs they run these days, he said, there would be a chance of a driver breaking his wrist as he flicked the lever about.

I'm no expert in this, of course, but I seem to remember the '80s drivers managing all right, and they - in the turbo era - had quite a lot more power than now. Nothing like the revs, though, I'll admit.

You're absolutely right, however, that the semi-automatic gearboxes of today have taken a lot of pressure off the drivers. As Jean Alesi put it, "Monte Carlo used to be a one-handed race track..." At Monaco, too, your only real hope of passing someone was to pressure him into missing a shift on the pit straight, then snicking by him into Ste Devote. Can't happen now.

I've never been much interested in this 'racing improves the breed' thing, which major manufacturers have pumped out since the beginning of time - for me, racing has no need to justify itself. There's no doubt that road cars have been significantly improved by racing, and in sundry ways, but I don't think there's any need to compare the two.

A lot of today's road cars, for example, have traction control, but this is to protect inadequate drivers in slippery conditions, and - to my mind - has no place in F1, where the drivers are supposedly the best on earth.

Most road cars have ABS brakes, after all, but they're banned in F1, thank God.


I'm sure you're right that manual gearboxes will be around on road cars for a long time to come, but the fact of the matter is that, whatever else, in the old days the combination of a lever, a clutch, and a driver watching a rev-counter, led to an awful lot of blown engines in F1, and in today's world the price of that would be terrifying. Imagine it in the era of 'one engine per weekend'...

Changing gear used to be part of the racing driver's art, and, like you, I'm sorry it has gone. Realistically, though, it ain't ever coming back.




Dear Ray,

To be perfectly honest with you, I haven't a clue, and neither have the colleagues I've asked. I'll see if anyone in the Imola paddock can tell me this weekend.

It's obviously not a 'rule', as such. While nearly all tracks are run clockwise, Imola, as you point out, is anti-clockwise, and so, too, are Interlagos and the new circuit in Shanghai.

Eau Rouge in the other direction...now there's something to think about...