Ask Nigel Roebuck: February 4

Dear Jason,

Irreverent paddock twist on an old joke. If it looks like a Ferrari, and sounds like a Ferrari, chances are it's a Sauber...

The F2004 does indeed look like a red Sauber, which in turn looks like a blue 2003-GA - which in turn means that the F2004 closely resembles the F2003-GA - which, I guess, is the point you're making. Actually, I had similar thoughts a year ago: the F2003-GA did indeed look a stunning machine - you're halfway there when you paint a car scarlet - but I didn't think it looked greatly different from its predecessor.

Still, I can see what you're saying. Messrs Byrne and Brawn have stressed that the new car is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary - but they have also said that the car, when it appears in Melbourne in March, will probably look rather different from how it did in 'launch' form, so I don't doubt there are new bits and pieces on the way. Before the car's launch, for example, Jean Todt suggested we would get a surprise when we saw its nose, but in fact, at launch time, its nose was entirely conventional, so it may be that a very different frontal appearance is on the way.

It's fact that the nose of the Williams FW26, while ugly, is very far from the accepted norm, and thus far the car is impressive every time it tests, so clearly they haven't found a fundamental shortcoming in the nose. Unlike the Ferrari, the FW26 does look very different from its predecessor, and the same is true of McLaren's MP4-19 - very different from the MP4-17B, although not greatly so from the stillborn MP4-18.

If Ferrari have chosen not to follow a revolutionary path with the F2004, it's worth remembering that last year's car won eight of the 16 races, and took both championships. And had it been on Michelins, I suspect there could have been quite a few more victories.

What I'm trying to say is that it's not as though Ferrari was already on the back foot, and merely introduced a light revision of a poor car. The F2003-GA may not, in terms of domination, have been the equal of the F2002 - because Williams and McLaren upped their games, and so, most significantly, did Michelin - but still it was a superb car. True enough, Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello may again suffer in the tyre department this year, but in other ways - not least the new 'one engine per weekend' rule - one would expect Ferrari to excel. A car doesn't have to look different to be quick...



Dear Mike,

My thoughts about Derek Warwick, first, are that I've never met a nicer bloke in 30-odd years of covering this sport. I don't see 'Del Boy' very often these days, unfortunately, but whenever our paths cross we pick up as if we'd had dinner the night before.

Now, Warwick as a driver. In their early days, in F3, Derek looked far more likely to make it than Nigel Mansell, and it has always saddened me that it turned out the way it did. Derek spent his time in F3 locked in combat with Nelson Piquet, just as Martin Brundle later did with Ayrton Senna. Both Brazilians went on to win three World Championships; neither Brit ever won a single Grand Prix. A bit ridiculous, really.

After success in FF1600, F3 and F2, Warwick got into F1 in 1981, with the fledgling Toleman team. That season the car was both uncompetitive and hopelessly unreliable, but the following year Derek was able to show his ability on a couple of occasions, notably at Brands Hatch, where he ran as high as second, and at Zandvoort, where he took the fastest lap. In '83, there was more of the same, and Jean Sage, the Renault team manager, was keen to sign him for 1984.

This duly came to be - and Derek very nearly won his first race for his new team, at Rio. All season long he was very competitive, but too often the car broke, and at Dallas, where he had the race on a plate, he made a mistake on the disintegrating surface - as did half the drivers in the race, including Alain Prost and Niki Lauda.

By midseason in '84, Frank Williams had decided to replace his number two driver, Jacques Laffite, for 1985, and Warwick was his first choice. Ultimately Derek turned the offer down, and if that seems utterly unfathomable now, we need to remember that at the time Williams was hardly the hot ticket in F1. First, the team was in its first season with the turbocharged Honda engine, which had a lot of horsepower, but was about as user-friendly as a chainsaw; second, the FW09 chassis - Williams persisted with an aluminium tub after everyone else had gone to carbon-fibre - was perhaps the worst ever produced by the team.

Renault, by contrast, looked in pretty good shape, so long as something could be done about reliability. Warwick was offered a lot of money to stay, and it seemed like his best option at the time.

Mansell, meantime, had been informed by Lotus that his services would not be required for 1985, when his place, as Elio de Angelis's team-mate, would be taken by the young A. Senna. For a time, Nigel couldn't give himself away, and Frank Williams has admitted that he signed him as a last resort - even though team leader Keke Rosberg initially threatened to leave if Mansell should be brought aboard.

So what happened in 1985? Renault's new car was far less competitive than its predecessor, a complete waste of Warwick's time; by the end of the year, with the Regie in serious financial trouble, it was decided to close down the F1 operation.

Williams, meantime, came good again. Towards the end of the season, Mansell won his first Grand Prix, at Brands Hatch, and followed up with another at Kyalami. Nigel was on his way.

Renault decided to continue supplying engines to Lotus for 1986, and did their best to get Warwick into the second car, alongside Senna. The team management was also in favour, as was the primary sponsor, John Player, but Ayrton said no. It wasn't that he had anything against Derek, he said, but he thought him too good to be a number two, and he seriously doubted Lotus's ability to field two competitive cars. Warwick's presence, in other words, would compromise the effort put into his own car, and he wasn't prepared for that to happen. It was mighty tough on Derek, but probably Ayrton was right in his reasoning - as DW himself came to acknowledge.

Thereafter, Warwick drove half a season for Brabham in '86 (following the death of de Angelis), and also drove for Arrows for several seasons, but unfortunately he was no longer 'fashionable', and he was never to get into a competitive F1 car again.

Perhaps he was too much of a 'normal bloke' to become a superstar - I can think of no F1 driver I have liked more, nor one who changed less over the years. Just a delightful fellow, absolutely genuine, and with a tremendous sense of humour. I've often thought of how great a British sporting hero we would have had if Mansell's successes could have been combined with Warwick's personality.



Dear Guy,

Over the years I've had many an argument in the paddock as a result of something I've written - with such as Frank Williams, Nigel Mansell, Bernie Ecclestone, Max Mosley, Teddy Mayer, Gerhard Berger, Ayrton Senna, and so on. I don't enjoy it when it happens, of course, but occasionally it's inevitable. There are times when you have to remind people that you are not there to do PR work for them, but to write what you see.

Part of the problem, increasingly, is that the secrecy in F1 these days borders on paranoia. If people choose to keep you in the dark, inevitably you have to speculate - and often, when you do that, you're going to be wrong.

All that said, these arguments are usually sorted out, and then forgotten, on both sides. Ken Tyrrell, for example, once lost his rag with me, said his piece, then shook hands, and invited me to have a cuppa while we talked about cricket...

Ridiculous as it seems to me now, the most protracted 'spat' I ever had in the F1 paddock was with Riccardo Patrese. It began at Zandvoort in 1979. Riccardo had crashed at the end of the pit straight in what Jackie Stewart would call 'a fairly important way', and when I later asked him what had happened, he gave me advice not only anatomically impossible, but also, I thought, bloody rude. That being so, I made a similar suggestion to him, and stalked off, siding with those who thought him a brat.

Thus we had one of those ridiculous 'situations', and it endured until Patrese joined Williams years later. "Look," Ann Bradshaw, the team's PR said to me one day, "I love you both, and it's stupid you don't talk to each other." In the motorhome Riccardo and I shook hands, exchanged apologies, and were friends ever after.

"I think," he said, "that maybe I often used to behave like that in those days. Everyone thought I was arrogant, but actually I was shy. I was very young still, and didn't know any of the other drivers very well. And I must admit, I was very intense."

So he was at one time, but as he matured so he came to be more at peace with the world, and I have rarely known a driver who fundamentally adored the job as much as he. You can tell a lot about a driver, I have found, from talking to his mechanics, and among them Patrese was always adored, perhaps because he never took them for granted. F1 drivers are invariably tardy when it comes to reaching for their wallets, but in Adelaide Riccardo would always treat the entire team to a memorable end-of-season dinner. Folk remember these things.

It was a sign of the team's affection for him that Patrese was invited to have a run in the Williams-Renault FW18 late in 1996. Riccardo, three years after his retirement, set a time which would have qualified him in the first couple of rows at the British Grand Prix.

I wrote about it at the time, and later a letter of thanks came chattering over my fax. Unlike some, Patrese will always be one of those retired drivers you hope you'll run into in the paddock at Monza or wherever. Absurd now to think how long we avoided each other.



Dear Lex,

When you have a driver on the level of those you mention, yes, of course it has to be worth having him in your team, even if - as sometimes happens - there is another, less agreeable, side to the coin.

Pure driving ability is part of it, of course. Years ago I remember one of the Lotus mechanics talking to me about Senna. "If there's the tiniest improvement in the car," he said, "immediately it's reflected in the lap time. When you've got a bloke like that, it does wonders for the motivation of everyone in the team."

Let's consider the driving ability a given, however; let's assume that all at the very top level have that degree of talent and commitment. Next, you have to consider the work ethic, and if one or two who worked with Piquet might leave him out of this particular equation, certainly there's no doubt that the likes of Stewart, Senna and Schumacher achieve huge success because they work harder at it than their fellows.

Then there's the question of charisma - the presence of a personality so strong that the mechanics, and everyone else in the team, want to work for him. This quality Nelson had in spades during his years at Brabham, but, curiously, they never felt the same about him at Williams or Lotus or Benetton.

Perhaps it's virtually inevitable that, when a genuine superstar has left a team, its fortunes will take a tumble. Ross Brawn has admitted, for example, that when the time comes he knows he will find it very hard to work with another driver after Michael.

I don't think there's any mystery as to why a team's fortunes sometimes go into free fall after a Stewart/Senna/Schumacher leaves. However much the team's personnel might fight against it, inevitably there's a feeling of deflation: you had absolutely the best driver on earth, and now you don't any more. Some of the urgency has gone, and some of the impetus.

Trick is, get the next true superstar in to replace him. Through the '80s, for example, Alain Prost was very much the king of the hill, and the McLaren team simply revolved around him. Eventually, Alain left to go to Ferrari for 1990, but by then his absence was barely noticed, in terms of the team's performance, because Ayrton Senna was well settled in as the new king of the hill, as the inspirational figure at McLaren.

There can of course be a down side to all this. Gerhard Berger, who had the task of replacing Prost, as Senna's McLaren team-mate, became very close friends with Ayrton, but he was not blind to a situation within the team he didn't think altogether healthy.

"Let me say, McLaren were very nice to me," said Gerhard, "and I would say that Ron Dennis and I were friends, and still are. He didn't play too many games, and he was always straight with me. But he never realised that his team was built completely around Senna.

"That was the strange thing: Ron has quite a strong character, you know, but Ayrton always told him what to do. I remember occasions when he said things to him that I just couldn't believe, but Ron accepted anything from Ayrton. If you ask him, I'm sure he will say no, it's not true, and maybe he believes it. But, from the outside, there was no doubt about it.

"In 1992 I was asked to go back to Ferrari, and Ron wanted me to stay at McLaren. I told him I would stay only if Senna was leaving, that otherwise there was no way. While he was there, it would always be his team. This is not a criticism of Ayrton, OK? Undoubtedly he was the best driver, but still I wondered why Ron, as team chief, didn't lean on him sometimes. I wasn't upset about it, but it was a difficult situation, and it would have been the same for any driver there.

"Think about it: Prost was Senna's greatest rival, which was why there was always the big casino between them, and why Alain left. He had won World Championships with McLaren; it was his team when Ayrton arrived, but if he couldn't live with it, how was I going to do it? I never thought about it before I went there. I was stupid! I'm not often naive, but I was then."

Similarly, to suggest that Schumacher controls everything at Ferrari is not exactly a new thought. On the other hand, if you consider how much things have changed there since Michael arrived, you'd have to conclude that, from the management's point of view, that's been a small price to pay.



Dear Tyler,

Gilles didn't often talk about his snowmobiling days, but I did ask him about them during the first major interview we did, at Zolder in 1978.

"I started racing them when I was 13, I guess, and did pretty well. By 1973 I'd won the Canadian Championship for the Skiroule company. In addition to my retainer, I won about $13,000 that year, so, as well as being able to pay back what I owed everybody, I was able to buy a Formula Ford car, and that was how I was able to start racing."

Later in the interview, when we were talking about accidents and safety, some of his comments rather shook me: "I don't have any fear of a crash. No fear of that. Of course, if it's a top gear corner, with a barrier right there, I don't want to crash - I'm not crazy! But if it's near the end of qualifying, and you're trying for pole position maybe, then I guess you can...squeeze the fear. I know I can hurt the car, and that I don't want to do. But I never think I can hurt myself."

Villeneuve was sure that this attitude stemmed from his snowmobiling days. "Every winter you would reckon to three of four big spills, you know, and that meant being thrown on to ice at around 100mph. But I never hurt myself on a snowmobile, so..."