Ask Nigel Roebuck: January 28

Dear Rudy,

Yes, I'm sure independent teams can remain a part of F1 - indeed, I think they must, because otherwise we may one day find ourselves very short of cars. Problem is, sponsorship is much harder to find than it used to be, and while independent teams rarely have significant driver bills to fund, they do have to pay for their engines - and these days that's a terrifying amount of money. Last year there was the suggestion that the FIA had persuaded the manufacturers to make engines available at a much more reasonable price, but so far there is little evidence of that coming to pass.

Therefore, so long as the worldwide economy remains sluggish, life is always going to be difficult for the independent teams. If they were to disappear, would their absence be bad for the sport? Yes, of course it would - not so much because they contribute that much, in terms of being contenders, but because they quite often bring budding stars into F1, and because - let's face it - we don't really want fewer cars than the 20 we have at present.

That said, I don't want independent teams for the sake of it - in the past we've had some which were frankly a disgrace to something calling itself 'Formula 1'. Names like 'Andrea Moda' and 'Life' come to mind. All they did was dilute the overall quality of the product, and get in the way, and I was always very glad to see the back of them.

I rather agree with Bernie Ecclestone on this subject. When I talked to him about it, this is what he said: "A few years ago we'd got a little bit back to the startline specials there used to be in the distant past. These people would get their sponsors to turn up, and they'd break everyone's balls, saying they didn't get seen on TV. The reason they didn't get seen was obvious: they were only on the screen when they got lapped! In fact, they got seen more than most people, because they got lapped five or six times...

"We're the best, right? Formula 1 is the best, and we don't need anything in it that isn't the best. People go on about only 20 cars in the race. OK, so what? If I got someone who hadn't been to races to look at the grid today, they wouldn't know whether there were 16 or 25. The size of the field doesn't bother me at all. It's much better for us to have a smaller, better quality, grid, than have a lot of... We're in the quality business, not quantity.

"What I wanted to get away from was people who shouldn't be in Formula 1 in the first place. Why did people like that come here? Because they thought it was easier than it is. What I don't like is people walking around with begging bowls, and crying as if it is everyone else's fault. People who do that we should never have let into F1 in the first place."



Dear Jose,

On the face of it, I know it looks ridiculous - impossible even - for one bloke in a team to win the world championship, and the other not to score single point, but, yes, it did happen in 1972.

I don't think there's any great mystery about it, however. First of all, Lotus always had a reputation for not being able to run two cars of equal quality - or equal reliability, anyway. During the era of Jim Clark, for example, it was remarkable how Jimmy's car would invariably last the race (and usually win it!), while his team-mate - be it Trevor Taylor, Peter Arundell, Mike Spence or whomever - would not.

So I think there was an element of that in 1972, with Lotus inevitably concentrating on Fittipaldi, and giving rather less attention to Walker. But there was another reason, too, and a perfectly straightforward one: Emerson was a great Grand Prix driver, and Dave was not. He rarely qualified within two seconds of Fittipaldi, and the team was so disappointed with his performances that, at the Canadian Grand Prix, he was stood down, in favour of former Lotus man Reine Wisell. After 1972, he was not seen in F1 again.



Dear Roger,

First of all, let's repeat a remark from your question, because it cannot be over-stressed: 'There has probably never been a more honest and upright man in the history of F1 than Ken Tyrrell'. I'd go along with that any day of the week.

The saga which led to his team's banning from the last three races of 1984, and its exclusion from the entire World Championship that year, was a mighty complex affair, and one which would take days to set out in detail. For our purposes here, I'll try and reduce it to the bare bones.

First of all, let's consider the position of Ken and his team at the beginning of that '84 season. He had two young hotshoes - Stefan Bellof and Martin Brundle - driving for him, but, as was often the case, the team was drastically short of sponsorship. As well as that, it was by now the only team still running normally-aspirated engines (the venerable Cosworth DFV V8), every other having gone over to turbocharged motors, which produced a lot more power - and used a lot more fuel.

At that time there was a fuel restriction (for a race) on turbo engines of 220 litres, but it had been decided that for 1985 this should be cut to 195. Obviously this suited Tyrrell, for if the turbo brigade had less fuel for a race, it stood to reason that boost would need to be reduced - and so, correspondingly, would horsepower.

This the manufacturers of turbocharged engines, and the teams which used them, did not want, and moves were made to scrap the proposed fuel reduction to 195 litres, and keep it at 220. Problem was, for that to go through there had to be unanimous agreement from the teams - and Tyrrell steadfastly remained a lone dissenting voice. This did not go down well with his rival team owners.

At the same time Ken's team was fighting hard to stay vaguely competitive with the turbos in the Grands Prix of '84. Two or three years earlier only a handful of teams had been running turbo engines, while such as Williams, McLaren, Brabham and Lotus remained faithful to the DFV. The turbos had always had a considerable power advantage, but the real fear was that now the teams using them were showing signs of building cars close to the minimum weight limit; from a power-to-weight point of view, therefore, chances were that the Cosworths would be outclassed.

It was easy to be sympathetic with the Cosworth brigade. The turbo teams, such as Ferrari and Renault, with all their cumbersome and weighty turbo clobber, could just about get down to the weight limit, but such as Williams, McLaren and Brabham had no difficulty in undercutting it. Therefore they took it upon themselves to restore some semblance of equality, by matching lower weight to their lower-powered engines.

The problem was The Rules. Rightly or wrongly, all parties had signed the Concorde Agreement, thereby accepting the FISA regulations, one of which was that the minimum weight limit was 580kgs. If the rule had been straightforwardly written, there could have been no argument, but it laid itself open to abuse, for it stipulated that this was to be the weight of the car, minus driver, but including normal lubricants and coolants - which could be topped up after the race, prior to the checking of the car's weight.

That being so, for ingenious minds it was the work of a moment to spot a loophole, and what they came up with was 'water-cooled brakes.' The car, equipped with a huge water tank, would go to the grid with the thing full (perhaps...), spray its contents away in the early laps, run the bulk of the race 30kgs under the limit, then have the tank refilled afterwards so as to be over 580 for the check.

Clever stuff - if clearly against the spirit of a rule to which they had given their consent. After Brabham (Nelson Piquet) and Williams (Keke Rosberg) had finished 1-2 in the '82 Brazilian Grand Prix, they were protested by Renault (for whom Alain Prost had finished third), on the grounds that they had raced underweight. The protest was upheld by an FIA Tribunal, and on the heels of that announcement came another, declaring that in future the cars would be weighed as they were when they came off the race track. No more post-race adding of 'coolants', in other words.

By 1984, as we said, only Tyrrell was at a disadvantage to the turbos, because only they were still running a Cosworth motor. In their search for competitiveness - their quest, as they saw it, to level the playing field - they came up with a variation on the ploy tried by so many of their rivals a couple of years before.

If it were no longer permissible to add coolants after the race, before the cars were weighed, still there obviously remained no means of checking the cars' weights during a race. Thus a loophole remained, and Tyrrell exploited it. The cars had extra-large water tanks, and when they made pit stops late in the race, a couple of gallons of water were added. More to the point, though, as the water was pumped aboard, so also was approximately 60 kilos of lead shot!

Brundle was blissfully unaware of all this. "They didn't tell me anything," he related in Maurice Hamilton's marvellous biography of Ken. "The first I knew was when someone asked me about this lead shot which was all over the Tyrrell pit after I'd made a stop! I hadn't a clue what they were talking about, but I did wonder why it was necessary to take on all that water late in the race - and then have the car suddenly feel like it was towing a caravan as I left the pits!"

In its 'light' state, the nimble little Tyrrell was pretty competitive, particularly at a street circuit like Detroit, where Martin finished a very close second to Nelson Piquet's Brabham-BMW. After the race, though, the first six cars were inspected, with samples taken from the fuel tanks, as well as water from the Tyrrell's extra-large reservoir. This last necessarily included a quantity of lead shot - which Ken claimed was ballast...

A variety of charges were flung at the team by the FISA (then the motor sport arm of the FIA), and although Ken provided good arguments against each, the FIA Court of Appeal rejected all of them, and announced its draconian punishment.

Problem was, Tyrrell no longer had the support of his erstwhile 'friends'. Quite the opposite, in fact. Once he and his team had been banned from the last three races of 1984, and excluded from the entire World Championship that year, he was not - for the time being - a team owner, in the eyes of the FISA. Which meant, of course, that the lone voice preventing unanimity in the vote to retain the 220-litre fuel limit was removed. Surprise, surprise, it went through...

Ken never lost his love of motor racing, but neither, to the end of his life, did he forget - or forgive - the way he was treated by both the governing body and his so-called friends back in 1984. "I was stitched up, wasn't I?" he would say. And so he was. It was a reminder of how ruthless folk in this business can be.



Dear Rand,

From what I know, I'm much in favour of the proposed change, not least because, quite frankly, I've never been much of a fan of F3000, although I can't really explain why: it's always seemed a bit bland to me, somehow.

Therefore, I'm quite happy to see it replaced. That said, though, I'm afraid I can't see any new category taking us 'back to the glory days of Formula 2'. I used to adore F2. I thought the cars were nimble and attractive to look at, and the great thing was that many of them were driven by the leading F1 stars of the day. That being so, if some young newcomer was instantly competitive with them - as, most notably, was the previously unknown Jochen Rindt - you could be fairly sure that here was a superstar of the future.

An F2 race was not a 'supporting race', but a big event in its own right, complete with star drivers. The races tended to be run on circuits which did not host Grands Prix, and thus, through the summer there would a race - F1, F2 or World Championship sports cars - somewhere every weekend. And some of the greatest races I ever saw were for F2 cars.

Those days are gone, though. Over time, everything has been subjugated to F1, and it is rare indeed to see an F1 driver competing in any other form of racing. Their contracts preclude it, anyway, and they don't need the money.

In recent years there has been a lot of criticism of the 'supporting bill' at the Grands Prix, and I'm glad at least that there is to remain another single-seater race, presumably still to be run on Saturday afternoon. One can only hope that the replacement for F3000 will provide more attractive cars and better racing - and that it will not become ruinously expensive.



Dear Sean,

In the press room, we were delighted when JYS announced the formation of Stewart Grand Prix, not least because he is 'old school' when it comes to dealing with journalists. By that, I mean that he may say 'no comment' if asked a particular question, but he has never - in my experience - replied with a lie. He has a fine sense of humour, as we know, and he also tends to treat the press as friends, rather than natural enemies, and that, too, is refreshing.

This is not to say that Jackie doesn't have his enemies in the business. He does - but from what I've seen, they tend to be folk fundamentally bent out of shape with jealousy of a popular man who has achieved a tremendous amount. Also one who owes everything he has to motor racing, knows it, and retains a pure love of the sport. Why else would a bloke in his 60s have worked so tirelessly on behalf of the BRDC, not least in terms of safeguarding the future of the British Grand Prix, when he could simply have sat back and enjoyed his wealth?

When Stewart came into F1 as a team owner, I think he was received very well by the paddock personnel - team owners, drivers, journalists, and so on - but there were some among the powers-that-be who behaved spitefully towards him. This did not sit well with most of us.

As a team owner, I think Jackie did a lot with a little. He never had a budget remotely comparable with the major teams, but in only the fifth race for Stewart Grand Prix, Rubens Barrichello finished second to Schumacher's Ferrari at Monaco (in 1997), and in '99 Johnny Herbert won the European Grand Prix, with Rubens third.

At the end of that year, of course, Stewart Grand Prix metamorphosed into Jaguar Racing, for JYS had sold the team to Ford - who promptly made every mistake in the book, and added a few more. Suddenly, it seemed as though money were no object, and every flight you took was loaded down with PR people in green clothing. In 2000 precisely four points were collected, and Jaguar was ninth in the constructors' championship. The year before Stewart Grand Prix had finished fourth, with 36 points.

I'm not suggesting that the team, in its original guise, would have grown to the level of a Williams or a McLaren, but I've no doubts that many of the mistakes made by Jaguar Racing would not have materialised, if the Stewarts had remained at the helm.