Ask Nigel Roebuck: June 2

Dear Douglas,

Difficult one to answer, this, because one doesn't know quite what situation Ralf was in, technically, at the time of the controversy. Certainly the Williams-BMW lost gears through the race, and this could have accounted for his going slowly into the tunnel, and then suddenly accelerating with some zest.

It was this that caught out Alonso. Having been seriously delayed by Schumacher Jr for several corners, Fernando believed that at last he was being allowed by, and definitely did not expect to be out 'on the marbles' so late in the corner, by which he was travelling extremely quickly.

It's a fact, of course, that there is only one line through the tunnel, and that there is less grip off the line there than on any other corner in F1. For one thing, no one normally ventures out there, so no rubber goes down; for another, there is no heat in the track at the point, because the sun obviously can't get through.

The point is, Alonso did not expect to be 'off line' for very long. It was a simple matter of getting by Ralf, and then taking the normal line - he wasn't expecting the Williams to be alongside him for as long as it was. Given that Ralf was trailing round, off the pace, and given that he was not racing for position, but being lapped, my feeling is that he should have let Fernando comfortably by before accelerating hard.

If it was lack of consideration for another driver - lack of driving manners, in other words - that caused Ralf to do what he did, I think he squarely deserves blame for what happened. And if it occurred because of his car's technical shortcomings, then there's a case to be made for suggesting perhaps he should not have been on the race track.



Dear Michele,

After so many years of working in F1, I thought I'd heard every Machiavellian conspiracy theory on the market, but yours would do justice to some of my less stable Italian colleagues!

Seriously, though... it's true, as you say, that there was some outcry about Sato's engine failure, and I guess this was because it had been coming a while - even on the grid the engine was smoking, and it was obvious from the beginning of the race that it was only a matter of time before it let go.

Afterwards there was criticism of the Honda engineers, who presumably knew from the telemetry that Taku's engine was about to expire. When it did, of course, it was like a bomb going off, and the resulting smoke was so impenetrable that the drivers were literally heading into nothing. Sato did well to pull over immediately, and keep out of the way as much as possible, but in the circumstances it's actually pretty remarkable that only one accident - Fisichella going over the top of Coulthard - resulted.

When a driver's race has started as spectacularly as Sato's, it's perhaps not surprising that members of his team were unwilling to call him in, but I think Flavio Briatore made a good point at the Nurburgring: "Just imagine," he said, "what might have happened if Sato's engine had blown in the tunnel..."



Dear John,

Sadly, I only ever managed to get to the Indianapolis 500 on four occasions - more often than not it tended to clash with a Grand Prix, and since the CART/IRL split, at the end of 1995, I haven't had the same interest in the race. I still watch it on TV, but for me, as for many other people, the great days of the Indy 500 are gone now.

The greatest race I ever saw at the Brickyard was won by the driver who most impressed me there: Rick Mears. Many longtime followers of the 500 maintain that the greatest Speedway driver was Parnelli Jones, and Jackie Stewart concurs: "Parnelli was incredible round there - like silk."

Unfortunately, I never went to the race in that era, the '60s, but I think there's a very good case to be made for Mears as the greatest oval driver of the '80s and early '90s - again, he was 'like silk'. His late-race battle with Michael Andretti in the '91 Indy 500, when Michael passed him on the outside of turn one, and he did the same back on the very next lap, was about as exciting as anything I have ever seen at a race track.

In 1981 Mears tested an F1 Brabham at Riverside, and stunned everyone by immediately matching the pace of the car's regular driver, Nelson Piquet. To this day, Herbie Blash, who was present at the test, decribes Rick as, "The great lost World Champion". He never did come to F1, because he couldn't grasp the concept of having to find money to pay for a drive. And, given that he was already an established superstar, quite right, too.

Now the driver I'd most like to have seen at the Speedway... in 1993 Ayrton Senna tested a Penske Indy car, and loved it: "It's such a pleasure to drive a 'human's' car again - none of the stupid electronic stuff on it..." I think Senna would have been sensationally quick at Indianapolis - and I suspect that so, too, would have been Alain Prost, perhaps the smoothest driver I ever saw: his style would have suited Indy to a tee.