Ask Nigel Roebuck: March 19

Dear Edward,

First of all, it's worth making the point that Ferrari and McLaren had no choice about running revamped versions of their 2002 cars in Melbourne: their 2003 cars were not ready to race - indeed, it was never their intention to have them so.

In some ways, this makes a lot of sense. If you had a fundamentally great car the previous season, there is much to be said for running an updated version of it in the opening races, particularly as the season now begins with three long-haul events, in Australia, Malaysia and Brazil, all of them a long way from base.

'New car' problems invariably crop up in these races, so if you have something you know to be both quick and reliable, chances are you're going to start the European season (with your new car), already with a great many points in the bag.

You're right that BAR, Jaguar and Renault showed (running their new cars) greater competitiveness than before, but let's keep a sense of proportion here: none was a threat to Ferrari or McLaren, and neither were they expected to be. The only new car which got near Ferrari and McLaren was, as expected, the latest Williams-BMW FW25, driven by Juan Montoya.

Although JPM finished second in Australia, Williams did not leave in a desperately optimistic frame of mind, for Montoya had to drive out of his skin to keep up with the McLarens and Schumacher's Ferrari - and this was the team's new car. Both McLaren and Ferrari expect their latest models, due to debut at Imola, to be substantially quicker than what we saw in Oz...

However, I must say I don't quite take your point about McLaren's 'perhaps stealing a march on the World Champions if they'd been a little bit braver' - after all, David Coulthard won the race, and Kimi Raikkonen finished third! Difficult to improve substantially on that, I'd have thought. True, they'd qualified poorly, thanks to running with more fuel than most of their rivals, but once the race got properly underway, Kimi and DC were right there. Had the new McLaren-Mercedes been ready, and racing, it might well have been quicker than the 'interim' car - but, given that everything is totally new, including the engine, its chances of making the finish were surely far less. No, I thought McLaren made the right call in Australia.




Dear Jack,

In one respect, at least, I agree with you about the new qualifying rules: I like the fact that, running one at a time, everyone is guaranteed a clear lap, and also the each driver gets only one shot at setting a qualifying time. The new format also means that something is going on the whole time, that we've lost that dead first 20 minutes of the session, when hardly anyone ventured out.

That said, I'm less at ease with the rule precluding the adding of fuel to the car between the end of qualifying and the race. True, it can create an untypical grid - less competitive cars can get themselves towards the front by means of running lighter, with less fuel - but it also inevitably diminishes the significance of the qualifying session itself, for the cars run with differing fuel loads, and therefore differing weights. From their times, you can make an educated guess that so-and-so (quicker than you'd expect) is running little fuel, while a more highly touted rival (slower than you'd have thought) is running a lot. But you don't know, that's the point. All you do know is that no-one is running in traditional, balls out, qualifying spec, with a minimal fuel load.

I think your suggestion of banning refuelling is a very good one, but then I would - I've been squarely against it ever since its reintroduction, for I think it adds nothing to Formula 1, as a spectacle, or anything else. As far as I'm concerned, it was reintroduced solely as an artificial means of - perhaps - creating changes in the order, attempting to take everyone's mind off the fact that changes in order are almost never achieved on the track these days.

What refuelling has done, in my opinion, is make the format of a Grand Prix crude and unsophisticated, in the sense that a race is now a series of sprints between pit stops. Before refuelling, a driver had to work at a set-up for his car that worked well on a full tank of fuel - 200 miles' worth - and on a virtually empty one, but now such subtleties are unnecessary. He also had to take care of his tyres in the early part of the race, and so on.

A while ago I had a long talk with Alain Prost about possible changes to F1, and this is some of what he said.

"I really think that if we want to do something important, we need to ban refuelling. At the moment the cars are always light, always on a fresh set of tyres, and we need to come back to something like we had 12 or 15 years ago - when I think the drivers were even more important than now.

"F1 has a big problem with overtaking, yes, but the first thing we have to do is understand why - and why overtaking was easier in the past. For me, the big problem is that you have less and less mechanical grip; I think it would have been better to have wide slick tyres, to keep the mechanical grip high, and reduce the downforce.

"Another bad thing, in my opinion, is the semi-automatic gearbox. Before we had them, it was impossible in the course of a race not to miss at least one or two shifts. That was how I got by Berger one year in Monte Carlo - it was the only way to overtake there. He missed a shift on the pit straight, and I was able to pass. Can't happen now.

"For me, though, the main problem is the refuelling. If you look at the technical changes they have made, plus refuelling, what do you have? First, a gearbox that's always in good condition, because you can't miss a shift; second, your brakes are always good, because the car is always light (carrying relatively little fuel); third, your tyres are always good, because they're changed so often. So the performance of the car stays very constant throughout a race - and therefore you can't overtake...

"Nowadays the cars run all the time with relatively little fuel in them, but in the past, when you started with 200 kilos of fuel, you had to be very careful with the brakes and the tyres. At some point in the race the performance of the cars changed significantly - but the thing was, they never deteriorated equally, and that depended on how you had driven the first part of the race.

"At the moment, there's no need to think - it's just flat out between the stops. So unless something goes wrong in the pits, the order you have after five laps will be the order at the end of the race.

"For me, the dream would be to have at least two tyre companies involved. You start the race with a full fuel load, and you have no refuelling. You have a minimum of two tyre compound choices, and use whatever you like during a race. You start with hard tyres, and maybe your rival starts with soft, and another one with an intermediate compound.

"So, OK, the guy who starts on soft tyres can stop after 20 laps, then put on hard tyres for the rest of the race - and you can also have the opposite. That way you always have uncertainty. You would still have the pit stops that TV likes so much - and when only tyres are involved, you're talking about maybe four seconds, which is even more impressive to see.

"What do you have now in pit stops? It's the fuel that governs the length of the stop, but people watching TV don't understand why this stop took six seconds, and that one 11 seconds - they don't realise that on the first stop 40 kilos of fuel went in, and on the second it was 80. Yes, pit stops are important for the show, I understand that, but you don't need refuelling to have pit stops; you would always have them, anyway, because of tyres.

"With the rules as they were," Alain concluded, "you had some surprises: at the moment we don't have any surprises, and that's the biggest problem, isn't it?" It sounded like common sense to me.

I don't see anything terribly exciting about watching a bloke shove a nozzle into the side of a car, I'm afraid. To me, pit stops were far more crucial when it was a matter of tyres only; nowadays the tyre guys are finished long before the fuel has gone.

There's another thing, too. In this, an era otherwise obsessed with safety in F1, refuelling seems to me a wholly unnecessary danger - and the guys who take most of the risk are not multi-millionaire superstars, but mechanics. So far, we've been very lucky in F1, having only had a couple of fires (in which no one was seriously hurt), but I've never forgotten a pit fire I witnessed at the Indy 500 in 1981, when Rick Mears's Penske went up during a pit stop, and several of his mechanics leaped around like crazed marionettes, their clothing on fire. On that occasion, serious burns were incurred, and I wish never to see anything like it happen again, in F1 or anywhere else.

In short, like a great many others in the paddock, I would rejoice if refuelling were banned tomorrow. I'd like to see the cars run qualifying as they always did, with very little fuel on board, then go to the grid the following day with enough gas for the whole 200 miles.

Ah, but will it ever happen? Not a chance!



Dear Susan,

There are those who suggest that Williams have never built a great car since Adrian Newey made the switch to McLaren, and it is a fact that the last Williams to win the World Championship - Jacques Villeneuve's Renault-powered FW19 in 1997 - was the last in which Newey had a hand.

Personally, although Adrian is undoubtedly a genius, I don't think it's quite as straightforward as that. For one thing, immediately after his departure the team had two seasons with 'customer' Supertec (nee Renault) engines, which, while strong and reliable, necessarily lagged in the power department, because there was no longer the constant R&D that had been in place while Renault was in F1 as a committed manufacturer.

So, one, there was a shortage of power for a couple of years. Add in that Villeneuve, after a middling time of it in 1998, opted to depart for BAR, and that Heinz-Harald Frentzen, who had never lived up to the team's expectations of him, left at the same time, his contract not renewed.

For '99, therefore, Frank needed two new drivers, and that, given the obvious desirability of at least some continuity, is not an ideal situation. Much impressed by Zanardi's performances in CART, he and Patrick Head decided to take the chance of bringing Alex back to F1, and, for whatever reason, it did not work at all - there was little sign of the speed and flair he had shown in three years with Ganassi Racing, and his contract was terminated early, after just one season.

Once Zanardi had been signed, FW's initial inclination had been to partner him with Juan Montoya, who had hugely impressed the team as test driver through 1998. On further consideration, however, it was decided that Zanardi, although he had been a Grand Prix driver some years previously, was now effectively coming to it as a rookie again, and it would not be ideal to have, as his team mate, another absolute rookie, in the shape of Montoya.

Therefore, although it was always the plan to run him in F1 eventually, Juan was farmed off to Ganassi for a couple of years in CART, and Ralf Schumacher was signed to partner Zanardi. Ralf, as we know, lost no time in making an impression.

For 2000, of course, we had the arrival of the BMW engine programme, but Williams, having terminated Zanardi's contract late in the day, now had to find a new team mate for Schumacher. Anyone of reputation and worth was already committed elsewhere, so it came to a straight choice between two more rookies: Jenson Button and Bruno Junqueira. In testing, there was little between them, but Jenson got the nod, and partnered Ralf throughout the year, occasionally showing a remarkable turn of speed.

From the start, though, there was no question of his remaining in the team for a second year. By now, the Williams option on Montoya was nearing its end, and Frank knew that if he didn't sign Juan to the F1 team for 2001, chances were he was going to lose him for ever. That was not to be countenanced, so JPM came in with Ralf, and Jenson headed off to Benetton.

It's been Schumacher and Montoya ever since, so now there is driver stability at Williams, and, since the beginning of the 2001 season, there has also been a horsepower advantage - not too many would dispute the fact that BMW's V10s produce at least as much grunt as any of their rivals', and quite a lot more than most.

At the same time as this power advantage manifested itself, however, Williams made the switch from Bridgestone to Michelin, and I don't think there's any doubt that - thus far, anyway - the team has lost considerably more than it has gained from this change.

As well as that, in terms of car design, and so on, there has been a tendency to be too conservative, as Patrick Head has readily admitted. Geoff Willis, the team's chief aerodynamicist, left for BAR in 2002, after working on the team's disappointing FW24, and Gavin Fisher, the team's chief designer, took a much more radical approach when drawing up the latest FW25. Thus far, though, the car has fallen disappointingly short of expectations, and one must hope that development, plus new bits and pieces through the season, transform it into something worthy of the talents of Schumacher and, particularly, Montoya.

As things stand, it's difficult to see Williams-BMW fighting Ferrari and McLaren for the championship titles this year, but I think it's a little early to be writing them off, particularly in light of Michelin improvements over the winter, and the continuing supremacy of the BMW engine.

Rumours abound that eventually Ralf S. will leave Williams for Toyota, and there have long been similar suggestions that JPM is the man Ferrari want as team leader when Michael S. finally calls it a day, perhaps at the end of 2004. Unless Williams can soon come up with a car enabling Montoya to take a real tilt at the World Championship, yes, I agree with you, it's going to be mighty difficult for them to hold on to him...



Dear Peter,

Compared with many of his colleagues, yes, Juan Montoya is still a little impetuous on occasions - but if this sometimes leads to mistakes, so also it enables him to pull off overtaking manoeuvres that others wouldn't so much as contemplate. There is real fire in the belly of JPM, real passion for racing, which is why he has so many fans across the world. It was exactly the same with such as Ronnie Peterson and Gilles Villeneuve, wasn't it?

It's true enough that he spun victory away in Melbourne, but I think it's worth making a few points here. First, I don't think the Williams FW25 - in current guise, anyway - is a particularly easy car to drive, and lacks the grip of, say, McLaren's interim MP4-17D. Second, as Patrick Head pointed out, that mistake - costly as it was - was the first one Montoya had made all weekend. Third, where was Ralf? Was he in the race at all...?

Certainly, I think there are things that Juan Pablo has still to learn, and I doubt that he would claim otherwise, but I think that, in terms of raw talent, he's about as good as anyone I have ever seen. If you're pushing a car along faster than it cares to go, which is what he has invariably had to do, mistakes are occasionally inevitable.

Last year I talked to David Coulthard about Montoya, and this is what he said: "Juan Pablo is still a bit inconsistent at times, a bit wobbly - but that's because he's pushing, and if you're pushing to the point that you get a bit messy, it's because you're really trying."

Would Michael Schumacher make similar mistakes in a difficult car? History suggests that he would - indeed, quite often he doesn't need a difficult car! Michael, for all his genius, actually makes quite a lot of mistakes, and for the same reason as Juan: he runs at the limit all the time...



Dear Rudy,

This is terribly sad news about the cancellation of the CART race at Elkhart Lake, although American colleagues tell me they believe all is not yet completely lost. Fingers crossed.

Elkhart Lake is indeed one of the truly great circuits of the world - Montoya, for example, has told me that he has never driven on a track he liked more - and for that reason, yes, its loss is very comparable with the loss of Spa to F1.

I understand it's not impossible - at some stage, anyway - for Tony George to do a deal to take the IRL there, and I agree it would be good to see the likes of Franchitti and de Ferran - who plainly hate being in an 'oval only' championship - showing off their road racing talents again.

But wouldn't it be so much better to see them doing it in CART cars...?