Ask Nigel Roebuck: March 24

Your questions answered

Ask Nigel: March 3

Our Grand Prix Editor Nigel Roebuck answers your questions every week, so if you want his opinion on any motorsport matter drop us an e-mail here at Autosport.com and we'll forward on a selection to him. Nigel won't be able to answer all your questions, but we'll publish his answers here every week. Send your questions to AskNigel@haynet.com.



Dear Grayson,

Alonso's start in Melbourne was indeed something to behold - but what about his start in Sepang last Sunday? Talk about video games... All right, he was leaving from the back row of the grid, and weaving his way between the minnows, but it was as if everyone else had a handbrake they'd forgotten to release. It was the same at Suzuka in 1998, I remember, when Michael Schumacher had to start from the back (having stalled before the parade ap): the Ferrari went through the grid at a completely different sort of speed from those it was passing.

If you're asking me about the most remarkable standing start I've ever seen, though, I'd have to go for Gilles Villeneuve at the Osterreichring in 1979. He had qualified his Ferrari T4 fifth, with Jean-Pierre Jabouille's turbocharged Renault and Niki Lauda's Brabham-Alfa ahead of him on row two, and Rene Arnoux's Renault and Alan Jones's Williams on the front row.

The start-finish area at the glorious Osterreichring was anything but wide [with the substantial concrete pit wall to the right], so usually there wasn't too much overtaking in the first few seconds - there simply wasn't the room for it, unless you were extremely brave, that was. And Gilles, as we know, was that, and more.

Starts back then were completely manual, of course, with conventional gear lever and clutch. It was a matter of getting the revs absolutely right, and this Villeneuve did to perfection. When the green lights [the signal to start the race in those days] came on, he simply rocketed away, somehow managing to pass not only Jabouille's Renault, but Arnoux's front row car, as well! And he did it by squeezing the T4 between the Renaults and the pit wall. It was close, believe me.

Ultimately futile, too, because the Ferrari was no match for the
Renaults and Williams at this circuit. Gilles knew that, but, being the sort of man he was, simply had to try and lead, even if only briefly. By lap four Jones had passed him, and ultimately both Renaults, too, but Villeneuve never relaxed his pace, and when Jabouille retired, and Arnoux had to dash in for a late splash-and-dash, he was there to pick up second place behind Jones, and there he finished.

Two things come back to me from that day. Afterwards Alan Jones talked about the start: "I was half-expecting a yellow car [Renault] to come through, but no way a red one! I was really taken aback, and thought, 'Where the hell did he come from? I thought he must have jumped the start, but apparently he didn't."

Villeneuve was, I would say, the most consistently fast starter I have ever seen - but I'm only talking of the days when a driver was entirely responsible for his own getaway, and did not have sundry systems to do his work for him. I once asked about his starting technique, and he said this: "Simple. I put it into first gear, get the revs up to the red line, then slip my foot sideways off the clutch..."

I was in the old press stand opposite the pits at the Osterreichring that day, sitting with Denis Jenkinson. There wasn't much 'Jenks' hadn't seen, and it took a lot to impress him. He was, though, as fervent a fan of Gilles as I was, and as the Ferrari hurtled away up the hill, in the lead, he was ecstatic. "That," he murmured, "is a racing driver..."




Dear Jack,

I think there's no doubt at all that the Senna/Prost McLaren team was one of the greatest of all time - how could it be other, when they were the two best drivers on earth at the time? Exactly the same was true, though, of the Mercedes team in 1955: how do you improve upon a pairing of Juan Manuel and Stirling?

Let's put both those in among our five best teams in F1 history, so now we're looking for three more. You'd have to say that Fangio and Giuseppe Farina, at Alfa Romeo in 1950 and '51, when they won a World Championship apiece, were a pretty handy combination, and the same was true of Jimmy Clark and Graham Hill, at Lotus in 1967, although neither won the title that year. The Brabham teams of Jack himself and Dan Gurney [1963-'65] and Brabham and Jochen Rindt [in '68] weren't too dusty, either, and there's definitely a case to be made for the 1978 Lotus team of Mario Andretti and Ronnie Peterson - as also there is for the McLaren pairing [in 1984 and '85] of Prost and Niki Lauda.

If you want to go further back, to the pre-war days, before 'Formula 1' had been thought of, and it was known simply as 'Grand Prix racing', it would be hard to imagine a stronger pairing than Rudolf Caracciola and Hermann Lang at Mercedes. As with Alfa in the immediate post-war years, the pre-war German teams operated larger than two-car teams, but any with Caracciola and Lang on board had no real need of any more drivers.

Sorry, Jack, I think I've come up with rather more than the five you requested. Fangio/Moss and Senna/Prost are fixtures - the other choices I'll leave to you...



Dear Iain,

I have to confess I'm not a fan of 'tyre wars', and never have been. For one thing, they lead to a tremendous escalation in cornering speeds, and that in turn tends to provoke rule changes which are, one, expensive for the teams, and two, usually pretty ineffective.

For another thing, tyre wars tend to blur the edges of motor racing - it's much more difficult to evaluate a driver's or team's performance on given day when you're not precisely sure how much they were helped/hampered by their tyres.

Sometimes it's pretty clear, of course. I've never forgotten the 1971 Dutch Grand Prix, which was run in the rain, and fought out between two Firestone-shod cars, the Ferrari of Jacky Ickx (which eventually won) and the BRM of Pedro Rodriguez. Both were supreme wet-weather drivers, but so also, God knows, was Jackie Stewart, and that day JYS - whose Tyrrell was on Goodyear tyres - was reduced to fighting with such as local man Gijs van Lennep in a Surtees. Stewart eventually finished 11th, five laps behind Ickx, for no other reason than that the Goodyear 'wets' were truly appalling at that time.

The thing is, if you have a tyre war, and don't happen to be on the right brand at the right time, you can literally be reduced to the level of an also-ran. For fiscal reasons, Bernie Ecclestone chose to contract his Brabham team to Pirelli in the mid-eighties, and the result was that Nelson Piquet, a three-time World Champion, was often a relative backmarker. So disgusted was he by Pirelli's wets at the Portuguese Grand Prix of 1985 that at one point, during a routine pit stop, he alighted from the car, and proceeded to change into clean, dry, overalls!

There were times last year, notably at the Hungaroring, when Michael Schumacher simply didn't figure at all, simply because at that time Michelin had a decided advantage, and Michael's Ferrari was on Bridgestones. Turn that around, and you have the recent Australian Grand Prix, in which conditions were unexpectedly cool, and very much to the taste of the Bridgestones. Given that every top team bar Ferrari now runs on Michelins, the race turned into a complete rout, with Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello in a race on their own.

Of course you can't prevent tyre companies wanting to compete in F1, and of course competition is always healthy. But when you have every car in the race on the same tyres - or at least the same make - you have a baseline, a point of reference, which disappears as soon as you have X on one make, and Y on another. On occasions in the past, the FIA has dabbled with the idea of a 'spec tyre', and I confess I wouldn't care to see that, because I dislike restrictive practices of all kinds. But I have to say I think it would make for better racing...



Dear Andrew,

Difficult question to answer. I was terribly disappointed to learn that Fernandez and, particularly, Rahal were deserting the Champ Car World World Series [nee CART] for the IRL; both have been stalwarts of CART down the years - indeed, it's not that long since Bobby was running it!

Let me say right away that I would hate to see OWRS give up, difficult as it looks for them to continue at the moment. As much as anything, this is because I cannot get excited about the IRL - I find the cars unattractive, compared with traditional Champ Cars, and the ovals-only format monotonous. Juan Montoya, who has driven both [and won in both], compares the difference between the two with the difference between F1 and F3000.

You talk about 'allowing US single-seater racing to have one top class' - but, realistically, is this the case any more? For me, 'Indycar racing' was dealt a mortal blow in 1995, when it split itself in two, and I truly doubt we will ever see it in all its glory again. The OWRS is mighty short of cars, yes, but how many were there at the IRL season-opener at Homestead? Just 19 - and on an oval that really doesn't look many.

The great beneficiary of this single-seater civil war has been NASCAR, of course. In racing terms, it may be a shadow of what it was, particularly on the 'restrictor plate' tracks (remember the days of the slingshot finishes at Daytona?), but in commercial terms it has positively ballooned in recent times, not least because, instead of tearing itself apart, it has concentrated on consolidation, with everyone in it pulling the same way.

I like NASCAR, but confess to being a touch baffled by its popularity with the fans these days. Never could understand how a CART race at, say, Michigan [which produced some of the most heart-stopping racing you could ever imagine], played to a crowd tiny by comparison with a NASCAR race there. Then again, to me a real racing car doesn't have a roof - there is nothing like a single-seater.

Time was when I would count a season without seeing an 'Indycar race' something of a loss, but sadly I can't say I feel that very much any more. Ten years ago, CART was booming, an immensely strong series, providing the best racing to be found anywhere. It's beyond belief what has happened to it in the last few years - and perhaps the saddest thing is that many who made their names and fortunes in CART have now deserted it, and, worse, now badmouth it. All I can say is that I hope fervently that OWRS find a way to come through this crisis, and build up their series again.