Ask Nigel Roebuck: October 16

Send your questions to AskNigel@haynet.com.


Dear Ian,

No, I'm afraid I don't share your opinion on this - as I have written in this week's Fifth Column. Believe me, no one would like see more unpredictability in F1 races than I, but I have no wish to see it achieved by artificial means. You're right to point that the 'weight handicap' idea worked reasonably well in touring car racing - but that was touring car racing, not Formula 1!

All right, I'll concede that I've never made any secret of my lack of interest in touring cars, particularly of the kind found these days in the BTCC, but that doesn't come into my thinking here. The whole point is, there is supposed to be a kind of purity about F1 (don't laugh!), in the sense that it is the perceived pinnacle of the sport. And I find repellent the idea that a team should be penalised for doing what it's supposed to be doing: producing the fastest car.

Everyone has been saying that the current decline in the popularity of F1 is due to the superiority of one team, Ferrari, but that is way too simplistic. In 2002, Ferrari is the only team to have done the job properly; Williams and McLaren have done a poor job, and the rest of them - with due allowance for budget considerations - a terrible one!

In my view, it is not Ferrari's superiority which has been the problem as much as the way that superiority has been imposed. There has, for example, been a lot of ballyhoo about the fact that they have won 15 of the 17 races this year. Well, in 1988, McLaren-Honda won 15 out of 16, and only lost the other because a backmarker tripped up Ayrton Senna in the closing laps at Monza.

McLaren's domination was absolute that year. They had the best car, the best engine - and, in Senna and Alain Prost, the two best drivers on earth. Every fortnight I flew off somewhere, positively knowing before I left that a McLaren-Honda was going to win - BUT I did not which one, and there lies the difference.

Ron Dennis is a racer, that's the point, with a deep love of Grand Prix racing, and an awareness of his, and his team's, reponsibility to it. Although, on more than one occasion, Senna's muscular tactics came close to taking both McLarens out at the beginning of a race, Ron never once suggested any question of team orders: he trusted his drivers to race, and he wanted them to do so. By the end of that year, Senna had eight wins, and Prost seven.

Frank Williams is exactly the same, as we can plainly see from the Piquet-Mansell era of 1986/87: again the best car and engine, and two top drivers left to get on with it. You may argue that this policy, which inevitably means the drivers 'taking points from each other', cost the team the drivers' championship in '86 - by sheer driving brilliance, Prost sneaked his McLaren through to the title - but still it didn't change Frank's fundamental belief that his drivers should be allowed to race!

Therefore, if anyone stands condemned for the boredom induced by Ferrari domination this year, to my mind it is Jean Todt, who has reduced the business of Grand Prix racing to a set of accounts, to be presented to the board at the end of the year. That board, I have no doubt, is delighted, by the figures, and rightly so, but the damage to racing - beginning with that utter fiasco in Austria - has been incalculable.

All that said, I agree with Ron that the problem essentially lies with his own team, McLaren, and Williams, for not doing a good enough job. These are the only two capable of challenging Ferrari, and in 2002 they have signally failed to do so. Both Dennis and Williams, though, are implacably opposed to the idea that the playing field should be artificially levelled by the imposition of 'weight handicapping', and I entirely agree with them.

Imagine how it would be. Any engineering director would be able to tell you how much time five, 10, 20, 50 kilos would cost over a lap of a given circuit, and we'd be for ever writing that, 'Of course, in normal circumstances, so-and-so would have won by half a minute, instead of finishing fourth', etc, etc. It really doesn't bear thinking about.

Some team owners are in favour of the idea, of course, because they know they don't otherwise have a hope in hell of ever winning a race - but is this really how they want to win?

No, F1 must be seen to be real. I'm all in favour of standard ECUs - in other words, getting rid of the wretched 'driver aids' - because undoubtedly that would improve both the spectacle and the racing. But I'm totally against 'artificial' competitiveness of any kind. What next? Decreeing that Michael Schumacher have only one hand on the wheel?

For more of Nigel's opinions on the proposed rule changes, check out Fifth Column in this week's issue of AUTOSPORT magazine, on sale from Thursday.



Dear Todd,

As I tried to explain in the previous question, many of the proposed rule changes have not gone down well with the teams - the serious teams, anyway - because they're seen as contrived, artificial, ways of spicing up 'The Show', at the expense of 'The Sport'. Get 'The Sport' right, and 'The Show' follows automatically.

To my mind, far and away the best rule changes ever introduced were by Max Mosley at the end of 1993, when he announced a complete ban on 'driver aids'. These had proliferated over the previous couple of seasons, and included traction control, launch control, automatic gearboxes, even ABS braking, and the drivers, led most vocally by Ayrton Senna, loathed them, because they felt - rightly - that they detracted from the skill of the bloke in the cockpit.

If, in a tight corner on a wet day, all you had to do was plant your foot on the throttle, and the software would sort out how much power went to the back wheels, obviously the gulf in ability betweem Senna and an average driver was much reduced, and that was not a desirable situation. As Mosley said at the time, "'Driver aids' have no place in anything calling itself a drivers' World Championship".

Sadly, though, they were reintroduced in 2001, simply because some in F1 had found ways of cheating the traction control rule, and the FIA felt it was unable to catch them at it. In the paddock, the atmosphere was becoming increasingly poisonous, and it was felt - with great reluctance by Max - that if the rule could not be policed, it was better to legalise traction control once more, and put an end to the bickering. It is my hope that ultimately the FIA will insist on 'standard' ECUs, so that these gizmos can disappear once more.



Dear Bud,

Throughout his time in F1, I was always fond of Eddie, because he was such marvellous company. Although he was never going to be World Champion, he was - and is - an engaging fellow, with a wide variety of interests, and a great sense of humour. He was also a delight to interview, not least because he never had an 'us and them' attitude to journalists.

Cheever is a complex man. It always seemed to me that his biggest failing, as a racing driver, was that it was too important to him, that he thought too much about it, was too obsessed with it. In consequence, I don't think he ever did justice to his talent when he was in F1. Eddie's dark moods were very dark indeed.

Usually, though, they didn't last long. I always liked his willingness to speak his mind - that and his irreverence. I remember once talking to him in a motorhome, with his team owner hovering about. "Oh, yeah, it's going to be a great team, this, really coming along," he said, giving me the odd conspiratorial grin. "And ****** is a really great guy to work for..." The man turned his back for a second. "You f****** bastard!" Eddie whispered in his direction... I still get a laugh from that tape today.

His humour was invariably laconic. I remember once being at a test day at Donington, and watching with him while the mechanics worked on his car. "Jesus!" he suddenly said. "Prost spun!" A pause. "Oh, what the hell, he'll probably do it again in another three or four years..."

It gave me real pleasure when Cheever won the Indy 500 in 1998. All right, as you say, it was an 'IRL Indy 500', but still I was glad to see him have his day in the sun. And although, in F1, he was not a true front runner, there were days when he really made you sit up and take notice. I remember particularly a practice day at Spa in 1983, when it was raining, and in his Renault Eddie set the fastest time, some six seconds quicker than his team mate, one Alain Prost...



Dear Richard,

Not to any great extent, no. Geoff Willis is an extremely competent man - he wouldn't otherwise have survived with Frank and Patrick as long as he did! - and I'm sure his presence will markedly improve the fortunes of BAR in 2003, but few would claim that this year's Williams has been other than a middling car, by the team's standards. It lacked downforce from the beginning, frankly, and was undoubtedly flattered to some degree by the power of its BMW engine. Therefore, I doubt that Geoff's continued presence at Williams would have made a great deal of difference through the season.



Dear Deane,

To be honest, I'm more than a little mystified about this proposed American F1 team. At Indianapolis, Dan Gurney spoke of it, and suggested that Phil Hill was also involved, but later in the weekend Hill, being interviewed, said he really didn't know much about it! If something were going to happen, he said, of course the project would have his support, but more than that he didn't know.

Unfortunately, I never got to see either Dan or Phil at Indy, so I can't add much to what is already on record. On the face of it, though, you're right in suggesting that at present there are no obvious potential F1 drivers in the USA, and nor, given the state of the economy there, does this seem a very good time to go looking for sponsorship.

I very much like and admire both Gurney and Hill, and would love to think something might come of all this, because it would be great to have an American team and drivers in F1 again, not least because it would do so much to help popularise it in the USA, the one country in the world where it has never really caught on. It struck me last weekend, for example, how much difference the presence of Takuma Sato - and also, presumably, Toyota - made to the attendance at the Japanese GP. The crowd at Suzuka had been diminishing for years, but this one was maybe the biggest ever seen there.



Dear Joe,

Having been to well over 400 Grands Prix, I've seen so many great overtaking moves, it's not easy to pick out 'the three best'. Needless to say, not too many of them have been in the recent past!

One exception to that rule, though, was obviously Mika Hakkinen's fabled pass of Michael Schumacher at Spa in 2000, when he went to the right of Ricardo Zonta's (lapped) BAR, while Michael went to the left. This was at the top of the hill, into Les Combes, and happened under braking from 200mph. A quite fantastic pass - and what made it even more special was that, a lap earlier, he had tried the same move on Schumacher - which resulted in Michael's moving over on him. The Ferrari's right rear tyre touched the McLaren's left front wing, and Mika, obliged to lift off or crash, was coldly furious when he made the pass next time round.

What else? Well, I remember a move by Jackie Stewart on Ronnie Peterson at Becketts in the 1973 British Grand Prix, and what made this exceptional was that it was on the opening lap, before tyres were fully up to temperature. Into the old Becketts, JYS seemed to have forgotten his braking point as he sailed by inside the Lotus, but it was perfectly judged, and left Ronnie shaking his head in disbelief.

More than any other, though, I suppose I remember a move by Jochen Rindt in the 1969 Daily Express Trophy, again at Silverstone. The weather was appalling that day, and at the start Rindt's Lotus 49 fell to the back of the field, its electrics soaked. As they dried out, Jochen began a fantastic drive back through the field.

It was so murky that it was difficult to see much in the spray, but on one lap, as Rindt came towards Stowe - the old Stowe, of course - he had ahead of him four cars: the BRM of Pedro Rodriguez and the Lotus of team mate Graham Hill (to be lapped) and also the Brabhams of Jacky Ickx and Piers Courage, which were fighting over second place. Suffice it to say that Jochen went into Stowe fifth in this line of cars, and emerged from it first! I couldn't quite believe what I'd seen - but it happened.

Now into second place, he hacked into Jack Brabham's once huge lead, and by the finish was only two seconds behind him. One of those days you remember always.