Ask Nigel: September 19

Dear Steve,
Yes, I do think it's time Max Mosley and the FIA admitted they were wrong to go the 'grooved tyre' route, in an attempt to keep cornering speeds in check. That said, there's about as much chance of it happening as there is of Eddie Irvine discovering humility.

As one leading F1 technical director put it, when I spoke to him about it recently: "No one likes grooved tyres, but we're stuck with them. Why? Because Max thought of them..."

Everyone knows that if you're really serious about keeping cornering speeds under control, the way to do it is through aerodynamic changes - by reducing the cars' downforce, in other words, and I'm talking not about little changes here and there, but by massively reducing it. Take the emphasis away from aerodynamic grip, in other words, and put it back on mechanical grip (ie the tyres).

At a stroke, this would considerably reduce cornering speeds, give the quality of the racing a sorely needed boost, and enable us to have back slick tyres, rather than these unsightly grooved things.

Certainly, this is what the drivers would like to see, and it's also the solution favoured by the designers. Problem is, attempts to implement such changes have so far fallen on stony ground because of the teams' absolute inability to agree on how the changes should be made, how the new regulations should be written. Thus, in the absence of any firm proposals from the teams, the FIA has been obliged to impose its own ideas.

One technical director recently went as far as to suggest doing away with wings altogether - but pointed out at once that such a thing would never come to be, for commercial reasons. "The engineers may think one way," he said, "but the team owners have different considerations. When I suggested - half-seriously - doing away with wings, they looked at me with horror: 'You can't do that!', they said. 'Think of the advertising space we'd lose...'"

The situation is therefore not as simple as you'd think. I'd love to imagine a day when common sense - and a common purpose - prevailed, and we got a set of rules which would reduce cornering speeds and encourage better racing. Recent history suggests, however, that there's very little chance of its happening.




Dear Konstantin,
I don't say it's impossible, but it's going to be extraordinarily difficult. Paul Stoddart is a very clever fellow, and a very ambitious one, but unless he can find enormous backing from somewhere, I don't see Minardi becoming a midfield team.

Why? Because if you're running an F1 team on a shoestring, everything is compromised. Unless you are considered a major team, you will not get an 'engine partner', in the sense of a major manufacturer (BMW, Mercedes, Honda etc). This means that you will not only not get truly competitive engines, but also that you will have to pay for them. And, as Alain Prost has found this year, when you have to fund an engine programme, there is a 'domino effect' through your team, not least that your car doesn't get developed properly, because you don't have the money to go testing very often.

Then there is the question of drivers. Backmarker teams are never able to acquire drivers close to the top of the tree, first, because these people require considerable remuneration, and second, because they're not being offered a car that's going to be competitive. Therefore, your drivers are always going to be youngsters with a budget available, and even if you're lucky, and come across a really talented kid - like Fernando Alonso - chances are you're going to lose him very quickly.

It's the same with other employees. Remember Gustav Brunner? He was supposedly Minardi's technical director, complete with contract, but then along came the gentlemen of Toyota, and when Brunner saw the number of zeros on the cheque he was gone, pausing only to pick up a Japanese phrasebook.

I'm not saying Stoddart can't get Minardi to be a midfield team, only that history suggests it's extremely unlikely. That said, Paul is a hell of an entrepreneur, and just could one day pull off a deal that would transform his team overnight. Until then, though, he's always going to be struggling.




Dear Tom,
I'm sorry to say I have few recollections of Peter Revson, for I didn't see that much of his racing career, the bulk of which was in the USA. He dabbled very briefly with Formula 1 in 1964, long before I began work as a racing journalist, and returned, driving a one-off race for Ken Tyrrell at Watkins Glen in 1971, the year I started.

In '72 he drove a 'mixed' season for McLaren, driving in nine Grands Prix, and also racing for the team in some USAC races (including Indy) and CanAm, and then in '73 he took part in the entire World Championship for the team, winning both the British and Canadian Grands Prix.

The victory at Silverstone I remember clearly. This was the 'old' Silverstone, of course: very fast indeed, with Woodcote almost flat out, one of the best corners in the world. In addition to the regular cars of Revson and Denny Hulme, McLaren had entered a third car for Jody Scheckter - who proceeded to try and win the race on the first lap.

Coming into Woodcote, Scheckter went by team mate Hulme for fourth place, and then completely dropped it, causing one of the biggest multiple accidents in F1 history. Nine cars were out on the spot, but Brabham's Andrea de Adamich, with a broken leg, was somehow the only driver injured.

On the restart, Ronnie Peterson's Lotus rushed away into the lead, chased by Jackie Stewart's Tyrrell, which then spun off. After that, the British Grand Prix settled into a fight between the Lotuses of Peterson and Emerson Fittipaldi, the McLarens of Revson and Hulme, and the Hesketh-entered March of James Hunt. All save Emerson were to finish.

For the first half of the race, Revson appeared to be doing his usual thing, running consistently, third behind Peterson and Fittipaldi, but when Emerson retired, on lap 37, he suddenly cut loose, and passed Ronnie for the lead, where he stayed for the duration.

This was Revvie's first Grand Prix win, and I confess that few of us had anticipated it. Good as he was, I always thought of him as ultra-consistent, rather than ultra-quick, and it rather surprised that he was able to hold off a driver like Peterson.

I mean Peter no disrespect, for drivers as quick as Ronnie come along only a couple of times in a generation. To that point, though, he had done nothing to suggest he was likely to win a Grand Prix on outright speed, and Silverstone rather changed my perception of him.

As a man, I found him invariably polite, if a trifle distant. Within his team, he was extremely well-liked, and many were disappointed when Fittipaldi was chosen to replace him at McLaren for 1974. Revson went off to the new Shadow team as number one driver, and I remember him raving about the car at the Brands Hatch Race of Champions early in '74: "Unbelievable - rides just like a Cadillac..."

It was not long afterwards that he went off to Kyalami, to test in preparation for the South African Grand Prix. At Barbecue Bend, a long, fast, downhill, right-hander, the car suffered suspension failure, and hit a guardrail at very high speed. Peter was killed instantly.

I think perhaps you're right that his achievements are somewhat overlooked, compared with others of his era. When his name is mentioned, people tend to remember his movie star looks and patrician background than his considerable successes. While certainly not a great driver, in the Stewart or Peterson sense of the word, undeniably he was a very fine one.




Dear Scott,
No, it's not a rule that an F1 team may have only one spare car. At Monte Carlo, for example, where the close confines of the track tend to lead to many damaged cars, most teams take two spare cars, and the same is true, for the teams involved, of particularly crucial races - like World Championship deciders.

Time was when drivers would hop between their race and spare cars through the practice sessions, trying this, trying that, but you have to remember that these days spare cars cannot be used in practice or qualifying. If you damage your own car, you must either sit out the rest of the session, or you must wait until your team mate has finished with his own car, and then hop into it.

Race day is a different matter, of course. In the morning warm-up, a driver like Michael Schumacher will try both his cars before making a firm decision as to which one he will race, and at a race like Spa (three weeks ago), where the weather is uncertain, he will have one car in 'dry' spec, the other in 'wet'. This allows him the opportunity of waiting to see how the weather will turn out before opting for one or the other immediately before the start.

As much as anything else, it is for reasons of convenience that at most races the great majority of teams take only one T-car. Money has nothing to do with it. They do take copious amounts of spares, of course, and this includes monocoques. Should one of the cars be irreparably damaged in the course of practice, a new one can be built up by the mechanics in a remarkably short time.




Dear Gwyn,
This is what the late, and much lamented, Ken Tyrrell had to say about the Ford Cosworth DFV.

"I didn't have an F1 team in 1967, but the idea of progressing up from F1 was very much on my mind - and you have to remember how lucky I was with the timing. In 1967, the Ford Cosworth DFV engine raced for the first time, at Zandvoort. I flew over to watch the race - out and back on race day - and it was clear that this engine was...the only engine in the race. Everything else was just...crap, frankly. Old-fashioned rubbish. If you wanted to go racing in the future, this was the engine you had to have - and it remained so for more than 10 years! And the reason why there are McLarens, Williams, and so on, is because of the DFV.

"In 1968, you went up to Northampton, you gave them £7500 - and you came away with an engine which could win you Grands Prix. All you had to do was put it into a reasonably competitive car, with a good driver, and you could win the next race - and it continued like that for years."

It was true. The DFV won its very first race (in the back of Jimmy Clark's Lotus 49 that day at Zandvoort in 1967), and its final Grand Prix victory (in the back of Michele Alboreto's Tyrrell) came at Detroit in 1983. Over 17 seasons it won a staggering total of 155 Grands Prix. Nothing else has ever come close, and nothing ever will.

What you have to remember, Gwyn, is that - Ford apart - there was almost no 'major manufacturer' involvement in F1 back then. Honda, it's true, briefly played with F1 in the mid-late '60s, but if they (plus Ferrari, BRM, and, for a time, Gurney-Weslake and Matra) built their own V12 engines, other teams were obliged to buy their motors. When the DFV came along, it was the answer to their prayers.

Originally the engine was conceived and built for use in the Lotus 49, Colin Chapman's revolutionary design calling for the engine not to be mounted in a sub-frame (as was then the norm), but to be used as a stressed member - literally a part of the car, complete with rear suspension mounting points.

Ford's Director of European Affairs, Walter Hayes, allowed a budget of £100,000 for the project. Sounds like nothing now, doesn't it? But 35 years ago it was a huge financial commitment. Keith Duckworth and his men produced an engine that was small, light, relatively simple, extremely powerful. As Tyrrell said, it made everything else obsolete overnight.

Lotus had solus use of the DFV only in that first year, 1967, after which other teams took the opportunity to buy it, a fact which not surprisingly pleased Chapman not at all. But so much better then the opposition - in terms of horsepower and torque - had it immediately been that Ford would have been foolish to confine its use to one team only.

Over time the DFV became virtually standard wear in F1, which accounts, in part, for its huge number of wins. Ferrari won occasionally, and BRM very occasionally, but as pretty well everyone else was using a DFV, it's not perhaps surprising that 155 wins came the DFV's way.




Dear Ruud,
No, it's not the case that Mauro Forghieri and Niki Lauda did not get along - although they certainly did have some mighty rows over time. Lauda once said of Forghieri that he was, "Completely mad - but a genius..."

Mauro is, in a fact, a most delightful bloke, perhaps more 'Italian' in temperament than anyone I have ever met: intensely emotional, prone to losing his temper, then regaining it just as quickly, laughing, crying, the whole thing.

If he was temperamental, though, I have no doubt that Niki was right in describing him as a genius. He began working with the Ferrari team in the early '60s, and remained there until the late '80s, and for much of that time he effectively was, not only the team's technical director, but also - as you say - a man who played an important role in its management.

Most of the drivers who worked with him adored him, not least because he - unlike most Ferrari people of the time - never sought to blame them unjustly. It was often said that Enzo Ferrari's fundamental belief was that his cars won races, and his drivers lost them, but Mauro wasn't like that.

Looking back on Chris Amon's time with Ferrari, for example, he said this: "It's a fact that we never gave Chris a car worthy of his talents - particularly in 1968, when he should have been World Champion. He was the best test driver I ever worked with, and, in my opinion, at least, he was as good as Jim Clark."

I will never forget the absolute joy in Forghieri's face at the end of the Monaco Grand Prix in 1981, when Gilles Villeneuve got into the lead in the late stages, and stayed there. He adored Gilles for what he called his "rage to win", and he knew very well that that car - the clumsy 126C - had no right to win at a track like that. When Gilles came in, Mauro embraced him, and was so moved that for quite a time he literally couldn't speak.

It is a fact that I don't feel about Ferrari these days - organised, clinical, not particularly Italian - as once I did, but in the era when I truly loved Maranello and all its works, no one more epitomised the team than Forghieri. A wayward genius, perhaps, but a genius all the same.

If you have a question, send it to AskNigel@haynet.com.