Roebuck: Why abandoning Monaco is so rewarding

The Two Worlds Trophy they called it, and that - emphatically - is what it was. Run twice, in 1957 and '58, it was an attempt to stage a match race between Europe and the USA, and it must be said that the track, an oval taking in Monza's hallowed and long-defunct banking, was not exactly a layout calculated to favour the European contingent in its battle with the fabled Indy roadsters.

By any standards, the track was ferociously fast: at a time when pole for the Indianapolis 500 was in the vicinity of 140mph, in 1957 Tony Bettenhausen's Novi lapped the Monza bowl at over 177mph! With the exception of the Ecurie Ecosse D-type Jaguars - which, remarkably, came to Monza immediately after winning the Le Mans 24 Hours - the Europeans, citing safety concerns, withdrew from the event. It was not their shining hour.

In their absence, though, the roadster brigade put on an excellent show, and the following year the Two Worlds Trophy carried rather more weight, for now the Europeans had set aside their qualms about safety, and serious entries materialised from Ferrari and Maserati, featuring drivers such as Mike Hawthorn, Luigi Musso and Stirling Moss. Again it was an overwhelming triumph for the USA, but at least this time there was some worthwhile opposition, notably from the fearless Musso, who was to die the following weekend in the French Grand Prix at Reims.

One of the roadsters in the 1958 event - the Sclavi & Amos Special - was shared by two drivers, and the pairing must surely be the most off the wall in the history of motor racing: on the one hand you had Maurice Trintignant, a stylish and dapper French Formula 1 driver of the time, and on the other a brash newcomer from Houston, Texas. For the first time in his life, AJ Foyt was venturing outside the USA.

One of the reasons for my abandoning Monaco, after witnessing 47 grands prix there, in favour of the Indy 500 is that I love listening to the reminiscences of such as Parnelli Jones and AJ Foyt. As Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player unfailingly return each year to Augusta for The Masters, so the greats of Indianapolis folklore are invariably on hand during 500 week, and the anecdotes flow.

As I said, though, 'Two Worlds' was the right name for that long forgotten trophy, and to some degree it still appertains today. Over the weekend of the 500, I listened to Foyt's recollections of his Monza trip 60 years ago - "That Musso was a brave sumbitch, coming by the pits so close the mechanics had to jump out of the way!" - but then he came out with a final throwaway question about Monza that served to remind me that not every racer's world revolves around Formula 1: "They still use that place?"

Well, yes, I said, actually they do, not least for the Italian Grand Prix every September. AJ looked at me with a kind of faraway expression: "Uh-huh..." Clearly, this was not an event that figured much in his thoughts.

Fast forward to today's generation of IndyCar drivers, and you get the impression that not much has changed. As I listened to Will Power's victory press conference on Sunday afternoon, someone pointed out that this was a great day for Australian racing drivers. Momentarily Power was nonplussed, but then took the remark on board: "Oh, did Ricciardo win at Monaco, then? Great..."

Another salutary reminder, as I say, that there is life beyond the Formula 1 bubble in which so many live. By the same token, probably not too many in the Monaco paddock spent much time thinking about what was going on in Indiana - although a few, including Max Verstappen, said they planned to watch the race after the grand prix was over.

As has become my custom these last few years, I watched the Monaco Grand Prix on one of the large screens at the Honda motorhome, while breakfasting on Eggs Benedict in company with such as Bobby Rahal and Stefan Johansson. All very civilised and agreeable, but it has to be said after the first few laps of the race most of my fellow viewers had found other things to do. "How are they supposed to pass," asked a bewildered Bobby Unser, "when there's no room?"

It wasn't easy to give an answer, but I tried. Well, I said, time was - when Formula 1 cars were smaller and more nimble than today's monstrosities - that you would see the odd overtaking manoeuvre, but fundamentally the Monaco Grand Prix, while always a supreme test of driving ability, has never been a race as such. Arguably, I gamely continued, the most crucial part of the weekend is Q3 on Saturday afternoon: get pole position, make it to Ste Devote before anyone else, and all things being equal you've won. I don't think Unser understood.

That said, it is not only Formula 1 that has problems with overtaking. Granted, you see more of it in an afternoon at Indianapolis than in a year's worth of grands prix, but this 500 truly came to life only in the last quarter of the race, and for the first 50 or so laps was more than a touch dull.

The new generation of IndyCar, with reduced overall downforce, and more of it coming from the car's underbody, has proved an undoubted success on street and road circuits, but on ovals the jury is out: overtaking is clearly more difficult than with the previous cars, as Power confirmed.

"Whereas before no-one wanted to lead, because they'd get drafted," he said, "now what we had was a race you did want to lead - if you had a good car, you could benefit, and pull away, and I liked that."

Before the race, no-one was quite sure what to expect of the new cars, and the weather only added to the uncertainty. A fierce rain storm on Saturday night made for a very 'green' track, and on race day the temperature reached 91, making this the hottest 500 since 1937. "It's going to be very slick," said Rahal before the race. "I hate to say it, but I think there'll be a lot of yellows today."

He was on the mark. Danica Patrick's last race ended in the wall after her car suddenly swapped ends, and it was the same story for Ed Jones, Sebastien Bourdais, Helio Castroneves and Tony Kanaan. "I really don't know what happened," said Kanaan, and it was a popular refrain. The new IndyCar may be much more attractive than its predecessor, but seems also to be far less forgiving. "I think the new car is definitely harder to drive," said Power, "and in my opinion anything that puts the driver back into it more is good..."

Back in the autumn of 2015 I went one day to Portsmouth, to the HQ of Ben Ainslie Racing, there to interview the company's CEO. Following his departure from McLaren 18 months earlier, Martin Whitmarsh had taken time off, travelling extensively with his wife, but after a while concluded that full-time hedonism wasn't all it was cracked up to be: what he needed was a new challenge, and Ainslie's offer was irresistible.

"I didn't want to leave McLaren," Whitmarsh told me, "and at first tried to put Formula 1 out of my mind. When the first race of 2014 - Melbourne - came up, I said to Debs, 'Let's go somewhere where there's no TV'. So there we were, on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, both swearing we weren't going to watch the race - and then we caught each other out, watching the timing screen on the F1 app on our iPads!

"If anything, the change in our lives hit my wife even harder than it did me: she had travelled with me, and loved everything about racing - even going to Mokpo [for the Korean GP], for God's sake! Although we used the app, we really tried not to watch the races, but after pretending not to care, when it got to Spa... I mean, I couldn't not watch Spa!"

After parting ways with McLaren, Whitmarsh didn't lack for offers from other top teams, but all were turned down, including the only one he found truly tempting, which, intriguingly, could have brought back to Formula 1 the magical name of Maserati.

"After so long with McLaren, I couldn't see myself outside their garage in a different coloured shirt - I still loved McLaren, and I always will. In nearly 25 years there, I had some wonderfully high moments. We won over 100 grands prix - more than 20 of them when I was team principal - and eight world championships. And along the way I met some extraordinary people... drivers, engineers, and so on."

"He's still the best, isn't he? The most complete driver in the world. It went wrong when he was at McLaren the first time, but he's matured a lot" Martin Whitmarsh on Fernando Alonso

As well as being team principal, Whitmarsh had been the CEO of the entire McLaren Group and deputy chairman of McLaren Automotive. For a number of years Ron Dennis had been relatively in the background, not a role he enjoyed, and there were persistent rumours that he was intent on regaining control of the company. In the enforced absence through illness of firm Whitmarsh supporter Mansour Ojjeh, Dennis called a board meeting in January 2014, and immediately before it Whitmarsh told him he would not be attending. He left the building, and never went back.

"To be honest, my departure was part rational and part emotional. In terms of what the company stood for, I was able to align it with what I thought it should be: now the way it was going to conduct its business wasn't how I wanted to do things, and I wasn't willing to work in that environment.

"I'm not saying it was wrong, and I was right - just that it was going to be different from how I wanted it to be. My feeling at that instant was that it was the right time to walk away - I don't know if Ron was expecting me to go, but I think in his heart that was what he wanted." Following Ojjeh's return to health, three years later it was Dennis's turn to be deposed.

In Barcelona for the Spanish GP I was delighted to see Whitmarsh back at a grand prix for the first time in four and a half years, and many felt the same way. As we chatted in the McLaren emporium, Fernando Alonso, among others, came by to greet him before going off for qualifying.

"He's still the best, isn't he?" said Martin. "The most complete driver in the world. OK, for various reasons it went wrong when he was at McLaren first time round, but he's matured a lot - and he's the best, no question. Never gives up, never has an off-day.

"There are drivers who don't get the results that the car deserves, drivers who do get those results - and then a very few who get better results, more points, than the car deserves: year in, year out, Fernando did that with Ferrari, and he's still the same now - it's in his DNA. Just a phenomenally bright, talented, ruthless, racing driver. With all the problems in the last three years, I'm just glad he didn't flip out and go - for McLaren that would have been catastrophic."

So it would, but in spite of increased competitiveness, following the switch from Honda to Renault, the team is still far from where it should be. At Barcelona, Alonso made it into Q3 for the first time this season, and the race marked the fifth anniversary of his last grand prix victory.

In that time Lewis Hamilton has won 42 races, and I remarked to Fernando that at the 6 Hours of Spa the weekend before - in the quickest thing on the grid, with only his team's sister car to worry about - he perhaps got an inkling of how Formula 1 has been for Lewis these last four years. He just smiled.

As last year, when he drove in the Indianapolis 500, many of his colleagues in the paddock appear bemused at Alonso's continuing desire to take part in other categories, but time was when his way of doing things was the norm.

Back in the day the likes of Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart and Jochen Rindt routinely competed in Formula 2 and sportscar racing, as well as Formula 1, and Mario Andretti took things to even greater extremes: in 1978, the year he won the world championship, as usual he also undertook a full Indycar season, winning at Trenton a couple of weeks after clinching his title at Monza. For drivers of that generation, there was no summer break, and weekends off during the season were a rarity.

It will be like that for Alonso in 2018, and he relishes the prospect: as Zak Brown says, "I think Fernando would live in a race car if he could."

As in F1, though, so the rules in the World Endurance Championship can be a source of frustration for the drivers. "Formula 1," Alonso said to me last year, "should be flat out all the way - it shouldn't be about saving tyres, fuel, anything!" Few, I think, would take issue with him, but in the WEC, too, restrictions are in place, as he appreciated when he began testing the Toyota. "There are good things and bad - but the bad things you don't expect. When you have a dream, you try to idealise the dream, and avoid any negatives."

So what are the bad things in the WEC? "Oh, the restrictions you have, in terms of fuel economy, and things like that - they have this 'maximum fuel allowed per lap' rule, so there's a need to cut the fuel automatically on some of the straights, and the way you have to drive is not natural sometimes. You have to drive with an efficient style, not a quick style, and when you have that kind of machine in your hands - with the technology, the power, the downforce, the Michelin tyres - and then you don't have the opportunity to squeeze it, it's very frustrating! But, you know, when you are racing, and that machine is quicker than the others, you will be happy - that's the way it is!"

In 2014 Alonso went to Le Mans for the first time, simply to take a look, and to hang out with his pal Mark Webber, who had recently retired from F1, and joined the Porsche WEC squad. Impressed by what he saw, Fernando began talks with Porsche, and it was agreed that he should drive one of the factory 919s in the Vingt-Quatre Heures the following year.

In terms of sublime automotive madness, Porsche's 919 Evo puts me in mind of Peugeot's 875bhp 208 T16 for Sebastien Loeb's assault on Pikes Peak in 2013. This is some staggering car

Problem was, by 2015 he was a McLaren-Honda driver, and Honda didn't go for the idea any more than Ron Dennis did. That being so, Nico Hulkenberg was drafted into the Porsche team for Le Mans, and ended up winning the race, which did nothing to soothe Alonso's disappointment.

Even had he raced the Porsche, though, Fernando would have faced the same restrictions, regarding fuel economy and so on, as he does now with Toyota. What he - and any other LMP1 driver - would surely have savoured is the 'unplugged' 919 built by Porsche following the company's withdrawal from the WEC at the end of last season.

In effect, this is the car Porsche would have campaigned had the rules been 'no holds barred', and Neel Jani and Timo Bernhard have the privilege of driving it in demonstration runs this year.

In terms of sublime automotive madness, this Porsche puts me in mind of the 875bhp 208 T16 put together by Peugeot for Sebastien Loeb's assault on Pikes Peak in 2013. At the end of his run, which annihilated - by more than a minute and a half - the previous record, Loeb needed a moment or two to 'come down' from the experience, and Jani was the same after his recent lap of Spa in the 919 Hybrid Evo.

This is some staggering car. Jani's time - 1m41.8s - was 13 seconds faster than the 'restricted' Toyotas achieved in qualifying for the recent WEC race, but perhaps even more remarkable is that - despite being more than 100kg heavier - it was also seven-tenths quicker than the 'Q3 spec' pole position lap by Hamilton's Mercedes at last year's Belgian Grand Prix!

At Barcelona I asked Jani how this one-off Porsche was to drive, and he giggled at the question. "Unbelievable! Zero to 200km/h [124mph] in under three seconds, zero to 300km/h in under seven... At Spa, going up the hill to Les Combes, the car reached 369km/h!"

That's a hair short of 230mph, and other details of the lap, too, beggar belief: 307km/h (190mph) through Eau Rouge, 333km/h (207phm) flat into Blanchimont...

Fundamentally the car is the same as at the end of last season, apart from a slightly longer nose, removal of the lights, more downforce, and the addition of DRS. Jani, believe it or not, went through Eau Rouge with the DRS open: "The computer said it would be OK, and I have faith in the engineers..."

The car's engine, too, is unchanged, save that restrictions imposed by the WEC rules - fuel flow, and so on - are gone, which puts horsepower up to almost 1200, about the same as Porsche's turbocharged 917/30 Can-Am car of 45 years ago. No surprise, then, that Jani found the acceleration beyond his experience. "It just went on until you stopped it," he said. "The limit was me, not the car..."