When Benetton never failed to make its annual F1 car launch an experience to remember

Boy, do I miss the Benetton team at this time of year. I’m talking about the days when Formula 1 teams laid on proper car launches instead of a precisely orchestrated ‘reveal’ and gushing messages about this million-dollar piece of mobile cybernation winning races assuming the tyres on each corner don’t give up.

I mean, when is a team principal ever likely to stand up and say, in his honest opinion, this is the biggest pile of crap they’ve ever produced? In most cases, the media struggles to find a decent story. Not so when Benetton was around. There was always something to say – and not necessarily about the car.

Take the launch of the B199 in January 1999. As if to appease the writers who had been asked to give up their Saturday morning and travel to Enstone, we were each presented with a juggling kit on arrival. The instructions began with the words: ‘Be gentle with yourself. Find that calm, collected person inside.’

Apart from spawning jokes about Benetton throwing everything in the air and hoping for the best, we never did work out how this was related to the car waiting inside.

Such a novelty was no surprise from Benetton. We were once assembled in a white-walled studio on London’s docklands and dressed up to the chin in white overalls. Then, to loud music, a bunch of mechanics ran in, wordlessly threw paint bombs around the latest car and departed as mysteriously as they had arrived.

To this day, I still don’t know what that was all about. Not the sort of thing you’re likely to see Lawrence Stroll get up to when dressed in an expensive suit. Saying that, maybe it’s what he needs rather than stumbling through an autocued speech.

Hamilton had to wait until the first race of 1997 to see the B197 in the flesh after the launch hubbub

Photo by: LAT Images via Getty Images

In 1996, Benetton flew us to an incredible extravaganza in Sicily where Flavio Briatore appeared to have invited 700 of his closest friends. The following year, he tried to pack the same number – or so it seemed – into Planet Hollywood in London’s Leicester Square.

I never actually got to see the car in the flesh until the first race a few months later. But the pizza was good. It didn’t stick to my jacket for too long after I had inadvertently shoved an elbow into a tray of the stuff carried by some hapless waiter marooned in the throng.

Hiring a convenient venue in central London may have seemed a good idea, but trouble had started earlier that morning when the bar, which was due to shut at 1am, did not close until 3am, thus robbing Benetton of two valuable hours when it came to converting the first-floor restaurant into a theatre, complete with the Benetton-Renault B197 mounted on a tilting stage.

To his horror, Dudot discovered that a very interesting technical detail, unique to the Renault engine, had not been removed as planned

The launch had taken two months to plan at a cost of £500,000 – and almost ground to a halt with 30 minutes to go.

Bernard Dudot, the technical director at Renault Sport, happened to take a glance at his latest creation, the RS9 V10, which was on display at the front of the stage. To his horror, he discovered that a very interesting technical detail, unique to the Renault engine and not one he wished to see exposed for the benefit of the cameras, had not been removed as planned.

As the Renault technicians hastily got to work with spanners, a panicked phone call to the photo lab stopped the production of 400 press kit prints of an image that had been taken earlier.

Last year’s super-slick, grand-scale, all-teams launch was a far cry from juggling kits and paint bombs

Photo by: Ben Stansall / Pool /AFP via Getty Images

All of this served to delay entry and kept a couple of hundred frozen media people stamping their feet while jockeying for position by the front door. In the opinion of many, they would have been better off staying there.

Once inside, the scene was reminiscent of the Tube during rush hour. The room was hopelessly inadequate and very little could be either seen or heard by the majority of those present. There was loud music, dancing girls and dry ice.

Then the sheet covering the near-vertical car failed to come away completely from the top-right corner and was removed only after some frantic tugging by members of the harassed production team. The irony was that most of us had seen pictures of the car already, since it had been testing for two weeks in Spain.

After such a fiasco, there was a lot to be said for a juggling kit and the desire to find a ‘calm collected person inside’. On that occasion, there were dancers and acrobats using a variety of props ranging from stilts to dustbins (don’t ask). At one point, the artists pulled off a very difficult manoeuvre and then paused briefly for applause.

Nothing. Not a ripple. In a theatre, perhaps. But not on a temporary stage in an F1 factory. These energetic souls didn’t realise that their audience consisted of blase motor racing hacks, weary from having travelled to Oxfordshire from all corners of Europe and then waiting patiently – while clutching their juggling kits – in a reception room. This unappreciative audience had just one thought: where’s the bloody car? 

It was under a sheet – or so we thought. The ghostly profile suggested an interesting and extraordinarily low frontal area. Then an invisible cord from the ceiling whipped away the sheet to reveal – absolutely nothing. Just a bare stage. It was a clever trick. The B199 was eventually rolled out, followed by questions and photos. Then everyone went home.

I can vividly recall the occasion. Mind you, I don’t remember much about the car.

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Briatore (here flanked by Jenson Button and Giancarlo Fisichella in Venice) liked to push the boat out

Photo by: Russell Batchelor / Motorsport Images