Autosport: The Supremely Gifted Artist

With an excellent, though sadly thwarted, run at Monaco, Jarno Trulli's 2006 season showed signs of life for the first time. If it was going to happen anywhere, it was always going to be here. Monte Carlo, with its ultimate demand for precision and, just as importantly, full commitment to precision, is tailor-made to Jarno's very individualistic approach.

Not only does he have a huge natural talent, he "fears failure less than the others" (his words), as he explained in an interview with our sister publication F1 Racing. This is a fascinating concept, and it tallies so well with trackside observations and apparent anomalies in his performances. At its most fundamental level, failure for a racing driver is being slow. But no-one in F1 is slow. That fear doesn't really apply.

Moving up the pyramid, the next definition of failure is losing control of the car and crashing. That bent piece of junk he's just creamed into the barriers represents the most highly visible evidence imaginable of a weakness.

That's why we so often see drivers walking quickly away from a wreck without a backward glance - they sub-consciously want to distance themselves from that failure. Frequently they keep their helmets on while they're walking away too, so their identity is better protected from association with the failure.

These are deeply-seated concerns of highly competitive individuals, driven by the need to succeed. They accept the general definition of success - winning races. They know winning races isn't always possible in the machinery at their disposal, but accept also that the outside world's not interested in that caveat. The task is to be perceived to be out-performing your circumstances in order to get into a car capable of winning - then winning.

That's as far removed as it is possible to get from the perspective of an artist, who would sneer at the idea of 'succeeding' on someone else's terms. As a result he would fear failure less than the others.

As part and parcel of the same thing, he would value success less than the others too. Because success is a concept to do with outsiders, nothing to do with him. If he has a feeling for success at all, it will be as an internal abstract.

He will be striving to satisfy himself on his own terms. Outsider observers might say he was less 'driven' as a result, less naturally competitive. Not that he'd value their observations much. How his performance is comparing with those around him - the other artists - is of little or no concern to him. In a sense, the perspective of an artist is almost one of pure arrogance.

When a driver doesn't measure up to his own internal abstracts, on one level he will find that interesting. Because it will be leading him to a fuller understanding of the thing that he values, better define the feeling he is chasing. This search is a journey, with many twists and turns.

When you see F1 drivers going through Barcelona's turn three, the long, fast blind-exit turn that goes on forever, you see a lot of improvisation.

Theory might say you get the car on the perfect trajectory and carry the maximum speed through it, but the practice more often reveals a series of small corrections before and after the apex, inputs that are costing only tiny, tiny fractions of time but which are ensuring there's no running wide at the exit, no dropping a tyre off the end of the kerb and having a nasty 'failure moment' otherwise known as a crash.

With Trulli you don't see that. When he has the car balanced to his liking, there is an initial steering input, with the car dancing on the very edge of adhesion, and full-throttle commitment to that input. The car runs to the millimetre outer reaches of the exit kerb and as it's heading there, or maybe beyond, still there's no flinching of extra lock or lifted throttle.

He sits there, serenely committed to his precision, his gift. Because he doesn't fear failure. This characteristic is rewarded massively at Monte Carlo, where the margins of success/failure as far less blurry and metal-hard.

Jarno Trulli © LAT

As such, guys like Trulli and Carlos Reutemann - another who springs to mind from another era - aren't really racing drivers in the classical sense. They're supremely gifted artists, exceptionally skilled in driving devastatingly fast when everything aligns right with their perspective. When the outside world allows it, they are capable of devastating performances that render everyone else as background detail.

But while it's a strength at times, its concomitant characteristic of not valuing success is very explicitly counter-productive in an endeavour as intrinsically competitive as motor racing. This isn't really a place for finely-honed artistic souls.

Dr Ricardo Cicarelli at Toyota - a psychology expert as well as Trulli's personal trainer - will understand well the conflicts going on with Jarno.

Without ever mentioning names, he once explained that the biggest problem he can possibly face when coaching drivers is when he encounters someone that is not intrinsically competitive at his very core. The problem is only compounded when that person is fantastically skilled - because it keeps him in the game for longer before realising that it isn't really a suitable game for him.

Jarno's future at Toyota is uncertain. His contract runs out at the end of the year and there is no guarantee it will be renewed. Given his temperament, his maturity and the probable greater self-awareness he has from working with Cicarelli, I wouldn't mind betting he's not even looking for a replacement drive, and that we may not be seeing him next year.

He knows what he could have achieved had he been given a group of people who shared his artistic vision. He knows how successful he's been on his own terms. When he leaves it will be without a backward glance, but not because of fearing failure.

He will leave us with the memory of a towering talent and the only frustration will be felt by us, not him.