Dodgy Business

Perception and reality can be two very different things. And sometimes, for a racing driver, it's perception that matters.

I remember taking a big interest in Niki Lauda when I was around 13 or 14, and I don't really know why. I suppose it was that he drove a Ferrari, seemed young and fast and took nine poles in '74 and '75 when I was at an impressionable age. He also won the championship in '75 and '77 of course.

But, as I dug deeper, reading the journalists of the time, I began to unearth opinions that suggested Lauda was fortunate to be in the Ferrari at that particular time, and that in terms of 'natural talent' he was certainly no Ronnie Peterson.

Niki Lauda (Ferrari 312T2) and Mario Andretti (Lotus 78 Ford) 1977 Dutch Grand Prix, Zandvoort © LAT

Peterson's reputation was based on his speed in the junior formulae, at March, when he did stand-out things in '71, and alongside Emerson Fittipaldi at Lotus in '73, when Emerson was the reigning champion but Ronnie was generally regarded as quicker.

With shades of the season just gone, the pair of them split race wins and allowed Jackie Stewart to steal the championship with his Tyrrell.

By the end of '76, Lauda's return from his Nurburgring accident and the scrap with James Hunt for the title, amid controversy, had captured the world's imagination and Lauda was a mega-bucks earning global star.

He ultimately lost out in '76 but then returned in '77, saw off Carlos Reutemann at Ferrari and recaptured his title. Try telling a casual interest fan then that, in fact, Lauda was no Ronnie Peterson and the response would have been, Ronnie who?

Lauda had, by then, got the better of Clay Regazzoni and Reutemann in equal equipment before switching to Brabham when he fell out with Enzo Ferrari. At Brabham he was generally quicker than John Watson, but not always. Then along came Nelson Piquet, fresh out of Formula 3.

Almost immediately, Piquet was on Lauda's pace. The BT48, an unwieldy long-wheelbase device with a thirsty Alfa V12, was not ultimately competitive in '79 and Brabham took the decision to revert to the ubiquitous Cosworth V8 for the BT49.

Towards the end of the year, in Canada, in the middle of the weekend, Lauda suddenly told Bernie Ecclestone that he'd had enough, that he was fed up with driving round and round in circles. He retired on the spot.

Alan Jones had a different take. Jonesy pointed out that Lauda's success had been based on having a 12-cylinder engine with a power advantage in a decent Ferrari at a time when everyone else had a Cosworth V8. Niki then continued with a flat 12 and a V12 at Brabham.

Now that he was going to have the same engine as everyone else, Jones reckoned, he didn't fancy it. It wasn't so much that Lauda, still just 30, didn't want to drive around in circles anymore, he just didn't want to drive around in circles behind Nelson Piquet. The shrewd Lauda, Jones suspected, knew what that would do to his market value.

Probably, it was a good call by Niki. Piquet went on to win championships for Brabham in '81 with the Cosworth and then in '83 with the BMW turbo as blown engines took over. Would Niki, 10 years in, have handled Nelson? Maybe. But probably not.

After a couple of years playing around with his DC10s, Niki was back to drive Ron Dennis's carbon McLaren. Granted, it had a Cosworth in the back, but Wattie, a known quantity to Niki, was in the other car, and there was a Porsche-built TAG turbo in the offing.

It worked out splendidly for Lauda, who took a third title with McLaren in '84. The only blot was the arrival of a certain Alain Prost. Another Nelson, except with four seasons F1 experience, Alain was simply too quick. For Niki to escape with a title apiece from two seasons alongside Alain was as good a Houdini act as it was for Prost to do the same with Senna five years later.

Fernando Alonso exits the McLaren for the final time © LAT

A quarter of a century on, we're still waiting on the future plans of Fernando Alonso, which are expected to be known any minute now. If it's taking a while, that's understandable. Fernando is in a tricky situation.

A year ago, Alonso's stock could not have been higher. He'd just won back-to-back titles and, more importantly, overcome Michael Schumacher in a race-winning Ferrari. But then along came Lewis Hamilton.

In his conduct throughout '07 Alonso did not emerge with too much credit, no matter which way you slice it. In Mark Hughes's piece on Alonso in Autosport magazine, a Spaniard close to the situation suggested that Fernando does not lack intelligence but perhaps a little wisdom.

And there seems to have been panic inside his head. Personally, I don't actually think it was a heinous crime to try to blackmail Ron into slowing down Lewis. Not fine, honourable or upstanding, sure, and also ill-advised, but somewhat predictable as, by then, he was clutching at straws.

At the time, at a press gathering in Istanbul, James Allen asked Ron if it was the worst episode he had experienced. No, Ron replied, just the worst you know about ... These guys are competitive animals, the McLaren boss explained, and they will try anything.

Part of the job is negotiating yourself the unfair advantage if you possibly can, but Fernando's methodology was highly questionable and went badly wrong.

He probably set it out as a negotiating position he could step back from, and wasn't to know that Ron would phone Max right away. But had he thought about it deeply, he would have appreciated that it was no basis for any kind of harmonious future. That wouldn't have mattered though. He was suffering, and he needed to put a stop to it.

So what does he do now? Lewis has deflated the perception of Alonso considerably but not disastrously, because everyone appreciates Hamilton's quality. At least that's the perception. Because, truly, the question has to be how much of the Alonso/Hamilton 'wow' factor was the McLaren?

As Mark Webber pointed out, you can have a bad race in a McLaren and finish up on the podium. Webber pointed to Hamilton's Silverstone race as perhaps his weakest of the year.

"He finished a long way behind Fernando but he was still on the podium," Webber said. "Finish half a minute behind your team-mate in that midfield group and you'd be 15th or 16th."

And that's true enough. Can we be sure that Hamilton/Alonso would perform any better in a McLaren than, say, Webber/Button? No.

Alonso can survive 109 points each with Lewis, but he could do without jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. It is important for the future of his career that he does not immediately put himself into the same situation with another team-mate.

So what does he do? If I was Fernando, no matter how many dollars or Ross Brawns Honda might be offering, I wouldn't want to go anywhere near Jenson Button, who is still a talented driver, awaiting the right car. Jenson is a Hakkinen waiting to happen.

Heikki Kovalainen testing at Barcelona © LAT

I'd be very wary of Red Bull too, if it meant taking on Webber. In a Formula where qualifying is so important, I wouldn't want to go head-to-head with a guy who has proved significantly quicker than anyone he's been paired with.

And so Renault. If it was Kovalainen, I wouldn't fancy that too much either. Heikki struggled at first, but Pat Symonds has candidly explained that much of that was the team's fault. "With a novice driver you have to give him a consistent car, and we clearly didn't do that," Pat said.

At the start of the season, Renault had all sorts of problems correlating the car's wind tunnel and track performance, for various reasons. One minute the car had downforce, the next it didn't, and that contributed much to Heikki's rather too infrequent early season visits to the scenery.

But, as Symonds pointed out, as the team got a handle on their problems around Canada time, it was like flicking a switch with Kovalainen and he was very impressive thereafter, generally besting Fisichella.

If Heikki ends up at McLaren, it would be interesting to see how he fared against Hamilton. I suspect he'd be a lot closer than many might expect. And I'm sure Alonso, having watched Heikki test for a year, will be all too well aware of that.

If it's true that Bernie wants to see Nelson Piquet Jr in a Renault next year and that Flav is of a similar mind and Fernando can't partner Fisi again, the double champion would probably prefer Nelsinho to Heikki. But he's probably not old enough to appreciate what Nelson Sr did to Niki. And he's got no DC10s to go and play with, either ...

Right now, the over-riding perception revolving around F1, rightly or wrongly, is simply Lewis Hamilton: Megastar! You knew it when you watched him on Parkinson recently, when he got top billing, ahead of conservative party leader David Cameron.

Lewis came across well and, when Cameron finally came on, there was a good line from Parky. With Tony Blair, Parkinson said to Cameron, you got a sense of mutual respect between the pair of you, but with Gordon Brown it seems pretty clear that's not the case. "Is he your Alonso?" Parky asked, to widespread laughter.

Like I said - important things, perceptions.