The 'Buck Stops Here

After 31 years - and roughly 230,000 cigarettes - Autosport Grand Prix editor NIGEL ROEBUCK is bowing out. Here, he looks back on his time at the magazine

More than anything, it's the row of Autocourses that gets across to me just how long I have worked for this magazine: the last 31 of them cover that period of my life. I joined Autosport the very week - in September 1976 - that Niki Lauda made his comeback at Monza, 40 days after being given the Last Rites. And logically I suppose I should begin there.

I had been at the Nurburgring when Lauda crashed, knew he was unlikely to survive the night, and drove back, anticipating the worst. Next morning, though, the news was that he was still fighting for his life, and five weeks later came the rumour - barely credible - that he might drive at Monza the following Sunday. And so he did, finishing fourth. Afterwards I was in the Ferrari pit, watching in silence as he gingerly peeled his balaclava from the still-fresh wounds.

Time was when black humour abounded in motor racing, a necessary device, perhaps, to cope with an environment that could be frequently grim. And when it comes to black humour, N Lauda has ever been the master practitioner.

When he crashed at Bergwerk, on the second lap, the race was red-flagged, but eventually it was decided to start again, to have a whole new grand prix. "So the first race," someone said to Lauda years later, "never happened." "Well, if it never happened," Niki retorted, "what happened to my fucking ear?"

It was some time before medical help reached him that day - Chris Amon remembers going with Hans Stuck to find a field telephone so as to sound the alarm - and the accident brought an end to Formula 1 at the Nordschleife.

A year on, the German Grand Prix had a new, rather less distinguished home, and John Watson summed up the feelings of many of his colleagues. "I'd rather race at the Nurburgring," he said, "but I'd rather survive at Hockenheim." Lauda won the race, and went on to clinch his second world championship.

That year, 1977, was the first in which I covered F1 for Autosport. Budgets being tight ('twas ever thus), it was decided by a suit somewhere that, for the time being, I should attend only the European events. My first report, therefore, was from Jarama, on the outskirts of Madrid, where Mario Andretti's Lotus 78 dominated.

It goes without saying that F1, while conspicuously more perilous, was also more laidback in those days. There would be a room set aside in which the journalists could type, but few had TVs, and there were no press conferences or releases. Conversely, you could wander freely around the pits, unhindered by security goons, and the drivers were much more accessible - and free to speak their minds.

This came back to me in the summer past, when a press release reassured us all that Lewis Hamilton had not used the F-word in the course of his radio exchanges with Ron Dennis in Hungary. Those of a less gentile mien have used it with enthusiasm for generations, as countless of my tapes confirm.

Brambilla at Monaco in '77, for example. The late Vittorio was never the steadiest of drivers, and in that race had a wild battle with Laffite, resolved in Jacques's favour when Brambilla made a series of 'unforced errors'.

"Problems with the car?" I asked. Vittorio's English was limited, but he got the message across: "Could not fucking see!" Then he showed me his new balaclava, of a type fashionable at the time, with separate eye-holes. It was plainly too big for him, and he conveyed that it had been moving around under his helmet, so that only occasionally were the eye-holes where he needed them to be. Made it difficult, he said, driving round Monaco like that. I said I could see how it might. When I told Laffite, he nearly fainted.

That summer the Lotus was the quickest, if not the most reliable, car, and Andretti cleverly hoodwinked everyone by talking about 'locked diffs' and 'corner weighting', with which he - alone - had become familiar at Indianapolis, and was now applying to F1. We did wonder, however, why the bottom of the bodywork had long rows of small brushes attached, and eventually the message got through that they helped form a rudimentary seal with the ground. We were seeing the beginning of 'ground effect', which sucked the car down, and made for phenomenal grip.

Hence one of Mario's great phrases, which meant nothing - and everything. How was the car? "Man, like it's painted on the road."

Perhaps the most memorable weekend of my first year with Autosport was Silverstone, where Renault raced its revolutionary turbocharged car for the first time - and where Gilles Villeneuve, who would become a friend, made his startling F1 debut for McLaren.

It was a little different from Lewis Hamilton's entry to the top level. Straight from Formula Atlantic in Canada, Villeneuve flew to England, where he had minimal time to acclimatise to a car vastly quicker than anything he had driven before, and to a circuit he had never seen.

There were so many entries for the British Grand Prix 30 years ago that a day was set aside for pre-qualifying, and it featured 14 drivers, one of whom was Gilles. I lost count of the number of times he spun - but he never hit anything, and was conclusively quicker than anyone else. "I had a lot to learn," he said, "and no time! So I went faster and faster until the car let go - then I knew how much was too fast."

In the race, his old M23 set the fifth fastest lap, and we marked this little guy down as something special. Unfathomably, McLaren declined to sign him for '78, whereupon Enzo Ferrari acted on a hunch, and the foundations of legend were laid.

You got fine quotes in that era. At Zandvoort Andretti went to pass Hunt on the outside of the long Tarzan hairpin, and at the exit was rudely chopped. Both were out on the spot, and I asked Mario for his thoughts. "James Hunt - he's champion of the world, right? Problem is, he thinks he's the king of the goddam world! He says to me, 'We don't overtake on the outside in Formula 1'. Well, I got news for him..."

The following year, with Ronnie Peterson as his team mate, and Colin Chapman's sublime Lotus 79 with which to work, Andretti duly won the world championship - at the same time competing in all rounds of the (Indycar) USAC Championship which did not clash. Sounds incredible now, but that's what he did.

By the time of Monza, Andretti's only mathematical rival was Peterson, but when Ronnie was taken back into the Lotus fold, he accepted Chapman's condition that '78 was to be Mario's year, that it was a championship he had earned.

In the course of that season the two men became close friends, Peterson - by his own admission the world's worst test driver - acknowledging that the 79 would not have been the car it was without Andretti's expertise. Ronnie had reignited his career, and was in demand again.

At Zandvoort he told me he had signed a McLaren contract for 1979, whereupon another driver suggested that now Ronnie was leaving Lotus, he could forget any obligations and simply go for the championship. "I gave my word," he said simply, and that shut the oaf up.

Over the Monza weekend I spent a lot of time at Lotus, in what passed for a motorhome in those days. Although the atmosphere was outwardly calm, there was a certain tension - perhaps not surprising, since these were the only drivers who could take the title.

Much later, at an Interlagos test just before Christmas, I mentioned it to Andretti. "At Monza," he said, "Ronnie was more uptight than I'd ever seen him. He and I really used to level with each other, but that weekend we hardly said a word, never shook hands before the race, which we'd always done before. Exactly what was happening there, I don't know. It was nothing bad, just something of the moment, but it bothered me at the time. Just like there was something in the air..."

Within seconds of the start, there was a ghastly multiple accident, in which Peterson suffered severe leg injuries. That being so, Andretti was confirmed as world champion, but that evening in the motorhome the atmosphere was subdued, the champagne unopened. Then there came a call from Professor Sid Watkins at the Niguarda Hospital in Milan and, after Mario had hung up, his mood was transformed: "Ronnie's legs are pretty bad, but they can be fixed - and his vital signs are good. He's going to be okay!" The Moet et Chandon was duly uncorked.

Next morning I got an early flight back to Heathrow, and was waiting at the luggage carousel when Colin Dryden, of The Daily Telegraph, arrived, having just spoken to his office. "Ronnie's died," he said.

At about the same moment, Andretti, arriving at the hospital, was met by Emerson Fittipaldi. And Mario, facing a barrage of TV interviewers, inimitably summed up the conflict everyone felt about the sport in those days: "Unhappily, motor racing is also this."

Peterson had been a hero across the world, not least to Michele Alboreto, whose blue-and-yellow helmet was in homage to Ronnie, among the fastest drivers of all time.

Villeneuve, another Peterson fan, now took over his mantle as the fastest - and most spectacular - driver in F1. In 1979 he narrowly lost the championship to his more measured team-mate, Jody Scheckter, but Ferrari always looked to Gilles to take the battle to Williams, whose FW07 was the fastest car of the season.

There were so many memorable days that summer, and most of them seemed to involve Villeneuve - the bare- knuckle fight with Rene Arnoux at Dijon, which has gone into racing legend, the fastest ever three-wheeled lap at Zandvoort, the getaway at the Osterreichring, where he started on row three, yet led as they went away up the hill.

More than anything, though, I remember the North American races, run in the autumn. At Montreal Gilles fought a race-long battle with Alan Jones's Williams, which ended in narrow defeat, but the following weekend he won superbly at Watkins Glen.

It was in first qualifying at the Glen, though, that he laid down the most abiding memory. In monsoon conditions, he ran a lap almost eleven seconds faster than the next man, Scheckter.

I was watching with Jacques Laffite who, like many of his fellows, had declined to go out at all. "Look at him," he said, as Gilles skittered by. "He's different from the rest of us - on a separate level." And so he was.

It was in '79, too, that Williams first won a grand prix, and appropriately the venue was quintessentially English Silverstone. Jones led until he retired, at which point Clay Regazzoni took over.

For Clay, this was an Indian Summer but, if he savoured his first win in three years, it was FW's joy which meant more to him. "Bravo, Frank," he said quietly, as they shook hands. There was no champagne on the podium, in respect for the team's Saudi sponsors, but later a tumbler of whisky and a cigar were thrust in Frank's direction, and the lifelong non-smoking teetotaller bravely toyed with both as he smiled, dazed, for the photographers.

The following year Williams won the constructors' title, while Jones deservedly became world champion, but in 1981 it was his team-mate, Carlos Reutemann, who looked set to do it.

Such a strange one, Reutemann: blessed with freakish talent, he had incredible flair in a racing car, but was plagued by insecurities. For Carlos, the glass was always half-empty. At Silverstone, where he held a 14-point lead, I said that not even he could deny that things were going well. "Too well," he grimaced. "Too well..."

It couldn't be long, in other words, before his fortunes changed, but when we got to Las Vegas, the last race, he still narrowly led Piquet on points, and took a stunning pole position. Given that it was hot as hell, and that Nelson was hardly of Olympian fitness, Carlos's championship looked a foregone conclusion - yet after one lap he was back in fifth, and by the end eighth, lapped. It remains the most inexplicable collapse I have seen, a day of acute private tragedy for a great driver.

Piquet, meantime, finished fifth, semi-comatose. He had to be lifted from his car, and it was some time before he was able to walk to the podium. At the informal press conference, he slumped in a chair, barely able to speak - but world champion nonetheless.

This was Jones's last race, and he won with ease. Beforehand I had asked him who he wished to win the title, Reutemann or Piquet. "Couldn't care less," he laughed. "Can't stand either of them."

Jones and Villeneuve, by contrast, constituted something of a mutual admiration society, but now the one was gone, and the other, tragically, would shortly follow.

I have written many times of the events leading up to Gilles's death, of Didier Pironi's duplicity towards his team-mate at Imola, of the accident in qualifying at Zolder two weeks later, of my long conversation with Villeneuve between times, in which he declared he would never speak to Pironi again.

In my early days in the business, my colleague Eoin Young told me that I would become good friends with a racing driver, that he would be killed, that thereafter I would never feel quite the same about racing again. Happened to everyone, he said. In his case it had been Bruce McLaren. That Saturday at Zolder remains the worst day at a race track I have known.

A month on we were in Canada, at the circuit newly renamed for the country's fallen hero, and Pironi took pole position, afterwards dedicating it to Gilles: "Because we all know that if he'd been here, he would be on pole." I was listening, on the PA, with Keke Rosberg, whose response was succinct: "If it wasn't for him, Gilles would be here."

Following Villeneuve's death, his close buddy Patrick Tambay was drafted in to drive number 27, and he won at Hockenheim, bringing tears to the eyes of Enzo Ferrari. The day before, unsighted by spray, Pironi had crashed hideously, suffering leg injuries which would end his career. "Addio mondiale," said a sad old man, watching on TV in his farmhouse at Fiorano. Goodbye, world championship.

The following season Tambay took his only other win, and what made it unforgettable was that it came at Imola, where Villeneuve had been deceived a year earlier. Patrick was emotional afterwards, but defiant too. When I shook his hand, his grip was like steel. Justice, he whispered, had been done.

It was in 1984 that we greeted one destined to reach mythological status in F1. At Kyalami I saw Ayrton Senna in a grand prix car for the first time - and it didn't, in all truth, make much of an impression. Granted, his Toleman-Hart was not the quickest car, but he qualified only 13th, and finished sixth, two laps down. What I remember most, quite honestly, was that this supposed phenomenon wasn't fit enough: at the end of the race he had to be helped from the car.

Before long, though, we were taking the mysterious newcomer - Ayrton always had an unearthly quality - very seriously. In Monaco it rained, and at this, a circuit where mistakes are punished, he was brilliant. After Nigel Mansell had slung the race away, Prost's McLaren led, but Senna was on his tail when race director Jacky Ickx concluded that it was too dangerous to continue, and put out the red flag.

One might have expected a rookie to be elated at being runner-up in only his sixth race, but Senna was incensed - much as would be the case at Monaco, 23 years later, with L Hamilton.

The following season we had another ultra-wet race, at Estoril, and by now Ayrton had moved to Lotus. On a day when Piquet at one point stopped and changed into dry overalls, Senna annihilated his rivals, lapping all save Alboreto. As soon as he was past the flag, he undid his belts, half out of the car in his jubilation, but later he was curiously matter-of-fact, as if this were merely the first of many victories. Which it was, of course.

Until Senna moved to McLaren in 1988, though, it was Prost who remained king of the hill, and no one ever made winning seem so simple, so undramatic. Take his weekend in Monaco in 1986: pole position by half a second, victory by half a minute. At no point did Alain seem to be hurrying - you felt you could have done it yourself.

The best grand prix I have ever seen was in Adelaide that year, when for once a championship decider more than lived up to its promise. Mansell, Piquet and Prost were all in contention, but the two Williams-Hondas had a decided power advantage over Alain's McLaren-TAG, and Nigel - who needed only to finish third - was the heavy favourite.

He was running where he needed to be, too, when his left-rear tyre exploded, and Williams then brought Piquet in for a precautionary change - leaving Prost, who had suffered a puncture and driven flat-out thereafter, to win both race and championship. When he took the flag, Alain's fuel tank was about dry.

Mansell's championship would come, finally, in 1992, when he drove the 'active-suspension' Williams-Renault FW14B, perhaps the most superior F1 car ever built. But the two races of Nigel's which most stay with me - for very different reasons - are Silverstone in '87 and Montreal '91.

In the first he was astounding, at his fearless best, as he chased down team-mate Piquet in the closing laps, having made an unscheduled stop. Down to Stowe he feinted left, then darted right and into the lead. A quite fantastic move, a masterpiece of freestyle motor racing.

At Montreal Mansell should have won too - had he not begun to wave to the crowds a lap too soon. When the revs dropped too low, the engine died - with less than a mile to the flag. It was perhaps the silliest reason to lose a grand prix in the history of the sport.

The late '80s and early '90s were, of course, dominated by the rivalry - if one may use so pale a word in this context - between Prost and Senna. Team-mates at McLaren in 1988 and '89, they were a class above the rest and took a championship apiece, but there was no reason for the feud to become as bitter as it did - save that Ayrton set his sights squarely on Alain, then perceived as the best, and was ready to do whatever it took to displace him.

Let me say at once that Senna was quicker, of that there is no need of discussion. However, I thought Prost - as a complete racing driver - the better of the two, and emphatically the more balanced.

When Alain went to pass his rival on the pit straight at Estoril in 1988, Ayrton - at 190mph - swerved at him, putting him precariously close to the pit wall. Prost went on to win, but afterwards admitted to being shaken by what Senna had done: "I knew how much he wanted the championship, but it wasn't until today that I realised he was prepared to die for it."

We were shaken too. Moves of that kind may be commonplace now, but 20 years ago they were regarded as underhand, even lunatic. As the sport has become incomparably safer, so its ethics have gone down the pan.

Three years running, we went to Suzuka to see the championship decided between these two. On the first occasion Senna won, fair and square, but in '89 he was behind Prost and eventually tried a desperate move at the chicane, which relied - for success - on Alain's giving him room, which he declined to do. The cars touched, and although, on the road, Senna won, he was subsequently disqualified.

This made him pathologically angry, and in 1990 he sought retribution, spearing into Prost's Ferrari at the first corner, at perhaps 150mph. With 24 cars behind them, it was a criminally irresponsible way of making a point - Prost's sheared-off rear wing could have come down anywhere - and for me remains the most reprehensible single action by a racing driver in the annals of the sport.

When, in Adelaide a fortnight later, Senna was shown a photograph of himself driving into Prost, his response was... instructive. "That's a lie!" he said.

He was such a strange man. Kind, fundamentally, even gentle, yet capable - in extremis - of actions that bordered on madness. If ever a racing driver were incapable of compromise, it was Ayrton Senna, and of course that's what killed him.

Once Prost had retired, Senna was different again. Now that the nemesis was no longer a threat, there was no reason he should not be a friend. That is how concentrated Ayrton was. In the last weeks of his life, he spoke to Alain often on the 'phone, invariably - ironically - about matters of safety.

By now he had a new worry, of course. At Spa, in 1991, one Michael Schumacher had appeared, having what was to prove a one-off drive for Jordan. F1 recognises paydirt when it sees it, and by the next race the wunderkind was at Benetton, signed and sealed. Precisely one year after his debut he won at Spa, and history's most successful grand prix career was on its way.

"It would have been magic, just magic," sighed Bernie Ecclestone, when considering what a Senna-Schumacher rivalry might have done for the sport, but sadly it ended almost before it had begun. At Imola, in 1994, Michael won, and Ayrton died.

When I think back now to that spring weekend, it is of course with melancholy, but also some bewilderment, for it was as if normality had been suspended, as if it were suddenly impossible to crash a racing car without hurt. In qualifying, on Saturday, Roland Ratzenberger became the first driver to lose his life at a grand prix for a dozen years, and the second followed only a day later.

The reason for Senna's accident became a cause celebre, with all manner of theory put forward. My own belief has always been that Ayrton, in a Williams FW16 still far from honed, simply went into Tamburello at a speed, and on a line, which the car, for whatever reason, could not sustain. At this, the third race of the season, he was without a point, and driving out of his skin to stay ahead of Schumacher's faster Benetton.

Senna's accident changed the face of grand prix racing forever. Since 1994 the emphasis - not surprisingly - has been overwhelmingly on safety and, as Professor Watkins has said, that has meant the inevitable loss of much of the panache with which the sport was synonymous. When we went back to Imola a year later, Tamburello had been completely reworked and, as the Prof smilingly pointed out, Ayrton himself would have hated it!

After May Day 1994 the Schumacher era began, Michael ultimately achieving a level of domination, in his Ferrari years, which not even Senna could have envisaged. Seven world championships... two more even than Fangio. Through most of his time at the top, only Mika Hakkinen was a true rival.

In the course of his 15 years in F1, Schumacher quite often behaved ruthlessly, and sometimes - as when he took out Damon Hill at Adelaide in 1994, and tried to do the same to Jacques Villeneuve at Jerez in '97 - despicably. As with Senna, his legacy is by no means entirely positive.

And yet, if I want to recall a race of Michael's, it is not one of those in which he fought the good - or bad - fight, when he banged wheels, and got into angry post-race exchanges. It is not even his last grand prix, when he drove sublimely after an early puncture, and left in our minds, as a final calling card, a perfect pass of Kimi Raikkonen, the man due to succeed him at Ferrari.

No, I think of the Belgian Grand Prix in 2002, of a day as perfect as a man may have in a grand prix car. In a season of Ferrari domination, Schumacher had recently 'allowed' Rubens Barrichello to win in Hungary, but this was special, this was Spa, his favourite place.

What Michael gave us that afternoon was F1 distilled to its essence. He wasn't racing anyone - that wasn't necessary. He was simply out for the afternoon, revelling in his art.

It should have been boring, like so many other races that season, but it wasn't. It was the best driver on earth, at the best circuit, and the symmetry was perfection - something at which Lewis Hamilton, better as a rookie than any of them, can aim in the years to come.

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- The Autosport.com Team

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