To the racers the spoils

Back in the days when the Long Beach Grand Prix was a Formula 1 race, it was our invariable custom, the night before the race, to go to Ascot, where the sprint cars were doing their thing. This was motor racing at its most primitive, its most raw, and Denis Jenkinson was entranced by it.

'Jenks', the sport's most celebrated journalist, was never one to turn up his nose at anything but F1. He adored the immediacy of sprint car racing, its sheer violence, but also appreciated the throttle control of the best drivers, and relished the absence of mirrors on the cars: "That's why you don't get bloody baulking..."

This was 25 years ago, you understand, when 'baulking' was still considered a sin.

Something else about sprint car racing much to Jenks's taste was that, for the feature race of the evening, the grid was invariably reversed, so that the quick guys started at the back. "Now," he'd say, rubbing his hands, "we'll find out who's a racer, and who isn't..."

On the strength of Suzuka last weekend, there is quite a case to be made for 'reverse grids' - all right, I'm not being entirely serious, but perhaps you can understand why the thought crept into my mind. Thanks to the vagaries of the weather on Saturday, we finished up with a quite surreal grid, in which virtually every driver of real significance was towards the back.

Throw in that this was a real race track, where driver virtuosity counts for a lot, and that grip levels were uncertain on a 'green' surface, and you thought of Jenks: "Now we'll find out who's a racer..."

In point of fact, they all were - all the ones we're talking about, anyway. Montoya was bounced into the wall on the opening lap, when he - like Alonso, like Raikkonen, like Schumacher - was striving to make up a lot of places in a short time, but in those circumstances it was always likely that one of the chargers was going to fall foul of a backmarker.

As it was, JPM's shunt brought out the safety car - and thus was delivered the final ingredient for a memorable afternoon. Had the leaders, particularly Giancarlo Fisichella, been able to continue at their own pace at that stage, there is no way the likes of Kimi and Fernando would ever have been able to get on terms. Now we had a whole new race, and an hour and a half later were able to reflect on one of the greatest grands prix in history. Never for an instant had the action flagged.

Nor the tension. And that tension, I suspect, will have continued far into the evening for anyone in the company of Flavio Briatore. By the time the leaders were halfway round their last lap, Flav had already left the pit wall, and I was thinking of something he had said to me a year or so ago.

At the '04 French Grand Prix, Jarno Trulli (then with Renault) surrendered third place to Rubens Barrichello on the final lap, and Briatore was incensed. When Trulli was replaced in the team, many wondered if this had been at the root of it.

"Mmmm, not really," said Flavio, a while later. "It was not one thing, one situation, which made me change - it wasn't that I said, 'OK, you fire Jarno because he didn't keep ahead of Rubens in Magny-Cours'. Mind you," he growled, "sure I was very upset by that, because I never saw anyone lose a place like that in the last corner - impossible to overtake in that corner, right? I was not happy at all..."

We were talking about a third place, remember, and in the middle of a season.

On Sunday it was a matter of victory - and at a crucial point, when the constructors' championship (valued highly by the teams, if not the public) is up for grabs. By failing to hold off Raikkonen, Fisichella not only lost a race that was bought and paid for, but also seriously jeopardised Renault's hopes of winning 'the contructors' for the first time.

Had he somehow scrambled and fudged a way of keeping Raikkonen back for another three miles, Renault's points lead would have been six; as it is, going to Shanghai, McLaren-Mercedes are but a couple adrift.

Recently, Briatore defended Fisichella's disappointing season, and I imagine Giancarlo will be glad just now that Flavio said there was no question of his not partnering Alonso in '06. As Raikkonen loomed ever closer during those late laps at Suzuka, it was like a big cat moving in on a tethered goat.

As I watched, I remembered Monza, where I had been in the Renault pit, headphones on, listening to the talk between drivers and race engineers; remembered the exhortations to Fisichella from Alan Permane: "Giancarlo, pick the pace up a bit, please. You're lapping half a second slower than Fernando."

Then, rather more urgently, "Giancarlo, Raikkonen is five seconds behind you - and a lot quicker. You've got to push, mate, you've got to push." And finally, "Raikkonen's right up behind you, mate - there's only six laps to go - you've got to keep pushing." At no point in the afternoon did Rod Nelson ever need to say anything of the kind to Alonso.

Fisichella is a beautiful driver to watch, a stylist, a man of immaculate line, and when all is right he can be phenomenally quick. A few years ago, following a poll, he was announced as 'the drivers' driver', and undoubtedly his fellows rate him highly.

But 'driving' is only part of it. Throughout history there have been drivers of consummate ability who have hardly won a thing, and maybe it's not by coincidence that invariably they have been well-balanced human beings.

The great ones, though, have always had another quality - a further quality.

"It's what the Italians simply call 'cuore'," Jenks would say. "'Heart'. That's why they loved Gilles [Villeneuve] - he had more of it than anyone. It's what a racer finds in himself when there's nothing left to find..."

I suppose what it amounts to is a refusal to be beaten. It's what Villeneuve, tyres long gone, found in the closing laps at Dijon in 1979, in that fight to the death with Rene Arnoux's faster Renault, which has passed into motor racing legend. It's what Alonso or Raikkonen or Schumacher would have found on the final lap on Sunday, leading, and under threat. And what Fisichella, sadly for him, could not.