From today's soaraway Sun:
... allow me to let you in to a little secret. All Formula One drivers are pretty much identical. Occasionally you get one — like Ayrton Senna — who’s 0.1 per cent better than the rest, but mostly they all have the same ability. I mean it. Some are in the sport because their dads paid. Some are there because their dads like to be on television. Some are there through luck and some through persistence. It doesn’t matter though. When it comes to driving, they are all the same...
What matters is the car... And so we arrive at the main reason why Formula One has been turned on its head this year. When Michael Schumacher started winning world championships, he was driving for a team that employed someone called Ross Brawn. When he moved to Ferrari and started winning world championships there, the team employed — Ross Brawn.
And in all that time, only one other team ever consistently mounted a serious threat. That would be McLaren using a car designed by someone called Adrian Newey. This year, of course, two new teams have risen to the top. Brawn, run by Ross Brawn and Red Bull, using a car designed by Adrian Newey.
He might be exaggerating slightly - and mentioning Ayrton Senna but not the evil genius Michael Schumacher is downright churlish - but the facts seem to stack up. Maybe the whole thing is down to Ross Brawn - who doesn't just design the car but make split-second decisions on tyre, fuel and pit-stop strategies as well - and Adrian Newey.
Saturday, 16 May 2009
Jeremy Clarkson on Formula One
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8 comments:
Not quite, but nearly. Brawn and Newey are very very good. And all the F1 drivers are quick. Quicker than you can possibly believe - and I can speak from experience having once been in the same race as Stirling Moss. And it is true that perhaps there is 0.1 second between them, all other things ebing equal, but they never are.
Schumacher, whom I consider to be a cheat, was quickish, plus he was very able at the politics and getting the right people around him. Somewhat like Fangio.
It has just been revealed that Ferrari has had a special deal with the FIA since 1998 basically they had a contract that allowed them to dictate the rules. In other words McLaren et al were simply the foils for Ferrari. This is essentially the problem with F1. It is a dictatorship, contracted to an oligarch and run as a cartel with an excess of regulation. It is a paradigm for all that is wrong with wstern capitalist democracy in general.
For the avoidance of doubt I hold no particular candle for current F1.
L, of course Schumacher was an absolutely outrageous cheat, on top of his undisputed driving skills, but somehow he managed to get away with it most of the time.
If Ferrari really have the whip hand, how come they are doing so badly this year? And if Ferrari really 'ruin' things, then fewer people will watch, advertising revenues etc will drop and F1 will die off by itself.
I personally got bored with F1 years ago, but other people still enjoy watching it, so fair play to them. There are plenty of other things to do on a Sunday beside watching F1.
MW Para 2 - eggsaktly. And that is waht is happening, hence the budget capping bollocks. Ferrari are doing badly because there was a massive rule change which they thought they'd cracked, but hadn't. They have been sabre rattling and trying to enforce the rules approval contract with the FIA.
The whole thing is corrupt, as you'd expect from something run by a dictator of the progeny boasted of by Max.
I am not yet bored by F1 because I am a cognoscenti, but I am really angry about the way it is run. And the way it is run reflects the way many democracies are currently run. With the same problems. And like the democracies the solutions proposed by the statist bureaucrats and oligarchs and cartels are the same and flawed in the same way. More rules. More price controls. More regulation.
F1 like democracy will grow and prosper if there are less rules and more democracy. Max is not the man to do this.
Just to make myself clear I am much more interested in people doing their own sporting thing rather than watching other people do it. I race. I am averagely competent. I have raced at Spa. I can watch a GP driver take his car round Pouhon and marvel at it, because I know how difficult it is.
Oh and Clarkson is wrong. It is not going round the corners that makes you quick. It's how late you can brake for them and hence how much speed you can carry into them that makes you quick. And that ability is very very hard to acquire. Hamilton is excellent at it. Button also very good. Both are better than Schumacher was, especially as we now know that he, Schumacher, had a deal to make sure his car was always better.
On the whole I agree with Clarkson - they are all pretty much the same talent wise. However, there are a few who are not only very quick, but are also able to "manage" the car over the length of a race - looking after tyres, not over-stressing the engine and gearbox and so on. Then there are a few who are absolutely rubbish at that - the engine breakers and tyre shredders. So, if you put them all in the same car and asked them to do a quick lap they'd all be within 0.1 of each other, but over the course of an F1 race the smoother drivers would rise to the top. That's the thing with Senna - he was not only quick he was very good at managing the car. You rarely saw him at the ragged edge, he never missed an apex (apart from that once and that wasn't his fault) and you rarely saw him lock his brakes.
I like the dual challenge of motorsport. The engineering and the driver. F1 is - should be - the pinnacle of that challenge. But now Le Mans prototypes are more technically innovative than F1, because of the stupid 'regulations'.
You either get the dual challenge bit or you don't. I think this has a lot to do with the love it or hate it attitude to motor sport. If you look at the history of the success of F1 it is centred in the UK. Its post WW2 roots grew out of the pre war specials built for hillclimbs and Brooklands and the 750 Motor Club. This latter gave the opportunity to engineers like Chapman, Broadly (Lola), Len Terry (contract designer), Derek Bennett (Chevron) and others to hone race car engineering skills and ideas. Many of them were truly innovative and creative people. These blokes developed partnerships with real racers, Chapman and Clarke for example. One creating the machine in which the other could demonstrate their skills.
For blokes like me, the race is as much about the best of engineering as it is about the best of driving. But I am a motor sport fan, not an F1 fan. I don't really have any team favourites or driver favourites, although of course it pleases me when a Brit wins.
But I am not a generous viewer. I won't pay stupid prices to go and watch a GP - I've never been to one - if for the same money I can go and race myself. So I'm no good to the Max and Bernie show. I am no good to the manufacturers. I am no good to the sponsors. Max and Bernie need the more tribal fan who supports a team or a driver and who loves F1. Who can be pursuaded by the sponsorship. Who does think BMW build the greatest cars on the planet (IMHO a Mondeo is better than a 3 series). And this is where they have taken F1. It's been dumbed down into a spec formula that most people can understand. This of course gives it a wider audience. I mean, what Arab that you know will spend hours in his shed building his own race car?
At the same time the media need all the prima donna hissy fits thrown by various star drivers, all of which M & B love as it adds to the 'show'.
In short F1 has been taken away from its roots. It is no longer what I originally thought of as Grand Prix racing. It's a show.
I'm sure a lot of punters tune in just in case there is a big crash.
"Lola" is spot on... F1 isn't really "motor racing" any more - it's a glossy, noisy, adjunct to the advertising industry.
As to the relative performance of the drivers, I remember hearing Michael Schumacher being interviewed a few years ago (when the gap betwen the first and last cars on the grid was around 4 seconds) and opining that the difference between all the drivers was almost certainly less than one second and the rest was down to the car.
As to whether they're "the best drivers in the world", I'm not so sure... Because of the weight rules in most of the "lower formulae" (where only the car is weighed, not the driver) to be successful it's necessary to be small and/or light. All F1 drivers fall into this category, even Robert Kubica, who's supposed to be over 6 feet, only weighs about 65 kilos and most of them are really quite small blokes - spectacularly fit, but tiny.
I'm an ex-racer too. I've even raced against some of the F1 guys of my day. Modesty forbids me from saying how I got on. :-)
Oh go on Pogo, enlighten us!
My personal skill assessment marker is how well a driver can brake. This works as current F1 cars do not have anti-lock. Late braking separates out the good from the average. Next is how much speed they can carry through a corner. And next the exit speed, now that traction control is banned (Yeah. Right).
I still don't reckon that Schuey was that quick. His principal skill was engineering Ferrari's domination and special deal with the FIA. Also of course he was massively arrogant.
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