08/01/2012
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
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It is that time of year when there are lists. The editor and I discussed a Top Ten Drivers of 2011, but he wasn't keen on compiling one and I was positively against it. I have no problem with a Top Ten as a starting point for a pub debate, but to publish one as an editorial feature is another matter and, besides, I am not competent to do so.
Thirty years ago, no problem and I did produce such lists back then. As season followed season, I felt less comfortable and eventually gave up. It was not advancing senility, it was the changing nature of the demands on a driver.
Consider this one fact, thirty years ago timing at a typical Formula One test session was done with stop watches. Before long it was done electronically and timed to within thousands of a second, a fraction of time which has no meaning in everyday life.
Some will tell you that there was a time when a Formula One driver made a greater input to a car's performance than today, but it is more complicated than pointing out how much quicker a Moss or a Fangio was over his team-mates. Cars and engines were not made to the fine tolerances they are today and a team leader got the best kit. At Vanwall, Moss could drive all the cars and chose his favoured chassis, engine and gearbox.
Further down the line, it was widely rumoured that, at teams whose name ended with a vowel, a driver's wife or girl friend could influence the allocation of equipment. I have no idea what this means.
With computerised machining and all the rest, drivers today receive identical cars. It is only comparatively recently that a driver's greatest rival has become his team-mate because it was acknowledged that few teams could prepare two cars to an identical standard. When Senna vetoed Warwick's move to Lotus in 1986, it was not because he feared Derek's speed, it was because he knew that Lotus could not service joint number one drivers.
Senna had no problem joining Alain Prost at McLaren because McLaren was, with Williams, the first F1 team to bring identical cars to the line.
If you were driving a Maserati 250F say, your greatest enemy was heat, particularly in the brakes. Today's driver has to manage heat because if he has not heat in his tyres and brakes, he is not able to generate the downforce to allow him to corner at speed.
One reason why some of us are fascinated by historic racing and sports cars is that they hold no mysteries. If we can drive a Ford Fiesta, we can drive a Vanwall or a Lister-Jaguar. We may not be quick, but we can drive around a circuit. By contrast, nobody without the right background experience, can simply climb aboard a current F1 car and make it work. Much of the technique of driving a current F1 car is counter-intuitive to regular driving and most of us would have a problem even driving one in a straight line, if we could get it off the line in the first place.
Consider tyres, which are now crucial to a race strategy. Until the end of 1951, F1 cars ate tyres but then they had to carry a lot of fuel. In the latter stages of the Alfa Romeo Alfetta, it was achieving barely one mile per gallon and races were at least 300 miles long. The Alfa Romeo 159 consumed three quarters of a ton of fuel during a Grand Prix. Refuelling was by funnel and churns and took so long that you might as well change tyres at the same time. There was nothing strategic about tyres.
From 1952, tyre stops became a matter of occasional expediency. Maserati used half tanks and fresh rear tyres in Germany 1957, a strategy which allowed Fangio to score his last victory and to clinch his fifth World Championship.
It was the first time that tyre stops had been used as a race-winning strategy though you will search in vain for any contemporary report which makes the point.
A few months later, Moss used the fact that Ferrari needed to pit for tyres to win the 1958 Argentine GP. His Cooper had bolt-on wheels and he fooled Ferrari into thinking he was going to have to take a lengthy pit stop. He fooled Ferrari again at Monza, 1959, by fitting wire wheels with knock-off hub nuts to the rear of his Cooper. Ferrari assumed that he was going to stop, but the little rascal didn't.
The first Grand Prix to be won by the choice of tyre was Germany, 1961, and it was Moss again. He chose a new Dunlop compound, the 'green spot', which gave more grip but with a greater wear rate. He gambled on there being rain and there was. It was the first time that a race was won by choice of tyre compound.
In Buenos Aires in 1958 Stirling had used Continental tyres. His entrant, Rob Walker, was trying to get a free supply from Dunlop who weren't playing so he bought some Continental tyres which were favoured by Porsche. From the early 1960s on such a casual exchange of a tyre, and its compound, became increasingly difficult, even if contracts allowed, and then quickly became impossible without lengthy test sessions.
The tyre warmer, incidentally, was invented by Mike Earle of David Purley's Lec team in 1977, it was an insulated cabinet into which hot air was pumped from a fan heater via donkey dick. Robert Synge's Madgwick Motorsport had one in 1984 on Maurizio Sandro Sala's FF2000 Reynard. Formula One was slow on the uptake. Andy Wallace driving in FF2000 in 1983 ran on pre-heated tyres and Niki Lauda did not.
A driver today has to have the sensitivity to explore a tyre lap by lap, minute by minute. Modern road tyres are now so robust and reliable that you and I sometimes forget about them. Motorists tended to be more sensitive to tyres when crossplies were common and differences in pressure more immediately apparent.
The current Formula One driver cannot do anything as spectacular as Fangio in 1957 (Germany) or Moss in 1958 (Argentina) but neither Fangio nor Moss had to worry about their tyres unless they had a puncture. Tyres did not change characteristics minute by minute. Jenson Button is known for being able to extend the life of his tyres for a few miles, sometimes only nine or ten miles, and this was not something that Nuvolari or Caracciola ever had to do.
Fangio and Moss practised for races, they did not have to qualify. Pole position was good to have for the psychological edge, but there were often four cars on the front row. The cars were narrow and were not fitted with wings. What mattered was kicking in the clutch and jumping the start by not too wide a margin.
Of course, the jumped start was part of a driver's armoury, but there was no way of proving it and no system of penalty.
The one place where pole position counted was Reims, in Champagne country. Pole attracted 100 bottles of bubbly. Jack Brabham worked out that if he overcooked things and took to the escape road at the Thillois hairpin, he could exit with a head of steam to start a flying lap. He didn't like Champagne, he just liked winning it. Some bottles appeared at daughters' weddings and that was the best Champagne because it hadn't been paid for.
Telemetry means that teams have a massive amount of information. Lotus once arrived at Goodwood for a test session in 1963, and Colin Chapman said, 'Anyone think to bring a stop watch?' Lotus won the Constructors' Championship that year and Jim Clark won 12 Formula One races, seven of which counted to the Championship.
Teams have information that that the rest of us are not privy to. I suspect that Fernando Alonso has had as great a contribution to Ferrari's recent performance as ever Fangio or Moss gave to their teams, it is just not as apparent. It is measured in tenths and not whole seconds. Engineers within a team know, but they are not going to say.
There is no way that I or any other observer could quantify Alonso's contribution. In much the same way, I have no way of assessing Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari both of whom gave been released by Toro Rosso. I had thought that both had done a reasonable job of finishing and racking up the points, but the team has information the rest of us does not have.
Everything a driver does is on a print-out, the moment he brakes, the pressure he uses, everything. There are similar, not identical, analyses in the junior formulae, even in karting. Drivers now grow up with such systems so they are used to having their performance analysed. On track testing is limited, but time on simulators is not.
Most of us could not interpret the information even if we had access to it. At different times, Fangio and Moss led the Maserati team and were the only drivers to win World Championship races for Maserati. Mechanics tested suspension settings by pushing down the rear of the car and noting how many times it bounced before coming to a rest.
Moss and Fangio are from the time when I first got hooked on racing, which is one reason I have used them. Another is that they raced before more scientific methods began to be used, often borrowed from aviation. It was also the case that innovations more often came from drivers in the 1950s because they had more to discover.
I believe that slip-streaming as a racing technique, rather than a natural phenomenon, was discovered and developed by Stirling Moss driving for HWM in 1950. Greatness depends on time and circumstance which is why no driver can ever be greater than Stirling just as no admiral can ever be greater than Nelson. I have never argued that no driver cannot be better, quicker, what you will, but greatness implies a dimension beyond excellence.
That said, I believe that there is more excellence on a current Formula One grid than at any time in history. Of course some drivers will bring money, but racing has never been a pauper's sport. There are no amateur dilettante drivers as once there were, every one on the grid today possesses skills most of us cannot even imagine.
A few engineers might, together, assemble a credible top ten, I think that the time when a journalist can do a proper job is long over.
Mike Lawrence
mike.lawrence@pitpass.com
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