"Yeah, whatever…" Photo by Darren Heath

In the immediate aftermath of last weekend’s brouhaha over team orders I started writing a blog post entitled The dreary face of orchestration in which I fully intended to lambast the hideousness of it all. I never got around to finishing it; not because I’m a lazy git, but because I got caught up in a whole load of other work*, which gave me pause for sober reflection.

That Formula 1 is a business as well as a sport is a truism we all have to accept, since without the presence of global brands and their cash injections F1 simply wouldn’t be sustainable in its current form. That said, Sunday’s events perfectly illustrate the philosophical chasm that separates the insiders from the fans. Simply put, not one of the business people and team figures I’ve spoken to since Sunday saw anything wrong with what Ferrari did. Conversely, the fans – if you exclude the zealot types who’d have approved of it even if Fernando had run over half the queue for the school bus en route to the chequered flag – were outraged by the sheer cynicism of the manoeuvre.

Alonso passes Massa, and the controversy begins… Photo by Darren Heath

From a purely pragmatic point of view, instructing Felipe Massa to let Fernando Alonso past had its merits. Alonso was 31 points ahead of Massa in the drivers’ championship and 47 behind Lewis Hamilton. Now put your calculators away and close down your spreadsheets. On an F1 pitwall, what matters is what works – now, not next week or next month. It doesn’t matter that Alonso may get run over by a bus (or, heaven forfend, actually be on a private plane that clips a building), thereby eliminating him from the rest of the season and causing Ferrari to rue the day they orchestrated the swap. In the heat of a grand prix, the future is another country. Possible championship permutations that may come about if three hens lay addled eggs? They may as well be in the horoscopes column.

So Ferrari made the choice. We all saw it coming, telegraphed well in advance like a ham-fisted soap opera twist. The FOM TV director knew it, bringing his camera to bear on the moist eyes and thoughtful mien of Rob Smedley as he prepared to push the button and deliver the instruction. This in itself was an act of pure opportunism in a dull grand prix that needed an injection of drama; they must have been whooping and high-fiving in the TV compound as the gift arrived…

The print media greeted it with a curious mix of outrage and glee: fury because most of them are, at heart, fans; joy because it brought something interesting to write about other than tyre degradation. The hunt for quotes began; as usual, Saint Martin of Whitmarsh delivered himself promptly to a microphone, but only to demur rather than condemn. He would, he said, speak privately to Ferrari about the matter, but make no public comment about it.

Joy on the podium – before the British media clamp their teeth round his ankles… Photo by Darren Heath

After all the posturing – including the absurd charade in which everyone from Ferrari continued to pretend that nothing untoward had happened – a number of insiders (Martin Brundle, Ross Brawn, David Coulthard, etc) have come out in support of team orders. Are they mad? Are they stupid? Are they corrupt? No, just so far ‘in’ that they’ve grown out of touch. They fail to appreciate that for the fans – the demographic these people deride for being naïve – Formula 1 is an emotional investment. You don’t choose a favourite team or driver as passionlessly as you might select a new fridge.

By the by, though, I wonder if they have a point. Perhaps teams should be allowed some leeway – not to use one or other of their drivers to block a rival, but at least to give one precedence over another when vital championship points are at stake. If they wish to do this – and if they don’t care what the fans think – then so be it. As my old English teacher, Mrs Lucock, was wont to say about essays handed in late: “It’s your funeral…”

For if teams don’t value your support – why should you give it to them? Invest your emotional capital elsewhere. Let ennui and ambivalence achieve what angry protest cannot.

*checking the facts and dates of a load of 1960s sportscar and non-championship F1 races in the LAT Archive for a future book project, although I had a brief diversion via a 1965 John Bolster article in AUTOSPORT entitled THINGS I HATE! Judging by the contents he hated rather a lot, since you ask..

Absolute bunkum, of course. Such a thing would require planning – and, above all, a motive. All we have is opportunity and effect; in any case, when two cars come together as violently as Mark Webber’s and Heikki Kovalainen’s did, the FIA’s race director has rather more important tasks to perform before he can get around to plotting Ferrari’s demise (I may be wrong, and it may be a great big conspiracy after all – sadly, my tinfoil hat is away being cleaned).

So, rather than entertaining these absurd notions or second-guessing the competence of the race director, Charlie Whiting, perhaps we should consider the role of the Safety Car itself. What should its philosophy be?

What I mean is this: should the deployment of the Safety Car be allowed to influence the outcome of the race, over and above the inevitable effect of closing up the field?

In this regard you can divide motor racing into two distinct camps. In sportscars, where multiple classes are racing at once, competitors have grown accustomed to the inadvertent distortions a Safety Car deployment can create. It comes out, it does its job, and if your car is on the wrong piece of road at the wrong time and gets caught out, tough luck. The best sportscar teams have evolved strategies to turn Safety Car deployments to their advantage – or at least to minimise the disadvantage.

On the other side of the fence – predominantly in US racing – the full-course yellow has become part of the entertainment portfolio. How often have you watched a NASCAR race and witnessed the peculiar phenomenon of a minor incident late in the race being used as an excuse to “throw a yellow” and artificially close up the field, thereby guaranteeing an exciting finish?

The most difficult and controversial aspect of any Safety Car deployment is the business of picking up the leader during the initial scramble. True to form, in Sunday’s race the leader – Sebastian Vettel – was already several seconds up the road when the Safety Car emerged. Second-placed Lewis Hamilton was passing the pit exit at the time and vacillated over whether to pass the Safety Car; by the time he’d done so the SC had crossed the white line, rendering the move illegal. Alonso and Felipe Massa were then stuck behind the Safety Car while Vettel and Hamilton were free to press on to the pitlane (‘free’ in the sense that they still had to observe a mandatory lap time, which several other competitors didn’t).

In order for the Safety Car to have as little impact as possible on the outcome of the race, one of two things then had to happen: either the race director would have had to contact McLaren and Red Bull and order them to have Hamilton and Vettel slow down and allow themselves to be passed by the Safety Car; or the car would have had to wait at the pit exit for another lap and then pick up Vettel. The former option was do-able, at a push (but if this were to become an official policy, what would happen if one of the drivers in question was out of radio contact?). The latter option just doesn’t bear thinking about.

When a serious accident occurs, racing must stop immediately. The deployment of the Safety Car cannot be put ‘on hold’ for fear that someone may lose out. Tough luck. Don’t blame the FIA, blame the dingbat who put their car in the wall. Or, better still, don’t blame anyone at all. Just get over it.

That said, I’d love to know why 12 laps elapsed before Lewis Hamilton was investigated for passing the Safety Car…

For Ferrari make a team as strong as the Yamaha team, it should hire Sebastian Vettel alongside Alonso… And, if [Luca di Montezemolo] is currently looking for the opportunity third car, he should give it to me.

The whiff of Google Translate hangs heavily over this piece of guff. Since the business of teams being able to run third cars is utterly dead in the water – and has been for yonks – the whole premise of this rumour is utter balls.

It’s utter balls on another front, too: Rossi is currently struggling with a career-threatening shoulder injury he sustained when he fell off his motocross bike. He’s finding it hard enough to perform in MotoGP, let alone consider a swap to Formula 1. Do none of these idiots check their facts before clicking “Publish” and charging their gullible clients a few cents?

Silly question, I suppose…

Martin Whitmarsh and Lewis Hamilton: miscommunication?

The problem with modern racing drivers is that racing is all they’ve ever known: all that time spent honing their natural, instinctive feel for how to make a car go as quickly as possible, from an early age, leaves them undeveloped in other crucial areas. Chief amongst these is their capacity to form effective relationships with other people.

Of course, even if you’re paranoid it doesn’t necessarily follow that they aren’t out to get you – but for an F1 driver, trapped in their own self-centred bubble from the moment they first grasped a steering wheel, paranoia can be extraordinarily corrosive. The merest whiff of partiality is all it takes; and then, like any message board conspiracy theorist or tinfoil hat merchant, once they have reached their conclusion they shape and interpret all incoming data to suit it, and discard anything to the contrary. It’s all downhill from there.

This mentality is what precipitated Fernando Alonso’s meltdown at McLaren in 2007. Odd, isn’t it, that someone with the inner steel to go wheel-to-wheel with their rivals at 200mph and beyond could so easily be provoked into a destructive sequence of hissy fits? And yet that’s what happened: by the end it didn’t matter whether McLaren really were favouring Lewis over Fernando or not; it was enough that he believed they were (and let’s not forget that Lewis had a tantrum of his own that year, in Monaco, because he felt the team had favoured Fernando over him – sometimes being a team principal must be like herding cats).

As documented in my previous post, a whiff of not-invented-in-Salzburg syndrome is in the air at Red Bull after the Turkish Grand Prix. But what of McLaren? Never have I seen Lewis Hamilton look so unmoved after a race win.

Having inherited the lead after the Red Bulls eliminated one another at Turn 12, Hamilton was challenged by his team-mate at exactly the same spot nine laps later. It was a brief battle, which Hamilton resolved in his favour by edging Button wide into Turn 1 at the beginning of the following lap. And then, as if in receipt of an urgent injunction from the team to play nicely, they held station for the rest of the race.

There were the beginnings of a muttered conversation between Hamilton and Jenson Button in the drivers’ pre-podium ‘green room’, but they broke it off when they realised they were within earshot of a live microphone and camera. McLaren’s race feed on their excellent new website contains no radio conversation pertaining to the events of lap 49.

Questioned later, Hamilton explained that he had been instructed to save fuel and given a target lap time, which he thought was too slow, and which enabled Button to catch him up. He also alluded to a “miscommunication” with the team (given his recent penchant for slagging them off on the air, they can be forgiven for leaning on the mute button for that one). Fleet Street drilled down into this during the official presser. He responded:

For me it was just… the communication wasn’t clear for me. When they suggested ’save this much fuel’ it was not easy to save that much fuel unless I went particularly slowly. I tried to reach that target and in doing so, Jenson was all of a sudden… he just appeared from nowhere and he was up my tail and then there was nothing I could do.

Button, for his part, said:

For about four or five laps beforehand they were saying you have to save fuel. They didn’t put a lap time on it. They just said you have got to save a bit of fuel. That was quite early in the race I was told to do that, probably about lap 30.

It’s possible that Button, having stayed in touch with the leading trio in the first half of the race without seriously pushing them, had burned less fuel and therefore had more ‘in his pocket’. Does the team’s failure to set him a target lap time, as they did with Hamilton, equate to favouritism? As conspiracy theories go, this is very thin gruel.

Still, as I said, it doesn’t matter whether there is any favouritism or not. What matters is the individual’s belief that it exists. At the end of the FIA press conference there was an illuminating exchange prompted by F1’s pre-eminent banana-eater, Michael Schmidt:

Q: Lewis, what happened at the pit stop because Sebastian was able to jump you. Was there any problem?

LH: I don’t know, I have to…

MW: We put fuel in, I think, at the pit stop.

LH: It seemed to be quite a…

MW: My guys weren’t quick and I thought ‘Lewis’s guys are also having a bit of a break.’

In the toxic mental landscape of the paranoid, even a sticky rear wheelnut can be taken as evidence. Mark Webber clearly has a monkey on his back. Is there one astride Lewis Hamilton’s shoulders too?

Mark Webber: hard but fair? Photo by Darren Heath

Mike Conway, currently recuperating from major surgery to his legs and spine, will know precisely what AJ Foyt meant when he described the consequences of two cars touching at racing speed on the banking at Indianapolis: “School’s out, baby.”

As the simmering tension behind the scenes at Red Bull Racing manifested itself before our very eyes at Turn 12 of Istanbul Park on Sunday, I was minded of another quote – one that is (pluggety plug) going to feature in my next book. Graham Hill, in a 1967 interview, said:

I have a little mental card index for every driver. No driver responds in exactly the same way, so I have this little mental index which I look up whenever I come up on another driver so that I know what to expect from him. If you know all this, obviously you’re not going to put yourself in a position which might be very embarrassing.

This might sound terribly self-righteous, and I don’t intend it to be, but very often a lot of near misses can be anticipated and this comes through experience with the people you’re driving against.

If Sebastian Vettel was in possession of such a card index he’d have known not to swerve into the path of Mark Webber in a crass attempt to intimidate him out of the way (if that’s what it was). Steering a Formula 1 car is like flying a kite; at 200mph the merest dip of the hand on the steering wheel can induce a sharp change of direction. Close analysis of the onboard footage shows that this is what Vettel did.

Webber? He moves over for no one. That nugget would come at the top of his entry in the card index. He is hard but fair, and tough as old boots.

On the face of it, a racing incident – an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Behind it we can trace the fault lines of an increasingly fractious relationship – not so much between the drivers as between the racing team and Red Bull itself.

Commentators have been quick to accuse the team of outright bias towards Vettel. Let’s look at that in a level-headed way, shall we? Both Red Bull and McLaren approached the Turkish Grand Prix with a risky fuel strategy; McLaren were running light so as to push, and their quarry was doing the same in the hope that they could build a gap and then turn down the wick later.

The consequence of these opposed tactics was that Red Bull entered the middle segment of the race without the gap they desired. Worse, by lap 38, when Webber was instructed to change to a leaner fuel map, Vettel was carrying around a kilo more fuel – whether this is because he had embarked with more, or had burned less through running in the slipstream of Hamilton and then Webber, is open to question. Either way, Vettel had three more laps at full chat before he too would have to ‘lean off’.

We know what happened next on-track. Off it, the picture is murkier. Helmut Marko, Red Bull’s motorsport consultant, gave an interview to the energy drink’s TV channel on Monday in which he pointed the finger at Webber’s engineer, Ciaron Pilbeam, for failing to communicate the fact that Vettel was approaching rapidly in the laps before the collision.

On Sunday evening several journalists were briefed to the effect that Christian Horner had instructed Pilbeam to tell Webber to move over and let Vettel past, but that Pilbeam had been unable to bring himself to do so. This conversational lull may be what Marko was alluding to.

In an interview with the official Formula 1 website, Marko also emitted the following curious piece of doublethink:

The fact is that if Sebastian hadn’t passed [Webber] he would have been overtaken by Hamilton.

The manoeuvre was certainly born of desperation. And the irony here is that Hamilton was also fuel-critical. Still, it begs the question: why was protecting Vettel’s position the priority? Why should Webber sacrifice his lead?

You could make a strong argument here for saying that Vettel is the favoured driver at a most senior level – not so much within the race team, but back in Salzburg, whence the money flows. Marko has the ear of Red Bull magnate Dietrich Mateschitz and he was the most unequivocal in blaming Webber – when the majority of experts saw it quite differently. Horner initially sat on the fence, but during the course of Sunday evening gravitated towards the Marko view; interestingly, he appears to have dragged Marko back to a position of neutrality in their most recent pronouncements.

Helmut Marko: Give this man a boating lake! Photo by Darren Heath

Webber’s key failings are that he is too old and not cool enough for Red Bull’s core demographic, and above all that he is neither German nor a product of the Red Bull young driver scheme (overseen by – ah yes – Helmut Marko).

Not that being any of the above would have yielded Webber any benefit as he hauled himself up the ladder all those years ago. Marko’s attention-deficit approach to superintending the careers of young drivers has wrecked every one but Vettel’s thus far; perhaps his management style would be better suited to running a small boating lake. You know: “Come in number six, your time is up…”

This thought came to me in conversation with fellow scribblers at the Silverstone launch a couple of weeks ago, and it came to me again while watching the Spanish GP on Sunday afternoon – round about lap 25, when my pen fell out of my mouth and into my lap, waking me up*. For pretty much the first time since Formula 1 slipped into an internet-enabled 24-hour news cycle we’re missing the kind of long-running story that keeps readers happy when they return to the news trough every day.

Sadly, though, because those readers are so accustomed to their daily updates, if they find the trough empty** they tend to go on the AUTOSPORT message board and vent spleen about how lazy and inept the journalists are. Thus the newshounds have really had to raid the store cupboard for odds and ends this year. When the most exciting thing to talk about is whether an F1 car’s mirrors ought to be in an outboard or inboard position, it’s time to pop outside for a reality check.

I blame Jean Todt. He’s determined to keep a low profile and not annoy anybody – at least for now. When Max Mosley was in the driving seat you could be sure that conflict would eventuate, because he combines an almost insatiable appetite for mischief with the frustrated politician’s hunger to wield absolute authority – you know, without all those other troublesome idiots getting in the way with their pettifogging demands.

Perhaps F1 could take some lessons from successful TV dramas, with their meticulously planned character development and story ‘arcs’. When viewing figures decline, the producers swing into action rather than denying that the product is losing its popular appeal.

Not that I’m suggesting we should wake up and find Max Mosley in the shower, of course, but many soap operas do get a boost when a familiar rogue reappears on the scene. We’ve already had a touch of that; Michael Schumacher’s return puts me in mind of Dirty Den coming back to Eastenders, although I hope that Michael’s comeback isn’t scuppered by some unfortunate business with a webcam.

Or could this actually be that other trope of the failing drama, when a much-loved character returns but is played by a different actor? I say this only because going by Schumacher’s race pace this year, his role is actually being performed by his younger brother – or perhaps even by Jarno Trulli, he of the ‘Trulli Train’…

* Mind you, if you think Formula 1 is boring at Barcelona, you should try watching the DTM there.

** Obviously, if you are an avid consumer of GMM crap then the trough is never empty.

First, the good news: Silverstone is ready to host the 2010 British Grand Prix and the revised layout has been granted FIA Grade One status pending what circuit boss Richard Phillips describes as “a couple of tweaks”. This in itself is a remarkable achievement given the severity of the last winter; my local sports centre has been retiling its swimming pool since November and it still hasn’t reopened yet.

The chief motivation for amending the layout was Silverstone’s new contract to host Britain’s MotoGP round. Bridge corner was adjudged too dangerous – you wouldn’t want a bike to have the same shunt as Andrea de Cesaris did in the Jordan in 1991 – but the bridge itself is integral to the circuit infrastructure, and for reasons too boring to go into at length they couldn’t just build a bigger one. Ron and Leon Haslam essayed several laps on a pair of roadgoing superbikes, while David Coulthard appeared in the Red Bull demo car (which I think is a 2006 Toro Rosso chassis with the 2009 RBR nose and rear wing), and Damon Hill took HRH the Duke of York round in the Santander two-seater.

It’s too early to call the possible effects of the new section but it represents an effective and imaginative use of existing space. Village corner has a tricky approach (complicated for the demo runs yesterday by ‘green’ asphalt, lots of dust, and a large stage directly in the drivers’ sight line), the effects of which were more pronounced for the bikes, which had a very gradual turn-in phase. The short squirt to the Loop will emphasise traction and may provide a further overtaking opportunity if someone has overcooked their approach to Village and run wide.

True to form for this part of the world, almost as soon as the engines were fired up after lunch the skies began to bruise. I was due to have a run in the Santander two-seater once the BBC finished filming, and after commiserating with one of the Motorcycle News testers (green surface? Dust? Rain? On a GSX-R1000? After you, Claude) I donned my flameproof garb. As I finished lacing up my Sparcos I realised it had all gone rather quiet. Enter the two-seater, on the back of a truck.

David Coulthard had been driving Martin Brundle round at the time, and apparently the radio conversation went something like this:

MB: I think there’s something wrong with the engine.

DC: No, it seems okay.

[PAUSE]

[**GRAUNCH**]

DC: Yeah, there’s something wrong with the engine…

A very long afternoon ensued as the mechanics traced the fault – a blown crank oil seal – and finally had to give up and call for a new engine. Still, there was amusement to be had. I learned that my otherwise risible phone insists on trying to substitute “Trundle” for “Brundle”.

My optimism ebbed and flowed as the clock ticked around towards the curfew point of 7pm. At around four o’clock the skies cleared and the sun shone once more. Almost everyone else except the various camera crews had gone home. I felt as if I was going to have the last laugh on this one. What a shame the car was still in several pieces, on axles stands, with a puddle of oil underneath.

It was half past six before the beast was reassembled and Martin set out for an installation lap with Sky’s John Desborough shoehorned into the back seat. In very short order a man in a suit appeared brandishing a walkie talkie. This is never a good sign, and indeed he seemed very put out that the car had sallied forth without appropriate clearance. Off he flounced, still gesticulating with his walkie talkie, muttering darkly that at 7pm the ambulance (an insurance requirement) was going to leave and that would be that.

The vindictive clouds chose this moment to gather again and deposit their contents upon this hallowed loop of Northamptonshire asphalt. Cue further delay as the car, now with James Allen strapped in the back, took wet tyres. You can see the video of their journey, including the new section of track, on James’s site.

I had the fireproof gear on and was about to slip on my crash helmet when the grumpy troll in his ambulance arrived at the back of the garage to signify that playtime was over.

So, a disappointing end to the day, but nothing that a restorative pint of Kingfisher, a deluxe mixed starter and a chicken jalfrezi at Farnham’s finest curry house couldn’t sort out. And there’s always a next time…

Michael Schumacher: a masterpiece of defensive driving in China. Photo by Darren Heath

I never thought I’d look down and see my fingers composing the sentence that makes up the headline of this piece. Nevertheless, since so many munchkins out there are heaping unqualified criticism upon Michael Schumacher’s ageing shoulders, someone ought to point out some balancing positives.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that during a drearily slow news month (when the most interesting thing anyone could find to talk about in print was where the wing mirrors ought to go, I knew it was time to head to the bar), Schumacher’s woeful results in the opening rounds should propel him somewhat prematurely into the firing line. Certainly his overall pace in the understeering MGP-W01 has been disappointingly ordinary, although you have to wonder how the Mercedes designers managed to conjure a chassis whose natural balance is so diametrically opposed to that of the cars that delivered him seven world championships.

So, has Michael Schumacher lost it? Speed-wise, until (or unless) Mercedes GP equips him with a ‘pointier’ car, we may never know. But last Sunday, in China, he demonstrated that his formidable racecraft is as sharp as ever. Even as he slid down the order, his dogged defence of every lost position was so mesmerising that I couldn’t wait to see it again.

Viewing all this through a 600mm lens was Formula 1’s best photographer, Darren Heath; as you can see on his blog this week, he and I see eye to eye. Regardless of where Schumacher finished on Sunday, his was a marvellous display of defensive driving. He knew the weaknesses of his car (principally a lack of traction, brought about by shifting the ballast forward to get the front end working more to his liking) and ensured that his adversaries couldn’t take advantage of them.

As Darren writes, there is an art to defensive driving:

It’s all about simple yet fundamental factors: judging your competitor’s speed and trajectory; where the grip is (and isn’t); your braking in to the corner relative to the acceleration out; and, surely, in the art of both passing and being passed the failure to slow your assailant down to your speed (so that you remain in control) is a cardinal sin.

That was the key. Watch the race again and see how Schumacher – fairly, and with exquisite precision – placed his car so as to neutralise each opponent’s speed advantage. It was textbook stuff.

*Apologies for the paucity of updates recently. I’ve been hellishly busy on several projects at once (the old curse of the freelancer; you can never say “no”), and the deadline for my second book is looming. More on that, and other things, in the coming weeks…

The indefatigable Fernando Alonso. Photo by Darren Heath

A couple of months ago, when I was interviewing Sir Stirling Moss for my next book, he was keen to draw a distinction between those drivers who can simply conduct a car quickly and those who have a special mindset – a sort of heroic indomitability, if you like:

There are very few real racers in the world, as opposed to mere racing drivers. They’re the people who have a ruddy good go. I don’t mean to say that the others aren’t trying, because they are; but they don’t have the mental ability to push to the same extent, to really take it to a higher level. In my day it would be Juan Manuel Fangio, who to my mind was the best driver there has ever been; and Jean Behra was a real racer, too. Today you would say that people such as Fernando Alonso, Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton are the real racers.

Lewis Hamilton’s combative drive to sixth position from 20^th on the grid in the Malaysian Grand Prix last week demonstrated precisely those qualities, although many observers (including, perhaps, Moss himself) would have frowned upon his abrupt treatment of Vitaly Petrov. For any race fan with a soul, though, the most impressive drive of last weekend ended with a result that will not trouble the statisticians’ figures: 13^th place for Fernando Alonso.

Hindered from the off by a recalcitrant gearbox and a clutch that appeared to have turned into chocolate, Alonso just drove around the problem, booting the throttle to persuade each gear to engage. Surely it’s not possible to drive a modern F1 car like this? On Sunday Alonso proved that it is.

There was overtaking, too; while anyone in possession of a laptop, some fingers and enough brain cells to rub together has spent the past few weeks venting spleen on the internet about the lack of passing in F1, when the need arose Alonso just got on with it. And when his engine cried enough he was attacking Jenson Button – for what? Eighth place?

Here is the real weakness of the reliability formula in which each driver has a restricted quota of engines and gearboxes to last the season. A driver taking a more corporate, long-term view of the championship would have coasted back to the garage and parked in the hope that his engine and gearbox could be salvaged.

Not Alonso, though. He was having, in the words of Moss, “A ruddy good go.” He is a real racer, as was the man who gave Alonso’s team its name. At any point in the Malaysian Grand Prix Ferrari could have ordered Alonso to retire. They didn’t; Enzo would never have stood for it…

F1 fans are a passionate bunch, and as a journalist it’s very hard to write anything about anyone without being accused of bias; especially when we indulge our penchant for hyperbole, as we do. I found during my time on customer magazines that sometimes a client will focus on something that catches their attention – something they don’t like – and it plays merry hell with their ability to judge the rest of the product. In this case, it’s James’s second line that has caused many readers to chafe:

Jenson Button won the race with a performance of measured perfection and instinctive tactical brilliance, while Lewis Hamilton lit up Albert Park with his audacious passing, but ended up looking diminished in comparison with Button, less in control of his destiny, less mature.

It’s part of the folly of sportswriters that we occasionally overcook our opening paragraphs. While we’re in confessional mode, I’ll admit to describing Jenson’s early pit call as “inspired” in my post-race wrap on Formula Santander. But was it inspired or merely an act of desperation?

When analysing any tactical move, many people fall into the trap of judging it in the context of data that has subsequently come to light. But you have to come to it as if it’s a fresh page: on that particular lap Jenson didn’t have access to the split times of his car and those surrounding him, or to video images or still pictures showing how much he was losing or gaining. He was merely a man with a decade of Formula 1 experience, sitting in an F1 car – a harsh, stressful and vibratory environment – feeling a lack of balance in his tyres, seeing his team-mate pass him and pull away, and probably feeling rather than seeing the car behind him closing up. What, then, to do?

The choice was to KBO (“Keep Buggering On,” as Winston Churchill put it) in the hope that the tyres would improve, or roll the dice there and then by fitting a new set. It was a snap decision made in the heat of the moment, not a considered analysis based on all the facts. Don’t forget that when he announced over the radio that he was coming in, his pit crew were still sitting around picking their noses.

Had the decision not paid off we would now be describing it as foolish and inept. But Jenson’s call worked out, so in the flowery phraseology of sports writers it becomes “inspired” rather than “potty”. That’s how history is written. We remember Alexander Fleming, who lucked into the discovery of penicillin because he couldn’t be bothered to do the washing up, but we forget what’s-his-name* who spent years slaving over a means of mass-producing it.

What was the exact proportion of luck involved in Jenson’s win? Impossible to say. People on F1 forums like everything to be neat, clearly defined, black and white; sorry, ladies and gents, but sometimes inspiration and desperation run into one another down a dark alley and end up doing something their mothers wouldn’t want to see. Journalistic bias doesn’t come into it…

*Howard Florey