Les Français sont insultés (The French are insulted)

The French do hauteur exceedingly well. The world is ordered as follows: 1. The French; 2. Everybody else. The hauteur is present in everything: the dress sense, the manner, the food and France itself. Paris is a city that redefines grandeur and the French lose no opportunity in rubbing the noses of the non-French in it. Order a meal in a Parisian restaurant in Anglais and you will get it with both barrels. A shrug which you think is indicative of lack of comprehension is loaded with innuendo. You think that the waiter is saying "I'm sorry I don't understand you" when he really means "you look and smell as though you just emerged from the depths of a putrid sewer!". A comely waitress offers you a pout which makes you think "I'm in there - a few more careful words and tonight will be a shagfest!" when she is really saying "I would rather be seasoning a plate of my own excrement and looking forward to wolfing it down than spend two seconds in your company, you worm!".

Imagine then the insult felt across France - home of the world's oldest Grand Prix and the land that gave us the very name "Grand Prix" - by the decision to erase the French Grand Prix from the Formula One calendar with effect from 2008. The French Grand Prix was the first ever Grand Prix and has been held every year since 1906 - save for the years when the Europeans were too busy shooting each other and the rest of the world to bother about racing motor cars. The magnitude of the decision, therefore, has me rocking every time I think about it. Is nothing sacred any more? Well, clearly not to Mr Bernie Ecclestone and his bank manager. That the French have been buggered by an Englishman of all people is deeply resented across France. The cry goes out across the land as I write this: "who will save us from les Anglais? Napoleon, rise up and come to our rescue, for we need you now!"

To my mind it is inconceivable that the French Grand Prix can be erased from the calendar all together. It is one of a quartet of races that are part of the very fabric of Formula One: the Monaco Grand Prix, the British Grand Prix, the Italian Grand Prix and, of course, the French Grand Prix. Without these races Formula One ceases to be what we know and love. The reasons the French Grand Prix wont be held next year are all about its current home. Magny Cours, let's face it, is just not good enough for a race as important as the French Grand Prix. It is located in a remote part of France which is difficult to get to and is an uninspiring circuit. Other than the British Grand Prix which is on my door step, the French Grand Prix is the one race closest to where I live and yet I have never been to it. That speaks volumes. Other circuits in France - like Paul Ricard in Provence, or the Autodrome de Montlhéry just outside Paris - are far better and in vastly superior locations. It will be back, mark my words, but not next year and not at Magny Cours.

Nevertheless, we must say goodbye to Magny Cours this weekend and what better way to do so than have our boy hero Lewis Hamilton win in France. If he does so it will be the end of Fernando Alonso. Hamilton has put the wind up the world champion in a manner nobody could possibly have imagined. It is now abundantly clear that Hamilton and Alonso cannot continue in the same team. This was not in the firmament four months ago but by ill luck or inspired design it would appear that the best two drivers in F1 drive for the same team. Alonso did not ever imagine he would be shown up to such an extent by a British rookie and is bitterly frustrated by it. As if this is not enough, Hamilton has been part of McLaren for so long that it is more of a natural fit for him than it is for Alonso. Given Hamilton's evidently superior driving and mental skills, Ron Dennis would be insane to let him go. The smart money, therefore, must be on Alonso looking for a new drive next year. Two choices stand out: Ferrari and Renault.

Renault's Flavio Briatore would, I am sure, be only too glad to welcome back his Spanish wonder-boy but I am more greatly persuaded by the arguments one can employ about a Ferrari drive for Alonso. Ironically - with hindsight - Ferrari would have been the ideal team for Alonso this season. What he has complained about bitterly (without using the words themselves) is his lack of number one status at McLaren. He wanted to be respected at McLaren because he is a double world champion. To his mind this means that if he finds himself behind Hamilton the team should use clever pit strategy to get him ahead and not allow him to get beaten (as repeatedly happened to Barrichello whenever he found himself in the unhappy position of being ahead of Ferrari number one, Michael Schumacher). I am sure Ferrari would have been more prepared to consider giving the world champion number one status within the team than McLaren have been.

The other reason for suggesting Ferrari is Kimi Raikkonen. The Finn is for the chop at the end of this season whether he likes it or not. Alonso and Hamilton have demonstrated their prowess at developing a race car. They took an uncompetitive car, and made it a race winner - something that Kimi cannot do or, worse, will not do. After winning the first race comfortably in Australia, Ferrari have dropped in performance like a falling rock. The car that begins a season is vastly different from that driven a fortnight later, let alone three months later. It is instructive to consider where Renault is this season without Alonso - in the doldrums. Raikkonen is simply not pulling his weight at Ferrari.

Ferrari with Schumacher very much on the scene as an "adviser" are not best pleased about a chap who won't give his heart and soul to the team. During his time as a Ferrari driver, the German maestro ate, slept and dreamt Ferrari. A Ferrari drive is meant to mean more than a good job that pays well - it means every last drop of your blood! Raikkonen could have made it really big if he had been more committed. The "give me a decent car and I'll drive it but if it's no good that's your problem" stuff simply does not wash in Maranello and does him no favours at all. Michael Schumacher is now worth an estimated £1 billion because of his amazing years at Ferrari. But this does not seem to move Raikkonen. The exit door is a virtual certainty. For the Italians the end will not have happened soon enough. If the Italian press is anything to go by, Raikkonen is universally loathed in the land of the prancing horse.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers to learn that I have long had a love affair with France. My instructions to Guiseppe, my Italian delicatessen owner and purveyor of excellent food and wines, is under clear instructions to steer clear of the Italian stuff this weekend and ensure that my larder is sufficiently stocked with the finest French provisions obtainable north of Normandy. It is with these pleasant thoughts in mind that I anticipate an excellent French Grand Prix 2007. I do hope that you too will,

Enjoy Magny Cours!
28 June 2007

Hamilton rocks Indy

I found myself with time to spare once and chose to explore the shelves of an American bookshop. There was a new book by a prominent atheist professor called Richard Dawkins which I found fascinating. So engrossed was I in reading the book that I was on chapter three before I noticed the presence of the shopkeeper standing before me with a look of extreme belligerence.
"Are you gonna buy that book," the shopkeeper snarled through clenched teeth.
"Perhaps," said I in the manner of an offended, haughty person.
"This ain't no f****ing library, said the shopkeeper. Eat shit and die!" He then snatched the book from my grasp and ordered me to leave his shop forthwith.

This little incident came back to me when I looked at Fernando Alonso's face yesterday afternoon on the podium. He looked like a man who had taken the first part of the shopkeeper's instruction and wasn't particularly enjoying the taste of it. Lewis Hamilton in only his seventh ever Formula One race soundly beat the world champion to second place. Alonso was living a nightmare beyond the imaginings of even Salvador Dali, a Spaniard whose brain was wired like the circuit board of the heat control machines in hell. Denied pole position by a super-determined Hamilton on Saturday, Alonso thought he would apply his superior experience in the race on Sunday and get ahead of the English pretender to his throne. It was not to be. An attempt at diving past on the inside at the start was thwarted by the super reflexes of the young lad in the mustard yellow helmet. Down the straight in Hamilton's slipstream, Alonso tried it again and this time he looked certain to get through. Side by side as they came to the corner you could see Alonso getting through. It looked to be a certainty. But, no, the youngster is as good at defending as he is at overtaking.

The word phenomenon has been used repeatedly in description of Lewis Hamilton and it is now clear that this is by no means an exaggeration. The world champion is having a nightmare year while his team-mate effortlessly and with charming insouciance builds on his lead in the world championship for 2007. The gap is now ten points. It must be said that this can easily be overhauled. One retirement by Hamilton - almost a certainty - and a win by Alonso would bring them back onto level-pegging. But for now the man at the top of the points standings and on the front page of the world's newspapers is Lewis Hamilton. Speaking about Hamilton as a likely world champion at the end of his first season is no longer a fanciful suggestion. The lad makes it all seem so easy, so natural that one easily forgets the scale of his achievement. Hamilton is yet to race in a formula One car and finish other than on the podium. This is the sort of thing Schumacher used to do after he had been world champion a few times. Hamilton is doing it in year one. Astonishing.

I read an interview with Hamilton which was conducted early in the season - after Bahrain I think. Hamilton was asked who he would most like to meet. His reply was "Eddie Murphy - it would be like wow!" I couldn't help laughing at that. The lad is going to be - if he isn't already - vastly more famous and a good deal richer than Eddie Murphy could ever hope to be. He will look back at that interview and want to kick himself. He hasn't been back to England since his first win. He has no idea what awaits him when he gets here. Life will never ever be the same as it was again.

Truth be told the race was not terribly exciting. Apart from the Hamilton/Alonso ding-dong not a lot else happened. BMW proved as strong as predicted but lost out badly when Nick Heidfeld was forced to retire. At least Robert Kubica's replacement, nineteen year old Sebastian Vettel, managed to score a point for the team by coming in eighth. Ferrari were quick in the race but never quick enough to be anything like a threat to the imperious McLarens ahead of them. Once again it was Felipe Massa rather than Kimi Raikkonen who finished on the podium. If they haven't already questions will soon be asked about the Finn's commitment to the team.

It is now looking as though, short of sabotage or dreadful unreliability, the next world champion could well be a twenty-two year old boy from Hertfordshire. This is beyond fairy tale stuff. This is more like alchemy. The worry now must be that Hamilton will lose focus as a consequence of the fame and fortune which is swiftly coming his way. He will make money beyond the dreams of avarice. Women will throw themselves at him. Companies will be falling over each other to get him to endorse their products. All of this can cause an ordinary young man to go a little mad. But then again Hamilton has thus far proved that he is no ordinary young man. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Magny Cours, an Alonso circuit, is up next. Let's see what happens there…

Gitau
18 June 2007

A big race in a big country

In the late 1990s, when a few major businesses still inhabited downtown Johannesburg, I was in the city of Gold for a few days holed up in a high rise hotel in the city centre. The word on the streets then was that the city was wild and dangerous – which pretty much confined me to my hotel in the evenings. One evening after dinner, I wandered into the hotel bar and made friends with an entertaining chap from Serbia . Over a few beers, he told me gory tales about disembowelling people in the name of “fighting for his country”. Admittedly the chap was very unsavoury but sometimes such characters are the most generous when it comes to opening their wallets to purchase intoxicating substances.

At the end of a long, punishing evening I made my excuses and left the Serb to retire to my room. I found to my dismay on getting there that I had mislaid my card-key. There was nothing else for it but to go back to reception and request a replacement. The girl at the desk simply asked what room I was staying in. “3214,” I said. Without so much as a glance at her computer screen to establish the veracity of my claim – perhaps her mind was preoccupied with other things – she quickly issued the necessary command to her computer and it spat out a new card for room 3214.

Upon entering the room, my first port of call was the bathroom on the left where I noisily emptied my full to bursting bladder into the toilet bowl. Without bothering to do up my flies I staggered my way into the sleeping quarters of the room and was astounded to find an elderly couple lying awake in the bed with the bed covers tightly clenched in their hands and drawn up to their chins . When the male half of the couple spoke I realised they were American.
“Please, don’t hurt us, please, I beg you,” he said in a decidedly shaky voice.
“Eh?” said I, bemused.
“We’ll give you money,” said the man, “but please don’t do anything to us, please.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, much offended, “I don’t want your wretched money. I just want you out of my room now!”
The female half of the couple began to sob. “What is he gonna do to us,” she whispered,
The man began to sob as well. “We are old and shrivelled,” he said, “we’re not much use to you. Please leave us alone. You can have our United States Grand Prix tickets,” he cried. He then
began to weep as though his heart was going to break.

At this point I began to see sense. Americans love their motor racing and flock to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the United States Grand Prix each year in droves. If a man was prepared to give me his tickets to this race, there had to be something that was not right going on. I did up my flies, left the room and returned to reception. The room I wanted was 3241, not 3214. You would, doubtless, agree that this was a perfectly reasonable mistake to make after sinking ten Windhoek lagers and a few whisky chasers! (word to the wise – conduct of this nature tends to produce in a man the appearance of a gangster prone to violent robbery and buggery of septuagenarians)

This weekend, then, we observe the Americans as they host a superb event in Indianapolis . By rights the race ought to belong to Ferrari. The scarlet cars have only ever been beaten once in Indianapolis . Still, history is no determinant of performance this season. Kimi Raikkonen seems determined to end his career before it takes off. I cannot help but be frustrated by the Finn’s lack of form. His ill-preparedness and general listlessness are not fitting for a man who earns £20 million plus and races for one of the best resourced teams in Formula One - and, more importantly, one with a pedigree and history like none other. He is making mistakes which one cannot undersatnd - like that stupid one in Monaco qualifying. I was looking forward to a season of great action from Raikkonen but after winning in Australia he has gone off the boil. This is neither good news for Raikkonen nor Ferrari. I do hope he gets it together this weekend because, exciting as it has thus far been, we don’t want the season to be limited to the battle of the McLaren drivers.

The battle such as it is seems to be getting silly. As I pointed out earlier this week, of the two McLaren drivers the one who sounds grown up and sensible is the rookie. The world champion is allowing his emotions to get the better of him and saying things he shouldn’t. Fernando Alonso, better than anyone, knows that top level sport in general and Formula One racing in particular requires sound mind management. If you allow yourself to lose focus and get rattled by extraneous things you will be incapable of reaching inside yourself for that little extra ingredient that makes the difference between a world champion and a number two. Alonso may be thinking it unfair that he had to work as hard as he did to get to where he is while his team-mate had his place at McLaren handed to him on a silver platter. Alonso spent a year at the very bottom with Minardi and then another as a Renault test driver before he was allowed to call himself a Renault Formula One driver. Lewis Hamilton was placed in a top car on day one That is as it may be. But Hamilton did lots of graft within McLaren before this season began. When you cut through all the pointless and, frankly, irrelevant whingeing the question becomes simply this: who is leading the world championship at the moment?

BMW have come forward in leaps and bounds and Nick Heidfeld is getting better and better. Robert Kubica won’t be racing after his spectacular crash last week (which, incredibly, left him suffering nothing more than bruises and a sprained ankle). His seat will be taken by a newcomer called Sebastian Vettel

I have a sneaky feeling that Sunday’s race result may be odd. Indianapolis without Schumacher is a curious place. Most American beer is insipid piss but they do make a few decent wines in the Nappa Valley. You might want to try one with a large steak. Whatever you do,

Enjoy Indianapolis!

Gitau
15 June 2007

The Latin temperament

If there is one thing I have found to be refreshingly surprising about Fernando Alonso it is what I have thus far believed to be his ability to tame the famously feisty Latin temperament. Calm under the severest of pressure, Alonso had what it took to become world champion before his 25th birthday; an unprecedented and, surely, worthy achievement. He repeated the feat a year later - with Michael Schumacher racing in both years, remember - as if to dispel any doubts about the significance of his achievement. All the while he displayed a maturity and serenity that was new to Formula One. Imagine, then, my shock and amazement at learning of Alonso's comments today to the Spanish media.

Here's what the world champion had to say about joining McLaren and having Lewis Hamilton as his team-mate: “From the first moment, I wasn’t comfortable with everything. I'm in an English team, with an English team-mate who is doing a brilliant job. We knew that all the support and help would be going to him. I understood that from the start and I’m not complaining about it.” Remember, Alonso was speaking two days after the event and not immediately after the race when his blood would have been boiling.

Contrast that with this exchange during the post-race press conference on Sunday:

Q: (Rob Martier – CJAD Radio) Lewis two quick questions for you. Fernando didn’t have the best of days. At this point do you even care?
Lewis Hamilton: Of course. That’s a bit of a silly question to be honest. He’s my team-mate, I’ve got a lot of respect for him and we’re quite good friends. At the end of the day we are a team, we both want to finish at the front. I don’t know what happened in his race but we need to have a look and it’s not good for him obviously.
Q: (Rob Martier – CJAD Radio) You say that you are team-mates and you care about each other, that doesn’t always seem to be the case. What might this do to the relationship from here on?
LH: When does is not appear to be the case?
Q: (Rob Martier – CJAD Radio) It’s just my perspective.
LH: Ok, me and Fernando… He’s extremely professional and for me, coming into the team, I’ve got a huge amount of respect for him and I think he’s grown to get on really well with me. At the end of the day he’s the two-time world champion he’ll bounce back without a doubt and I’m sure he’ll be extremely quick in the next race.

I defy anybody not to have been shaken by the arrival of Lewis Hamilton. Alonso's nose must be badly out of joint and nobody can blame him. I remember seeing a photograph taken last October in Oviedo, Alonso's home town, a couple of weeks after he had clinched his second world championship. Alonso was standing alone on a balcony overlooking the town square while smiling at an endless sea of faces. From that to having the entire world focus on Lewis Hamilton to the exclusion of all others must be soul destroying. As I have repeatedly said about the Hamilton phenomenon, nobody has ever seen anything like it. But to go as far as accusing McLaren of not being even-handed demonstrates an astounding lapse in Alonso's judgment. This bothers me not a little. I am disturbed on three fronts.

First, I cannot credit Alonso's remarks. I have seen no evidence of favouritism and have even suggested on two occasions - Australia and Monaco - that team decisions have been taken for Alonso's, not Hamilton's benefit. McLaren, like Williams has always been a scrupulously fair team. Contrast this with the Schumacher-driven Ferrari. At Williams and McLaren drivers have always been permitted to race each other when the interests of the team were not compromised. The best example of this was the open rivalry between Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna in 1988 and 1989. Senna won the former championship and then Prost got his own back the next year. There was wheel to wheel aggression between the two which made for lovely television. As a world champion well schooled in the history of Formula One who learned all he knows at the knee of the Svengali of motor racing, Flavio Briatore, Alonso will know this only too well. He will have been well aware of this when he put his signature on the dotted line of a McLaren contract.

Secondly, introducing a national element to the questions demeans the world champion. By accusing McLaren of favouring Hamilton because they are English and Hamilton is English is effectively spitting in the faces of hordes of English fans of Alonso. If McLaren were as jingoistic as Alonso appears to imply, they would hire English drivers exclusively. Let's look at the McLaren drivers over the last five years alone and examine the merit in this: Mika Hakkinen, David Coulthard, Kimi Raikkonen and Juan Pablo Montoya. Not one name in that list belongs to an Englishman. So much for the McLaren jingoes then.

Thirdly, and perhaps worst of all, no driver can afford to create ill-feeling in his team. The opposite is always best. We saw it with Senna who, despite being a prima donna, managed to rally the McLaren team around himself. Most impressively we saw it with Michael Schumacher where the Ferrari team was like a family. The Italian mechanics would have done anything to ensure a Schumacher victory, even lent him their wives! They worked with passion and commitment. A Schumacher win was a win for all of them. In a sport with super-engineered machines which are prone to difficulties from the slightest change, dedicated mechanics and engineers are worth their weight in gold - and points. Once a team detects mistrust in a driver his fate is sealed. Witness Alain Prost, who had to defect to Ferrari in 1990, and Juan Pablo Montoya, who had to leave the sport all together last year. This is not the way to conduct a world championship campaign.

I am disappointed but not disillusioned by today's developments. Fernando Alonso is sometimes prone to the odd wobble when up against it. The Schumacher surge mid-way through last season threw him a little but he picked himself up later and won the championship. I rather suspect that Ron Dennis will have a quiet word with him and ask him to re-focus, pay attention to the task at hand and relax a little. He is not looking at a disaster scenario. At least not yet.

Gitau
12 June 2007

Hurrah for Hamilton

Every schoolboy probably had the words of Rudyard Kipling's timeless piece of inspirational poetry "If" repeatedly drummed into his head at home and at school while they were growing up. Never were the words more apposite than yesterday afternoon in Montreal: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…you'll be a Man my son!" In the most chaotic Canadian Grand Prix in recent memory, Lewis Hamilton demonstrated calm, self-assured brilliance while everyone else seemed to go potty. Hamilton is so supremely talented he appears to float above lesser mortals. His command of a Formula One car is so complete, so effortless that one feels that he was born to race one. Yesterday, Hamilton looked like a champion while virtually all the other drivers looked like rookies. To Hamilton a Formula One car is just a bigger, faster go-kart. It was inevitable that the young man would win a race this season but to achieve it so soon and so expertly was astounding.

When Hamilton nailed pole position on Saturday nearly half a second ahead of reigning world champion, Fernando Alonso, at a circuit which he had never seen before, you knew it was his destiny to win in Canada. The lad's presence seemed to unnerve his fellow drivers to such an extent that one after the other crashed into the wall and scattered debris everywhere. Thus, Hamilton had to win the race not once but five times. Each time he built up a comfortable cushion ahead of Nick Heidfeld another fool would smash his car into a wall and bring out the safety car (most dramatically, Robert Kubica who defied death before our eyes). Hamilton would then have to do it all over again. Each time he simply got on with the job as though it was the most normal thing in the world, as though this is what he did every day of the week. I was reminded of the Bishop of Southwark last Christmas. The man of the cloth attended a reception at the Irish embassy in London and got well and truly bladdered. He then crawled into a parked Mercedes which he did not own and began throwing toys about. When the owners arrived and found the pissed Bishop trashing their car, they asked him who he was and what the devil he was doing. The bishop sagely told them where to go with the immortal words "I am the Bishop of Southwark, it's what I do."

If you looked at the newspapers in Montreal and London on Sunday morning you would have been forgiven for thinking there was nobody but Lewis Hamilton racing that afternoon. The tone of the coverage was along the lines of "hey chaps, there is this new genius racing this afternoon and you must see him - oh, and by the way, there might be a few other chaps driving today but they are only there to make up the numbers." This probably explains why chaos broke out in Hamilton's wake. From the first corner when Alonso attempted a desperate, audacious passing manoeuvre, forgot his braking point and ran wide, you knew his goose was stewed. The world champion - a calculating man renowned for keeping his head in times of stress - had lost it. It didn't' happen on only one occasion. I lost count of the number of times Alonso's unforced errors cost him dearly. The litany of mistakes on a dry track shocked me. Yes, there are no run-off areas in Montreal (and Monaco) but everyone knows this and usually comes prepared for it. With few exceptions the entire grid was spooked by what will now go down in legend as "the Hamilton effect".

For the double world champion to be repeatedly shown up by his rookie team-mate is not doing his self esteem any good. The only newspapers fighting Alonso's corner are the Spanish ones. It would be rash and unfair to write off the little Spaniard just yet. We are experiencing a phenomenon like no one has ever seen but we must not forget Alonso's prodigious talent and - lest it be forgotten - his relative youth (he is only 25 for goodness sake!). Maintaining a sense of proportion in times like these, however, is dashed difficult. I try and tell myself not to allow my emotions to cloud my judgment and then I see young Hamilton's smiling face on the front page of every newspaper and all my reasoning flies out of the window. When measured past geniuses given to carefully chosen words - men like Sir Jackie Stewart, Sir Stirling Moss and Nikki Lauda - all line up to heap praise on the young man, one has to pay attention. Even the most famously egotistical of recent Formula One drivers, Eddie Irvine, a man stinting of admiration of anyone other than Eddie Irvine could not help but give his tuppence worth in recognition of Lewis Hamilton. When asked whether he thought Hamilton was "one of the greats" Irvine witheringly replied "there is no evidence to suggest that he isn't".

It was a funny old race, memorable for more than just the mayhem. Other than the winner, the man who made my afternoon was Super Aguri driver Takuma Sato. Sato-san has always had a maverick approach to driving. You try and get out of his way when he attempts one of his kamikaze manoeuvres or you are liable to get T-boned. Yesterday was a special day for the Japanese driver. Things were working out rather well for him and he managed to finish way up in sixth place - a splendid achievement for a team using a leftover Honda engine from last year while the works team itself couldn't even finish the race! The sight of the world champion in a McLaren having to yield to Takuma Sato in a Super Aguri really was a joy to behold. Not, mind you, that I wish ill-luck on Alonso but moments like those make for stunning television.

Felipe Massa was black-flagged for ignoring a red light in the pit lane. Kimi Raikkonen had neither the pace to match McLaren nor BMW. Ferrari have worringly gone off the boil. North America should be theirs for the taking, it is not. There is less than a week to go to the next race, hardly any time to change much. I am afraid we could be seeing a repeat of Canada in Indianapolis. I don't particularly mind…

Gitau
11 June 2007

Comments

I have been charmed and amused by the reactions I have received to various recent postings. It would appear that my stepping off the fence was not viewed with universal approval.

May I invite responses to any of the the things written about on this blog by asking that you e-mail me at gitau.githinji@gmail.com. I will post a selection of the fruitier ones later.

Gitau
6 June 2007

The thrill of Quebec

Many years ago, while sinking beers in a disreputable Parisian drinking establishment, I chanced upon two genial chaps named Francois and Pierre who were glad for me to join them and discover what joys lay before us that evening. Even to my Kiambu ear, the French these chaps spoke was heavily accented. Upon enquiry, I learned that they were Québécois. Listening to my new friends describe their Canadian Province and their desire for self determination - surprisingly high level conversation for that place and time, I accept, but there we are! - I understood profoundly why a French speaking native of Quebec thinks of himself first as Québécois and then Canadian. Caught in America's back yard with the Queen of England as his country's head of state, it is no surprise that a Canadian with a claim which distinguishes him from the rest would want to assert this for all he was worth.

Seated within spitting distance of us was a loud American fellow holding court to a dishevelled and rather unsavoury gaggle of people. During a break to soothe his overworked tonsils with beer, the American overheard Francois say something like "believe me, you don't want those arrogant American pricks as your neighbours". This remark greatly displeased the American. In a state of high dudgeon, he got up and advanced to our table. "Worthless Canadian bastard," he spluttered, "do you have any idea where you would be without the good old United States? I'll tell you for nothing, you scumbag. Nowhere!"

The reaction of the two Québécois gentlemen was so unusual that it has remained etched on my memory ever since. Francois calmly got up, pinched the American's nose with his left hand and yanked at his tongue with his right. Meanwhile, Pierre undid his belt and began using it to whip the American about the calves. After about a minute or so they let the American go. So stunned was he by this treatment that he slunk away and quietly left the bar. "We do things differently in Quebec," Pierre said with a knowing wink.

It was my turn to be provocative. "If you fellows want to be independent so desperately, why is the annual Formula One race held in Montreal called the Canadian Grand Prix and not the Quebec Grand Prix?" I asked. Francois smiled. "That is one of the main reasons why I still call myself Canadian," he said, "they could never do as good a job in Toronto, my friend!"

When I thought about it, Francois made sense. The Québécois have a talent for motor racing unequalled anywhere else in Canada. There has only ever been one Canadian Formula One world champion and he was Québécois. Now retired, his name is Jacques Villeneuve and motor racing ran through his veins - hardly surprising given that he was the son of one of the true Formula One greats, Gilles Villeneuve. Gilles Villeneuve gave his life up for Grand Prix racing - he was killed while driving for Ferrari in Belgium in 1982 - and the circuit at the Ile Notre-Dame in Montreal is, appropriately, named after him. It is a fascinating circuit - very quick and prone to life jarring moments like smashing one's car into the inconveniently located wall at the last corner. It is one of those races that one eagerly awaits each year. Coming, as it does this year, straight after Monaco, it promises to be another gem in a season of such gripping quality that superlatives are inadequate. And we are not yet even at the halfway point!

It was at the end of the Canadian Grand Prix in 2005 that I began to accept that the long, stultifying Schumacher era was about to end. Michael Schumacher virtually owned the Canadian Grand Prix. Like Germany and Italy, it was one of those races you didn't have to watch to know who had won it. But he was beaten to second place in 2005 by Kimi Raikkonen and again by Fernando Alonso in 2006. I think even he knew then that the baton had passed. It was time to get off the stage.

If Ferrari can sort out the speed deficit they seemed to be labouring under in Monaco, I think they have a good chance here. Another win by Raikkonen is, surely, overdue. He needs to start working jolly hard if he is going to stand any chance of putting a dent in the yawning gap between himself and the three out in front. If it isn't yet clear to the partying young Finn that success in Formula One requires more commitment than getting into a car and driving it very fast, it never will be. Another early shower could blow him out of the reckoning completely. That would be a shame, for there is no doubt whatsoever about his prodigious talent.

McLaren have gone as far as admitting that they cannot expect as dominant a performance from their cars as they enjoyed in Monaco. At the top end things rarely stay static for very long. Also, I think it is time to cool down some of the hype and restore focus. There are other teams whose game is improving. We haven't seen the last of BMW or Renault this season, I am sure. We have twelve races - more than half a season - to go. Plenty of time!

I used to be partial to a drop of Molson Dry beer but haven't had any in years. I think I may just seek some out this weekend. I suppose it's the least I can do since I am not able to get out to Montreal myself!

Enjoy Canada!

Gitau
05 June 2007