Massa reclaims Istanbul

Formula One cars at the sharp end have become so reliable that one thinks of them rather like a pair of feet. You don’t tend to look down at your feet as you walk. You trust them to do their job and deliver you to your destination. They are reliable as a general rule. But you may sometimes miscalculate things and find that your feet have their own ideas. Stepping onto the smooth marble floor of Liverpool Street station on a rainy morning last week, I learned why leather soles are not universally applauded. On a dry pavement, feet shod like mine were happy feet. They sailed merrily along with no thought to anything but the safe movement of Gitau from points A to B. On a smooth wet floor, well, said the feet, you’re on your own, matey. Thus, I found myself being lifted off the floor, my forehead having been where my feet had left.

Likewise, tyres are notoriously fickle things. We tend to forget that things can go spectacularly wrong in a race on account of the unpredictable nature of tyres. If you are racing a car on a track baking at 52 degrees, subjecting it repeatedly to a series of apexes such as the unique Turn 8, it is not unreasonable to expect that your tyres might just give up. So it was for Lewis Hamilton yesterday. One moment he was making mental calculations about how to leapfrog one or both of the Ferraris in front of him in the final round of pit stops when his right front Bridgestone exploded before his eyes. Then all he could do was wrestle the car for the better part of a quarter of a mile until he could get to the pits. There was quite major damage to the car’s front right wing but Hamilton chose to struggle on and just about managed to get the car home in fifth place; a valiant effort. It could have been a lot worse. On more than one occasion world championships have been destroyed by exploding tyres. Nigel Mansell had to park his car by the side of the track in floods of tears when his tyre gave up at the last race in Adelaide in 1986. Michael Schumacher saw his championship challenge explode in so much rubber at Suzuka in 1999 and all he could do was sit on a wall, distraught, contemplating what might have been.

At this stage in this exhilarating championship any mishap could well prove disastrous. There are now genuinely four championship contenders. Sixteen points separate first and fourth placed men Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Raikkonen. In between Fernando Alonso is five points away and Felipe Massa a mere fifteen points down. But you’ve got to hand it to Massa. The young Brazilian has developed more than anyone else since his first win a year ago in Turkey. The place seems to have a special resonance for the Brazilian. It is his “special” circuit. Fuelled heavier than his team-mate, Massa dug deep on Saturday and pipped Hamilton to pole position by the skinniest of margins. Raikkonen knew then that the race was lost. The fire in the Brazilian’s eyes said it all. Come Sunday and nobody was going to take away his second Turkish winner’s trophy from him.

If you asked the McLaren team engineers who of their two drivers better deserved to suffer ill luck yesterday they would have said Alonso without hesitation. He unashamedly says he is “owed” because on account of him alone McLaren are six tenths of a second up from where they were last season. Talk about slapping your designers, engineers, test drivers, physicians et al collectively in the face! Prima donnas are not generally loved. Alonso seems determined to be unpopular. Most unwise. Good luck to the man…

I found myself smiling wryly at an interview ITV conducted with Lewis Hamilton on Saturday. I couldn’t help remembering that less than six months ago the lad was almost quivering with excitement at the prospect of meeting people like P Diddy. Now he complains bitterly about being hounded by the paparazzi and saying that he is soon going to be forced to move out of the UK and live abroad if the abuse does not stop. Nothing could have prepared Hamilton for the manner in which the world has taken to him. It will come home to him more clearly when the season is over and he has a little more time to live amongst other mortals. He will be stirred to his core at the realisation that life will never ever be the same again.

The final part of the season always has the best races. The next two, Monza and Spa, are particularly exciting. I have found it difficult to say things about any circuit being “a Ferrari circuit” because this year McLaren and Ferrari have been pretty evenly matched throughout. This is what makes 2007 so exciting.

If anyone ever had any doubts about Formula One they ought to be whacking their foreheads with their palms. Monza here we come in a fortnight.

Gitau
27 August 2007

Turkish delights

While living in Paris in my younger days, I struck up a happy friendship with a Turkish lass called Ozlem who came from the city of Izmir. She had enormous, beautiful, green eyes in a face that one couldn't quite place squarely on the racial map. She looked neither European nor Arabic and was blessed with a complete lack of self consciousness. Ozlem did all she could to emphasise to me and anyone else who dared ask that every last bone in her elegant body was European, not Asian. She had a brazen, in-your-face way of doing so. An example of this which springs to mind was her fondness for not troubling herself with any items of clothing while indoors. This did not bother me in the slightest when we were alone in my flat but the trouble was that I did not live alone; I shared a poky little apartment in a seedy part of Paris with a German chap and a Welshman and often had a fight on my hands when requesting the excitable girl to exercise restraint.

Ozlem worked as an au pair and was away looking after the spoiled progeny of some wealthy Parisians for much of the time but she would come and visit me whenever she had time off. One Saturday morning, Ozlem turned up at my flat looking like death warmed up. The parents of the children she was paid to look after had gone away for a couple of days and the little terrors had conspired to make Ozlem's Friday night one never to be forgotten if she lived to see a hundred. Recognising her dire need of restorative rest, I suggested she slept, which she gratefully agreed to do, while I pottered about doing rewarding things like cleaning pots greased over with congealed lard. Ozlem was obviously very tired because I did not see her until later that evening. In the interim some friends turned up with enough Kronenbourg lager to float a small barge and we fell to putting it away in our usual appreciative style. Presently, my friend, Laurent, got up to go to the loo and was met by the sight of Ozlem emerging from my bedroom and walking down the corridor towards the bathroom.

Laurent returned to the living room and sank heavily into his chair with a deep sigh. Beads of sweat were visible on his forehead. He grabbed at his bottle of lager and hastily emptied it down his throat. When I asked what the matter was he gave me a distant look at first. At length he found the strength to say something.
"Gitau," Laurent gasped, "either I have died and gone to heaven or it is time for me to give up drinking. Please tell me it is the former. Please!"
"What's up?" I asked.
"I stepped in the corridor and this gorgeous tall girl with long hair was walking towards me," he said.
He reached for another Kronenbourg and took a healthy swig, shook his head as if to shake out cobwebs and resumed his story. "She was not wearing a stitch of clothing, my man. Not a stitch!"
"Oh," said I. "Most odd." I, to my shame, had failed to inform my friends that my bedroom was occupied.
"Odd! Odd? Is that all you can say? You are joking, aren't you?" Laurent exclaimed.
"Well," I said, "what did she do? Did she talk to you?"
"No," said Laurent. She swept past me, walked into the bathroom and sat on the loo without bothering to shut the door. It was as though I did not exist!"
"That's the reason I moved into this flat, mate," I said quietly and slowly. “What you saw was our resident ghost. She only comes out once in a while and is rarely seen, so consider yourself blessed, my friend."
Laurent took this in while nodding sagely. He spent the remainder of the afternoon in silence. The poor chap was never quite himself after that day.

If I was puzzled about Ozlem's ethnicity it was perhaps fitting. Turkey confuses the world because it is slap bang in the middle between Europe and Asia - hence the deliciously exotic nature of females like Ozlem. The predominant religion in Turkey is Islam but the country is fiercely secular and many of its nationals, like Ozlem, defy anything that places them in a religious box. Since 2005 Turkey has embraced the European motor racing tradition and run its own Grand Prix in Istanbul. Upon learning that there was to be a Turkish race introduced on the Formula One calendar, my first instinct was to sneer and cavil. "Pah!" I said, "the bastards have scratched the excellent A1 Ring in Austria from the calendar and gone to Turkey. No wonder the sport is going to the dogs." I was delighted to find that all my instincts were wrong. The racing in Istanbul has been magnificent for the two years we have been privileged to enjoy it. The circuit is simply marvellous - a true racer's circuit. Isn't it time someone gave a name to that notorious set of four corners known simply as "Turn 8"? The two most challenging corners in F1 racing are Eau Rouge in Belgium and Turn 8 in Turkey. The latter awaits our delectation this weekend.

So much heat and light has been generated by the arrival of young Lewis Hamilton into Formula One and the Ferrari/McLaren shenanigans that a newly arrived visitor from Mars would be forgiven for thinking that there are no other teams and no other drivers. I have (sometimes) noticed the others. For example, BMW have exceeded my expectations. I thought it would take more time for them to transform the old Sauber into a winning team but they haven't. BMW is the number three contender for the constructors' championship without a doubt. This puts to shame the more obvious also-rans like Renault, Toyota and Honda. Renault seem to have fallen off a cliff with the departure of Fernando Alonso. One could cut Heikki Kovalainen some slack because he is new to the team but not Giancarlo Fisichella who is both an F1 veteran and a seasoned Renault driver. There is clearly something lacking in car development at Renault this year. I think the smart money has to be on Fisichella getting the chop at the end of this year. I am also inclined to think that Renault will ditch their legendary parsimony and pay Fernando Alonso anything he wants if he will only come back.

The two big Japanese teams have bigger problems. Toyota are reputed to have a budget equalling that of the big boys but have indicated a clear desire to drive in reverse. You would have thought with money, a proven and experienced race winner like Ralf Schumacher - a chap who ought to be able to call upon the advice of the most successful driver of all time, his own brother! - and a skilled ex-Renault boy, Jarno Trulli, the team would be a class act. Far from it. I think the mistake was tying themselves to paying Ralf far too much money from the beginning. He didn't think he had to do an awful lot and his attitude seems to have affected the entire team. Things at Honda are not much better. Again money is not an issue and there should be no question marks about superlative chaps like Rubens Barrichello and Jenson Button but the team is sorely floundering. I think management is at fault personally and heads should be rolling soon. I mean to say, when was the last time you heard a team admit that the car was a mess because they had ballsed up the design of their wind tunnel?

We have seen emotion play with the results of races this season. Istanbul Park is not exactly the sort of place to drive at when a chap's emotions are running riot, though. Calm heads and steady hands are essential in Turkey. I have no doubt that it will be a brilliant race and trust that like me you will,

Enjoy Turkey!

Gitau
22 August 2007

Hungary and a monumental McLaren migraine

Who would want to be Ron Dennis now? He must have aged ten years in this past week. Having started the season with better prospects than McLaren had enjoyed in years, he now heads a team which looks in serious danger of imploding. In January, Ron could look forward to a season with a double world champion and an impressive young protégé. Both drivers liked each other and got along like old friends. Happy days. Now relations between Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso are so bad that the pair aren't even talking to each other.

It all began when McLaren tried to "fix" qualifying on Saturday. Hamilton was supposed to let Alonso get past him and had agreed to do so in the briefings before he donned his helmet. But when it came to it, in the heat of battle on the race track, his instincts simply could not allow this. Alonso did not like Hamilton's behaviour a bit. To pay the young whippersnapper back, he blatantly ruined Hamilton's final qualifying lap. Having been given the all clear by the team to exit the pits after his last tyre change and knowing full well that Hamilton's car was parked behind his and ready to slip in for a quick tyre change, he sat stationary for a whole ten seconds while the world stared in disbelief. The last time we saw something so calculated and dishonest was when Michael Schumacher "parked" his car at a ridiculous place on the Monaco circuit and by so doing ensured that Alonso's qualifying lap was wrecked. Hamilton exited the pits for the final time on Saturday with insufficient time to complete a flying lap before the chequered flag was raised to indicate that the session was over. Understandably, the Englishman was seething with rage and yelling obscenities down his microphone at Ron Dennis. Punishments handed down by F1 stewards are never consistent. While last year Schumacher was demoted all the way to the back of the grid on Sunday because of his conduct on Saturday, Alonso only suffered a five place hit and was, therefore, unlikely to drop out of a points scoring position on a circuit where overtaking is impossible (hence the absolutely crucial nature of qualifying in Budapest).

Come Sunday and young Hamilton summoned his nerve and delivered a commanding performance. Leading every single lap of the Hungarian Grand Prix to deny Kimi Raikkonen a chance at the victory, the lad's mastery of the Hungaroring looked easy enough but was not. This was the hardest win yet of Hamilton's fledgling career. He searched deep within himself and found all he needed. You could see at the end of the race that it had not been easy. The youngster was knackered. McLaren, meanwhile, were not permitted by the stewards to participate in the constructors' championship because of their pathetic team games. Watching closely what happened on Saturday, I thought it a bit harsh to penalise the entire team like this. I thought Alonso should have had all his qualifying time erased (and therefore been relegated to the back of the grid) and his trainer should have been banned from being present trackside at any of the remaining Grands Prix this season. I say this because the additional ten seconds Alonso took while sitting in his car were counted down for him by the slimy toad sitting on the pit wall plotting against young Hamilton.

Things have come to a pretty pass, haven't they? If you cut through everything you are drawn to one inescapable conclusion: Lewis Hamilton is too good. Fernando Alonso has been upset because the team won't restrain Hamilton. Alonso's men within McLaren are determined to do all they can to assist their man - even if this includes sabotaging his team-mate. My theory a few weeks ago about the future make up of the team is proving to be accurate. Alonso's hatred of his English team-mate extends equally to his English employers. The emotion was encapsulated in some of the flags being waved by Spanish fans at the circuit this weekend. They said "McLaren = Traidora" (McLaren = Traitors). But where is the treachery exactly? Does it lie in the fact that McLaren went out and found the most talented driver ever to break out onto the scene? Are they supposed to break Hamilton's legs or place boulders in his car? What do you do about a driver with so much ability? Well, you use it. I can understand Alonso' emotions, though, and am now more convinced than ever that whatever it costs, Alonso will walk at the end of this season. A proud man from a long line of Spaniard warriors, Alonso feels like he has been kicked squarely in the bollocks.

Alonso may still win the world championship. There are only 7 points in it after all with six races to go. Hamilton's inexperience set against Alonso's should mean advantage Alonso; but not everyone is so sure. I walked into a bookmaker's shop on Monday to place a tenner on Hamilton. I knew the odds were not going to be good - the time for doing this flew by months ago - but reckoned I couldn't lose my money was likely to make enough, perhaps, for a pint to toast the lad's success. The lady at the counter smiled at me. "Are you serious?" she asked. The odds were 11:10. For my tenner I would have all of £1 to celebrate Hamilton's success at the end of the season. Hopeless. Bookies are rarely wrong on these things. So, sadly, (and I know I shall be receiving email from my sporting friends for disavowing my sporting instincts so often displayed on the turf, at the dogs and elsewhere but, dash it, a chap's got to be careful with tenners in these straitened times!) I cannot recommend a punt unless you are doing it for satisfaction rather than monetary gain.

The main problem McLaren as a team now have is managing their two drivers. Feuding team-mates are no recipe for success - particularly if one is so hell bent on outdoing the other that all thoughts of the constructors' championship (or even his employment contract) have flown out with his reason. This is the sort of scenario which results in team-mates taking each other out. That can only be good news for Ferrari. Raikkonen and Massa needn't worry too much about getting pole. If the two McLarens take each other out at the start of the next few races, life becomes infinitely simpler for the scarlet boys.

We haven't had as much pleasure watching shenanigans on and off the circuit in decades. It's great fun, isn't it? Who can wait three weeks until Turkey?!

Gitau
7 August 2007

Mud slinging and a race in Hungary

Human reactions to situations tend to remain consistent for all of their lives. If you observe children in a sand pit you will have some idea what I mean. A little boy will have his back turned to his friends staring into the distance at something or other when, “whack!” he feels a clod of sand land on the back of his head. The boy won’t trouble himself with an awkward enquiry about who lobbed the sand and why. He won’t even turn round to see who was responsible for the outrageous assault. Instead he will bend over, scoop up a healthy portion of sand and lob it squarely at anyone standing behind him. Similarly, John Prescott, Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister, while out campaigning during the 2001 general elections, was working a crowd with his practised smile and generous handshake when “splat!” he felt an egg break on the side of his head. Prescott didn’t trouble himself with needless arguments or enquiries. He simply raised his left arm and landed a smart left hook on the jaw of his stunned assailant.

In similar vein, McLaren, smarting hard about being found guilty by the FIA of being in possession of Ferrari’s proprietary information, decided that an equal and opposite reaction was called for. More than a week after the FIA decision but – cleverly – in time to take advantage of the free publicity in advance of a weekend of Formula One racing, McLaren issued a wordy statement on Wednesday accusing Ferrari of being the villains of the piece. Nigel Stepney, Ferrari’s engineer, was trying to do the right thing by leaking Ferrari’s secrets to McLaren. Ferrari, so the allegations go, are scaly bastards and Stepney was just about fed up of them bending the rules and racing “illegal” cars. Coughlan, McLaren’s blameless enegineer, was simply trying to marshall up the facts so as to present a complete dossier to the authorities who determine these things. Ferrari were such bastards that they had raced a car with an illegally movable floor which gave Kimi Raikkonen an easy victory in Australia at the beginning of the 2007 season.

If you cut through all the guff, you get down to a fundamental reality. What is the common denominator in all of this? McLaren is a quintessentially English team. Stepney, notwithstanding his Italian employers, is English. Coughlan is also English. What McLaren are really saying without troubling themselves with laying on too much innuendo is this: “English people play fair in all instances. The Italians – well, we all know about them don’t we? Isn’t Italy the home of the mafia? It is beneath contempt to imagine that we, an English team, would bend the rules but perfectly understandable that a team of greasy, shiny-suited, garlic-eating, hand-waving, shouting Eyeties will as a matter of course!”

In other words, if you have never understood why the Brits were the most reluctant members of the European Union, you now do. If you have never understood the thinking behind the English sneer, you now do. The world is full of lying, conniving scoundrels. England is not.

The scandal has given motor racing pundits something to write about ahead of the least exciting race of the year (perhaps that isn’t quite correct – I am not sure which I dislike more, Hungary or Bahrain). The Hungaroring is the slowest, dullest circuit on the planet. On a dry day, one has to employ clothes pegs to keep one’s eyes open for the duration of the race – especially after a good lunch prepared from fine ingredients purveyed by the Italian genius, Guiseppe.

Having said all of that, the most exciting race of last year was the Hungarian Grand Prix. It was the first ever wet race at the Hungaroring and, consequently, produced beautiful, unpredictable mayhem. English wonder boy, Jenson Button, achieved his first and only ever Grand Prix win there by keeping his head and coming out on top after starting from fourteenth place on the grid. So, if you know of any efficacious rain dances, get dancing!

If it stays dry I expect an easy win for the world champion. Fernando Alonso seems to have got rid of his Lewis Hamilton induced demons and remembered that he has two back-to-back world championships under his belt. He seems to have remembered that, while young, he is still vastly more experienced than his rookie team-mate and easily capable of teaching Hamilton a thing or two about top-end racing.

I don’t think any of this is a bad thing for young Hamilton. My delight at his roaring start was tempered by worries about things getting to his head. The lad is flesh and blood after all. Things coming too easily to anyone inevitably make them complacent. It is good to fight to achieve greatness. Every respected driver in the Formula One pantheon has had to and Hamilton will feel a lot better about himself if he finds himself up against it.

The gods seem to have deserted Ferrari. Perhaps not exactly. I think they have deserted Kimi Raikkonen and Ferrari by association with him. Raikkonen must have upset someone in an earlier life. He has justly earned the title of the unluckiest man in F1.

I haven’t got great expectations for this weekend’s racing, I am afraid, but I will watch the race in the hope of a disappointment like I got last year. The championship this year is too close and too important for any race to be ignored, so, even if you have to grit your teeth,

Enjoy Hungary!

Gitau
4 August 2007