Perspective, perspective
Not very long ago I drove a hundred odd miles in the dark through wind, rain and traffic. I suffered no mishaps, though, and longed for my bed as I signalled to turn right into the road where I lived. Then, one turn of the steering wheel from my destination, bang! I was t-boned from the right. My mind went blank for a moment. Then I wanted to throttle someone. The chap who ran into me approached me hesitantly armed with a scruffy looking piece of paper in his right hand and a chewed up biro in his left. From the corner of my eye I could see his wife, covered up in Islamic headgear, sobbing with her head on the dashboard. It was not the right time for conversations – never mind that the man’s car was destined for the scrap heap and mine was not. I told the man to leave me, walked away from him and kicked a wall until my foot hurt.
Formula One drivers are not ordinary mortals. We cannot relate to how a person can maintain control of a moving vehicle at phenomenal speed, cornering, while fighting phenomenal g-forces. We cannot understand how they feel when crucial races end in disaster. We simply do not know. The best we can do is attempt to compare our own experiences to what we see on our screens and try and imagine how a driver must feel when disaster strikes. I can but imperfectly imagine that I have a vague idea how Lewis Hamilton must have felt this morning in China.
I don’t know why, but when I saw Lewis Hamilton beach his car in the gravel trap at the pit-entry my first thought was to remember a full page advert placed by the Central Bank of Nigeria in the Financial Times warning people to be wary of Nigerian 419 “scammers” (the ruse is always the same: chap claims to be connected to prominent former African leader with loads of money, needs access to banking facilities, offers vast sums, ends up fleecing the greedy and gullible). The advert ended with the words “If it seems too good to be true, it is.”
Hamilton arrived in Shanghai buoyed considerably by his imperious win in the rain at the Fuji circuit in Japan last week. After enduring a couple of days of classic Formula One silliness (ridiculous accusations of “erratic” driving behind the safety car), Hamilton approached qualifying yesterday with the knowledge that Ferrari and Alonso had demonstrated superior speed to his all weekend. Once again, Hamilton approached his final qualifying effort with confidence and self-belief. He positively nailed that lap. There was no answer to it: Hamilton, P1. It seemed like an appropriate fulfilment of destiny. Saturday qualifying? Box ticked. Sunday’s Grand Prix and the World Championship? Biensur! But, as old Murray Walker used to say, it is never over until it’s over. I dearly hope that my instincts were wrong. I desperately want it to be true; miraculous, but true. I want to think back to that FT advert and think about it only in its appropriate context (when I next receive a letter saying “Greetings from Christ, your most excellent goodness. May the blessings of God be showered upon you and your family. My father, the late President Sani Abacha, left $400,000,000 and….”)
Attempting a post mortem of what went wrong is not particularly useful. Tyres were the problem for Hamilton. The decision to delay his tyre change did for him. That is all. As Heiman Roth said to Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II “Mo Green ended up with a bullet in his eye. I did not ask who gave the order. I just accepted it. Because this is the business we have chosen.” A wrong tyre-call for Hamilton was made by someone at McLaren. I will not ask who made the decision.
Tyres, as Hamilton has already seen once before this season, are notoriously fickle things. Remember Michael Schumacher’s disastrous puncture at the championship decider in Suzuka in 1999 after he overtook everyone from the back after stalling his Ferrari on the grid? Many tears were shed then.
There was more to the Chinese Grand Prix than Lewis Hamilton’s retirement. We saw some good driving today. Kimi Raikkonen’s tenacity paid off when he eventually caught out Hamilton under braking. Likewise Fernando Alonso overhauled Felipe Massa by having just that little bit more talent. Jenson Button proved that Honda may one day (soon, I hope!) be a force to be reckoned with by salvaging fifth place. And David Coulthard seems only to get better with age. I was terribly impressed by Sebastian Vettel in the Torro Rosso. He redeemed himself from last week by coming fourth for a hopeless team. He, I think, is the hero of the day. So, as races go, this was rather a good one!
There is a risk of losing perspective (some might argue that it is one only I suffer; I urge you to look at any British newspaper site on the internet and see for yourself that I am in very good company!), so let us get back to basics. Why do we switch on our television sets regularly on alternate Sundays for six months of every year? What we are after is motor racing excitement. We like wheel banging overtaking action. We revel in dramatic crashes. We sweat over split-second pit-stop timing. This is what being a Formula One fan is about, isn’t it? If the championship was settled today, can I say, hand on heart, that the last race of the season at Interlagos would have been as exciting for me as any other this season? Would I still have suffered the shortness of breath, the pounding heart, the fevered brow? Would I have spent an entire Saturday night not sleeping? Would I really?
What we have before us at the end of an epic, outstanding Grand Prix season, is a splendid prospect: a genuine 3 way contest. I know I have two weeks of palpitations to suffer, but what a race to look forward to. At the end of Sunday two weeks hence, depending on whom you support, either a Ferrari or a McLaren driver will be Formula One World Champion 2007. There is nothing new about this – remember Schumacher v Hakkinen? – but this time we do not know which McLaren driver. Perversely, ridiculously, if I am honest with myself, I prefer it like this…
Gitau
7 October 2007
PS. This commentary was supposed to begin like this: “Mike Hawthorn, Graham Hill, Jim Clark, John Surtees, Jackie Stewart, James Hunt, Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and now Lewis Hamilton…”
A special prize to the first person who correctly emails me the remainder of that sentence.
Formula One drivers are not ordinary mortals. We cannot relate to how a person can maintain control of a moving vehicle at phenomenal speed, cornering, while fighting phenomenal g-forces. We cannot understand how they feel when crucial races end in disaster. We simply do not know. The best we can do is attempt to compare our own experiences to what we see on our screens and try and imagine how a driver must feel when disaster strikes. I can but imperfectly imagine that I have a vague idea how Lewis Hamilton must have felt this morning in China.
I don’t know why, but when I saw Lewis Hamilton beach his car in the gravel trap at the pit-entry my first thought was to remember a full page advert placed by the Central Bank of Nigeria in the Financial Times warning people to be wary of Nigerian 419 “scammers” (the ruse is always the same: chap claims to be connected to prominent former African leader with loads of money, needs access to banking facilities, offers vast sums, ends up fleecing the greedy and gullible). The advert ended with the words “If it seems too good to be true, it is.”
Hamilton arrived in Shanghai buoyed considerably by his imperious win in the rain at the Fuji circuit in Japan last week. After enduring a couple of days of classic Formula One silliness (ridiculous accusations of “erratic” driving behind the safety car), Hamilton approached qualifying yesterday with the knowledge that Ferrari and Alonso had demonstrated superior speed to his all weekend. Once again, Hamilton approached his final qualifying effort with confidence and self-belief. He positively nailed that lap. There was no answer to it: Hamilton, P1. It seemed like an appropriate fulfilment of destiny. Saturday qualifying? Box ticked. Sunday’s Grand Prix and the World Championship? Biensur! But, as old Murray Walker used to say, it is never over until it’s over. I dearly hope that my instincts were wrong. I desperately want it to be true; miraculous, but true. I want to think back to that FT advert and think about it only in its appropriate context (when I next receive a letter saying “Greetings from Christ, your most excellent goodness. May the blessings of God be showered upon you and your family. My father, the late President Sani Abacha, left $400,000,000 and….”)
Attempting a post mortem of what went wrong is not particularly useful. Tyres were the problem for Hamilton. The decision to delay his tyre change did for him. That is all. As Heiman Roth said to Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II “Mo Green ended up with a bullet in his eye. I did not ask who gave the order. I just accepted it. Because this is the business we have chosen.” A wrong tyre-call for Hamilton was made by someone at McLaren. I will not ask who made the decision.
Tyres, as Hamilton has already seen once before this season, are notoriously fickle things. Remember Michael Schumacher’s disastrous puncture at the championship decider in Suzuka in 1999 after he overtook everyone from the back after stalling his Ferrari on the grid? Many tears were shed then.
There was more to the Chinese Grand Prix than Lewis Hamilton’s retirement. We saw some good driving today. Kimi Raikkonen’s tenacity paid off when he eventually caught out Hamilton under braking. Likewise Fernando Alonso overhauled Felipe Massa by having just that little bit more talent. Jenson Button proved that Honda may one day (soon, I hope!) be a force to be reckoned with by salvaging fifth place. And David Coulthard seems only to get better with age. I was terribly impressed by Sebastian Vettel in the Torro Rosso. He redeemed himself from last week by coming fourth for a hopeless team. He, I think, is the hero of the day. So, as races go, this was rather a good one!
There is a risk of losing perspective (some might argue that it is one only I suffer; I urge you to look at any British newspaper site on the internet and see for yourself that I am in very good company!), so let us get back to basics. Why do we switch on our television sets regularly on alternate Sundays for six months of every year? What we are after is motor racing excitement. We like wheel banging overtaking action. We revel in dramatic crashes. We sweat over split-second pit-stop timing. This is what being a Formula One fan is about, isn’t it? If the championship was settled today, can I say, hand on heart, that the last race of the season at Interlagos would have been as exciting for me as any other this season? Would I still have suffered the shortness of breath, the pounding heart, the fevered brow? Would I have spent an entire Saturday night not sleeping? Would I really?
What we have before us at the end of an epic, outstanding Grand Prix season, is a splendid prospect: a genuine 3 way contest. I know I have two weeks of palpitations to suffer, but what a race to look forward to. At the end of Sunday two weeks hence, depending on whom you support, either a Ferrari or a McLaren driver will be Formula One World Champion 2007. There is nothing new about this – remember Schumacher v Hakkinen? – but this time we do not know which McLaren driver. Perversely, ridiculously, if I am honest with myself, I prefer it like this…
Gitau
7 October 2007
PS. This commentary was supposed to begin like this: “Mike Hawthorn, Graham Hill, Jim Clark, John Surtees, Jackie Stewart, James Hunt, Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and now Lewis Hamilton…”
A special prize to the first person who correctly emails me the remainder of that sentence.
posted by Gitau at 2:29 pm
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