Nerves in China
China is a country that makes people nervous. To the ear of the average non-Chinese man in the street, the language spoken by the people of China sounds incredibly strange, spooky even. When a Chinese woman serving you in a restaurant fixes you with a stare at the meanness of your tip, you instinctively reach for your wallet for fear of what might befall you at night. If you ask a Chinese man for help because you have blood pouring out of your arse, he will probably stick a couple of needles in your heel and miraculously solve the problem. And then there is the politics. While the Europeans decided after seventy odd years that Vladimir Lenin had been wrong after all, the Chinese hung on to communism but allowed themselves to rake in capitalist money with much gusto. Consequently, in these hand-wringing, awful recessionary days, the only chap who seems to be smiling is the man wearing a collarless jacket and eating spicy noodles. The Chinese, you see, live in a class by themselves.
A few years ago, I attended a celebratory luncheon with some bankers in Amsterdam at the conclusion of a much negotiated big loan transaction. The champagne still fizzing away inside me as I waited at Schipol airport for my flight back to London, I decided to continue the revelry by downing some more fizzy stuff. The barman I approached happened to be Chinese. “Shome more of that ekshellent fizz from Veuve Clicquot, if you please, my good man,” I said. The man looked at me with concern and shook his head. “Stomach will cause you trouble today,” he said. “Nonsense,” I said. “My lunch was shuperb, if you musht know, sho apply yourshelf to the task at hand and look sharp about it!” There rested the matter until the early hours of the next morning when a major explosion occurred in my tummy. I’ll spare you the details. Suffice to say that the Chinaman knew exactly what he was talking about.
So it is always with a touch of nerves that I contemplate the Chinese Grand Prix. This, the sixth year of this mysterious race, will probably be the most nervous Formula One outing for many a team principal. Squarely in the frame are McLaren’s Martin Whitmarsh and Ferrari’s Stefano Domenicali. For at least the last decade, the two teams have dominated the Formula One world almost to the exclusion of everybody else. Now, the racing world has been turned on its head. A little team called Brawn cleverly visited the Chinese oracle a year ago and have stolen a march on the big boys. So much so that it may take until the first European race (Barcelona) for the playing field to be levelled. By then Brawn in the hands of Jenson Button could be too far ahead to beat.
Like a man donating blood by slicing through his jugular vein with a carving knife, McLaren have chosen to damage themselves worse than any racing steward, FIA official or appeal court judge ever could. For a team with the numbers 1 and 2 on its 2009 cars, McLaren’s current self-destructive streak is impossible to understand. First they began the season with a car that was clearly not fit for purpose. So much time was spent celebrating Lewis Hamilton’s nail-biting championship win last year that insufficient attention was devoted towards the development of the 2009 car. Then, panicked by the bullet-proof reliability and sheer speed of the Brawn GP cars, the big brains at McLaren chose to engage in “rule engineering”. Seeing an opportunity to squeeze in six handy championship points for the team and Lewis Hamilton, the McLaren heavyweights decided forcibly to instruct the world champion to lie to the stewards at the Australian Grand Prix about the conduct of third placed driver, Jarno Trulli, under safety car conditions. This was stupid in the extreme and the team was rumbled pretty quickly by the conflicting evidence supplied by the tapes of Hamilton’s conversations with the team as the race progressed.
The fall-out at McLaren has been huge. The chap who issued the instructions to Hamilton has been sacked and Ron Dennis has announced an end to his career in motor racing. The latter action was probably taken to save the skin of Martin Whitmarsh who took over from Dennis as team principal this year. The damage to the reputation of wonder boy Hamilton is yet to be discerned. I think the lad will recover from this in the long term – Formula One has had many dishonest bastards in its time (think Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher) but their individual careers were never harmed. I doubt, though, that there is much more of a future at McLaren for Lewis Hamilton. Watch this space.
Ferraris woes may not be as gut-wrenching as McLaren’s but the team’s abysmal performance so far this season is causing a proud team to suffer dreadful anxiety attacks and receive heavy brickbats from angry Italian tifosi at home. I cannot remember when Ferrari last began a season so badly. They had hoped for the usual FIA favouritism they have enjoyed for years by being the prime movers behind the appeal against the Brawn cars, but this has backfired badly. The irony of the situation is that Ross Brawn, the man the Ferrari team now love to hate (they described him in court as “a man of supreme arrogance”) was the architect of Ferrari’s most successful period in Formula One. Ferrari know that the work required to remodel their cars is such that they could be a quarter of the way into the 2009 season before they win a single point! Domenicali may soon be looking for a home in England at this rate…
Meanwhile, the teams which didn’t go the way of Brawn, Toyota and Williams have frantically been working on new diffusers (part of the rear wing) back at their factories so as to stand a chance of being competitive. This is part of the disingenuousness that goes on in Formula One - they were doing this at the same time as launching court proceedings challenging the diffuser used by the three clever teams!
All of this amounts to a jolly interesting spectacle for us, the fans. There is so much unpredictability on and off the circuit that Formula One now feels like a new, more exciting sport. Who would ever hanker after the soporific, processional Schumacher days? Long may current form continue. When I think about the weekend ahead of us, I know I am safe in the knowledge that you will,
Enjoy Shanghai!
Gitau
17 April 2009
A few years ago, I attended a celebratory luncheon with some bankers in Amsterdam at the conclusion of a much negotiated big loan transaction. The champagne still fizzing away inside me as I waited at Schipol airport for my flight back to London, I decided to continue the revelry by downing some more fizzy stuff. The barman I approached happened to be Chinese. “Shome more of that ekshellent fizz from Veuve Clicquot, if you please, my good man,” I said. The man looked at me with concern and shook his head. “Stomach will cause you trouble today,” he said. “Nonsense,” I said. “My lunch was shuperb, if you musht know, sho apply yourshelf to the task at hand and look sharp about it!” There rested the matter until the early hours of the next morning when a major explosion occurred in my tummy. I’ll spare you the details. Suffice to say that the Chinaman knew exactly what he was talking about.
So it is always with a touch of nerves that I contemplate the Chinese Grand Prix. This, the sixth year of this mysterious race, will probably be the most nervous Formula One outing for many a team principal. Squarely in the frame are McLaren’s Martin Whitmarsh and Ferrari’s Stefano Domenicali. For at least the last decade, the two teams have dominated the Formula One world almost to the exclusion of everybody else. Now, the racing world has been turned on its head. A little team called Brawn cleverly visited the Chinese oracle a year ago and have stolen a march on the big boys. So much so that it may take until the first European race (Barcelona) for the playing field to be levelled. By then Brawn in the hands of Jenson Button could be too far ahead to beat.
Like a man donating blood by slicing through his jugular vein with a carving knife, McLaren have chosen to damage themselves worse than any racing steward, FIA official or appeal court judge ever could. For a team with the numbers 1 and 2 on its 2009 cars, McLaren’s current self-destructive streak is impossible to understand. First they began the season with a car that was clearly not fit for purpose. So much time was spent celebrating Lewis Hamilton’s nail-biting championship win last year that insufficient attention was devoted towards the development of the 2009 car. Then, panicked by the bullet-proof reliability and sheer speed of the Brawn GP cars, the big brains at McLaren chose to engage in “rule engineering”. Seeing an opportunity to squeeze in six handy championship points for the team and Lewis Hamilton, the McLaren heavyweights decided forcibly to instruct the world champion to lie to the stewards at the Australian Grand Prix about the conduct of third placed driver, Jarno Trulli, under safety car conditions. This was stupid in the extreme and the team was rumbled pretty quickly by the conflicting evidence supplied by the tapes of Hamilton’s conversations with the team as the race progressed.
The fall-out at McLaren has been huge. The chap who issued the instructions to Hamilton has been sacked and Ron Dennis has announced an end to his career in motor racing. The latter action was probably taken to save the skin of Martin Whitmarsh who took over from Dennis as team principal this year. The damage to the reputation of wonder boy Hamilton is yet to be discerned. I think the lad will recover from this in the long term – Formula One has had many dishonest bastards in its time (think Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher) but their individual careers were never harmed. I doubt, though, that there is much more of a future at McLaren for Lewis Hamilton. Watch this space.
Ferraris woes may not be as gut-wrenching as McLaren’s but the team’s abysmal performance so far this season is causing a proud team to suffer dreadful anxiety attacks and receive heavy brickbats from angry Italian tifosi at home. I cannot remember when Ferrari last began a season so badly. They had hoped for the usual FIA favouritism they have enjoyed for years by being the prime movers behind the appeal against the Brawn cars, but this has backfired badly. The irony of the situation is that Ross Brawn, the man the Ferrari team now love to hate (they described him in court as “a man of supreme arrogance”) was the architect of Ferrari’s most successful period in Formula One. Ferrari know that the work required to remodel their cars is such that they could be a quarter of the way into the 2009 season before they win a single point! Domenicali may soon be looking for a home in England at this rate…
Meanwhile, the teams which didn’t go the way of Brawn, Toyota and Williams have frantically been working on new diffusers (part of the rear wing) back at their factories so as to stand a chance of being competitive. This is part of the disingenuousness that goes on in Formula One - they were doing this at the same time as launching court proceedings challenging the diffuser used by the three clever teams!
All of this amounts to a jolly interesting spectacle for us, the fans. There is so much unpredictability on and off the circuit that Formula One now feels like a new, more exciting sport. Who would ever hanker after the soporific, processional Schumacher days? Long may current form continue. When I think about the weekend ahead of us, I know I am safe in the knowledge that you will,
Enjoy Shanghai!
Gitau
17 April 2009
posted by Gitau at 11:58 am
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