Did the game change at Siverstone?

When you see a Pussycat Doll leaping up in horror as her boyfriend slides off the Silverstone circuit onto the grass and an elderly man - who has the same name as the round objects at the front of your shirt - puts his head in his hands as his son loses track position to lesser mortals, you know things are not good for the subjects of Her Majesty. When you then see a German – a German! - express regret that he is not an Englishman because of how important winning the British Grand Prix at Silverstone is to him, you know that the words “not good” must surely be inadequate in description of the feelings of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button yesterday.

For the latter of the two English drivers, yesterday was not a complete disaster. He had a dreadful qualifying session on Saturday – both the mystique of Silverstone and the inevitable heebie-jeebies accompanying racing at home while leading the world championship did for him – and he was only able to manage sixth place on the grid. In a team controlled by the tactical maestro, Ross Brawn, this mishap could probably have been overcome by clever driving and keen race observation, but Button chose to pile on more problems for himself at the start of yesterday’s race. By the time the cars came round to Woodcote Corner, Button had lost three places because of a poor get away from the Start/Finish line. The rest of his afternoon was then all about damage limitation. That he was able to leave Silverstone with 3 points must be worthy of a little sigh of relief at how much worse things could have been. As things stand Button is still 23 points ahead of his nearest challenger, his team-mate Rubens Barrichello. With 8 races still to go this year, this is still a healthy buffer for the Englishman but he certainly cannot afford to be complacent. Things have been known to change very dramatically in F1.

What should keep Button’s management on their toes is the worrying fact that a young German is quietly and efficiently chipping away at the lead in front. The last German to overhaul a seemingly unassailable championship lead was Michael Schumacher. From the metronomic race control from the front to the android-like podium leap, Sebastian Vettel looks almost like Schumacher Mark II. To me there appear to be two main differences between the two Germans. The first is that whereas Schumacher was usually taciturn and uncomfortable speaking English, Vettel is loquacious (I have never known a driver speak so much after a race – this chap has his jaw wired to the national grid!) and perfectly at ease with the language of Shakespeare. The other is that notwithstanding his three wins at Silverstone, Schumacher always struggled at this circuit - and even suffered a bad injury there in 1999 when he broke his leg – while Vettel takes to the Northamptonshire track like a duck to water.

Yesterday’s commanding performance was by no means a fluke for the young lad (he’s only 21!); it was an announcement, an indication of things to come. Sebastian Vettel may be 25 points behind Jenson Button but I don’t think that is a fact which is likely to keep him awake at night. Better still for Vettel is the performance advantage Red Bull racing seem to have cobbled together. A one-two at Silverstone – with Mark Webber on the second step of the podium – is no mean achievement in anybody’s book. Red Bull is not a two-bit team run by some Austrian buccaneer who dares to think he can piss where the big dogs piss. Not any more it is not. Ferrari, McLaren and BMW can only stare in awe as the Red Bull cars lap nearly a minute faster than everybody else. The game has changed.

A chap having to come to terms with the new game is the autocratic boss of the FIA, Max Mosley. Having successfully faced down the mighty British tabloid press over revelations about his sadomasochistic predilections last year, Mosley arrived at Silverstone on Saturday determined to brow-beat the rebel teams comprising FOTA (the Formula One Teams Association) into submission. Describing the team owners as “lunatics” and accusing Flavio Briatore, the Renault owner, of attempting “to be a Bernie when he can’t”, Mosley was in vintage belligerent mode on Saturday. By Sunday it had become clear that FOTA were not listening to him any more and Mosley – perhaps for the first time in his life – was sounding conciliatory, magnanimous even. It is too late now for Mosley no matter how much he tries to lay on the charm; the die is cast. The only way FOTA will remain part of an FIA controlled Formula One series is if it has nothing to do with Mosley. In other words, the future looks simple: it is either an F1 series without Max Mosley or no F1 series at all. Again I say Hallelujah!

There is no escaping the fact that events at Silverstone this weekend marked a watershed moment, if not for the sport of Formula One as we know it, for the 2009 drivers’ championship. I look forward to the future with keen interest.

Gitau
22 June 2009

Silverstone heralds the beginning of the end of the madness

“About Turkey and Turkish birds we have heard lots,” wrote my correspondent. “Of Italy and your recollections we now know more than we need to. About France we have heard more than is sufficient to illuminate a late night conversation in any pub. But of England what do we know? Are you not resident in Her Majesty’s fair dominions? Do you not sup of English ale and call it your own? God bless my soul, do you not avail yourself from time to time of England’s fair maidens? These things we are certain about but a word about them nothing. Well, why? Why, why, why?”

I will spare you the rest of the details of that choking email which I received a couple of days ago but suffice to say it rather unsettled me. The gist of it – if you haven’t worked it out for yourselves – was the restraint I appear to express about my adopted home and fluency (his word, not mine) about lesser countries. I brooded over this for a while and chose to ignore the missive as being no more than the consequence of a deep and meaningful conversation with Mr Johnnie Walker but I have since corrected that thought and decided that there was some sense in my correspondent’s sentiments. I owe my readership an explanation – especially as it is the eve of the British Grand Prix, the home race of nearly all the teams in the 2009 Formula One championship, and probably the beginning of the end of the sport as we know it. The reasons for my silence are multiple but mostly related to a single event.

Here is what happened. Conscious of the significance of a symbol which any sailor would have identified as English since English sailors sank the mighty Spanish Armada a long time ago, I chose to spend a day sitting eating sandwiches and drinking lemonade on the white cliffs of Dover. When I arrived at the entry gates to the revered site, I met a crusty old gate keeper dressed in a moth eaten tweed jacket and smoking a pipe pensively. When I asked how much he wanted for a ticket, he stared at me through swivelling eyes.

“Like England do you?” he said at length.
“What does it matter you stupid old git,” I said irritably, “just hand over the bally ticket and go back to chewing your silly pipe.”

Remember the old chap who crops up from time to time in old westerns pointing vaguely at some point in the distance and declaring “there’s gold in them thar hills!”? Well, the gate keeper looked something like that when he handed over a ticket with the words “I’d be carefully my lad, there’s magic in those cliffs”.

Days later I woke up to find my bedclothes soaked. Convinced this was the consequence of a passionate visit by the Succubus in the dead of night, I dismissed this and attempted to get up for a drink of water. When my legs buckled under me and I began to see stars, I realised things were far more serious. As I sat on the White Cliffs a malicious tick had crawled into my trousers, bitten me on the backside and left some nasty poison inside me. I was now a victim of Lyme disease. Salvation came through medical intervention but I had learned my lesson: do not be disrespectful of Albion. So there you have it.

One would have thought they knew better but, after years of unfettered control of the sport, two arrogant, old Englishmen are about to have their comeuppance. And, appropriately, it is happening in England. For years, while Bernie Ecclestone decided where Grands Prix were held, how much any potential host circuit had to pay for the privilege of staging a race, which television stations were allowed to cover events and how much of this money he was prepared to share with the teams, his close friend, Max Mosley, set the rules of the sport. Both men grew increasingly megalomaniacal over the years. Result: disaster.

When Bernie Ecclestone found himself at war at home with his statuesque, no-nonsense Croatian wife, he soothed his battered ego by doing F1 deals with shady characters in ghastly places (how else do you explain the extraordinary, mind-numbing craziness of the Grand Prix in the desert – Bahrain – which we have been forced to endure for five years?). Meanwhile, Max Mosley, when unable to locate hookers sufficiently enthusiastic at thrashing his bottom, caused havoc with Formula One’s rule book. The participating teams put up with this double-headed nonsense for a very long time but they have now said enough is enough. From next year all the teams – excepting Williams and Force India – will be forming their own break-away racing championship. Hallelujah!

It is, therefore, with relief that I have been stacking up my fridge with Courage Best Bitter in readiness for tomorrow’s British Grand Prix. It is the home race of current championship leader, Jenson Button, but that is never a guarantee of success. If past races involving otherwise successful drivers at their home circuits is indicative of Button’s chances, I would be hesitant about placing bets on the Englishman. His team-mate, Rubens Barrichello, has better chances, I reckon.

The other Englishman racing at home tomorrow will be last year’s race winner Lewis Hamilton. Unfortunately the youngster’s car is so appallingly bad this season that he has better chances of persuading HRH the Prince of Wales to join his pit crew than he does of winning the British Grand Prix.

Silverstone is a magnificent circuit ; it is easily one of my favourites. One of the best pieces of news about the end of the Ecclestone-Mosley pantomime is that classic circuits like this one will be safe from threat. Heaven knows we may even see a return of precious places like the A1 Ring in Austria and Watkins Glen in New York – Inshallah.

I have never failed to enjoy a British Grand Prix and hope that you too will,

Enjoy Silverstone!

Gitau
20 June 2009

Turkey reveals Button's secret

Halfway through yesterday’s Turkish Grand Prix, the television camera swung round the Istanbul Park and I saw something that caused me to sit bolt upright, place Arabella on the floor and think hard. A tired looking fellow of indeterminate racial origin was sitting on a grass verge swigging thirstily from a bottle of water. To his right was his jacket – there was nothing unusual about this as temperatures were very high at the Istanbul Park yesterday – and to his left a six pack of Efes Pilsen. Looking carefully at the man’s jacket, I noticed that it was concealing some sort of object. Later on, when replaying the highlights of the race, which I had recorded, I paused the picture at this point and looked more closely at the man’s jacket. Poking out of the side of the jacket were the unmistakeable gaudy feathers of a mask I had seen somewhere before.

In the days before English and European football clubs like Arsenal, Manchester United and Barcelona became global religions and caused youngsters in a vast Nairobi slum like Kibera to kill themselves when things went awry for their teams, some local football teams actually mattered. I have in mind the days when it was dangerous to wander through certain parts of Nairobi in anything other than a lime-green Gor Mahia (a Kenyan football club) jersey. I remember getting into the spirit of the thing and queueing for many hours in 1987 for tickets for the biggest football match ever played on Kenyan soil. The final of the African Cup Winners Cup was to be played on a Saturday in November of that year between Gor Mahia and Espérance Sportive de Tunis at the Moi International Sports Centre, Kasarani and I was damned if I was going to miss the game.

On the fateful Saturday I was in amongst the crowd singing “Gor, Gor Mahia, Gor, timbedutoywakni!” (which, I am told, translates as follows: “Gor, Gor Mahia. Gor, all the teams are crying!”) when I noticed a rather disturbing, (or reassuring, depending on your disposition) sight. Running round the corridors of the stadium and dancing down the steps of each stand when he came to it, was a chap dressed like a peacock.

Apart from lots of lime-green being in evidence about his body and several jingly bits wrapped round his ankles, he had on a massive mask covered in feathers of every possible shape and colour and waved an elaborate fly-whisk over the heads of the chanting fans as he ran up and down the stand steps. The chap was perspiring so profusely that he left a little puddle of sweat on the steps of the stand in which I was sitting before moving on to bless the remainder of the stadium. He looked every bit like a member of the welcoming committee at the gates of hell. I was assured by better informed Gor Mahia fans than me that he was anything but bad news. In his absence, they said, Gor Mahia was assured of defeat, for the Tunisians were formidable opponents. The fans were right. I will never forget the faces of the Tunisians as the final whistle was blown and they had slowly to trudge to their dressing room in the knowledge that they had been humiliated by a team which, outside Kenya, was not known for its ability to do much more than kick its way out of a paper bag.

I was reminded of these scenes yesterday as Jenson Button easily got past the distracted pole-sitter Sebastian Vettel at turn 10 of the first lap and then went on to lead the Turkish Grand Prix for the rest of the afternoon and take the chequered flag as only the fifth man in history ever to achieve six wins out of the first seven races in a Formula One season. A man who had been written off as a has-been at the end of last year had now joined the exalted ranks of Alberto Ascari, Juan Manuel Fangio, Jim Clark and Michael Schumacher. I feel certain that the feathers being inexpertly concealed on that grass verge at the Istanbul Park have something to do with this. Button is doing better than anybody could ever have dreamed because he is the beneficiary of very powerful muti.

“Surely you jest, Gitau,” I hear you smirk. Well, here’s how it happened. The perspiring chappie at the football match in 1987 was also wearing a black tunic covered in white, lime-green and red buttons (bear with me, my friends, because this is significant).

Not long after the end of last season, Jenson Button was lying on his bed in a hotel room in a foreign city with a bottle of scotch and a revolver by his side. He had received word that Honda were quitting Formula One and each of the girls in his little notebook in that city had claimed “prior engagements” as an excuse for not seeing him that evening. He thought it a good idea to take a last look at the world – through the eyes of the television – see how awful it really was and then do the evil deed. The pictures from channel to channel were dominated by a grinning black man with a funny name. The black man was waving at vast crowds in acknowledgment of a significant moment in human history. “O-what?” Button thought in his state of befuddlement. “That can’t be right.” Than he saw pictures of the village where the father of the new American president was born. Among the dancing crowds was a gaudily dressed man in a black button-covered tunic, a feather-covered mask and jingly bits round his ankles. Button thought twice about the revolver and phoned his father in Somerset, England. “Get that bloke, Dad,” he whispered.

The colours of the Brawn GP car are white, lime-green, black and red. The Brawn pit crew wear black overalls. Now do you see it?

Jenson Button is going to be world champion in 2009. If you fancy your chances, offer me a decent wager against this not-so-bold statement. I promise to cooperate.

Gitau
8 June 2009

Tempting Turkey

If the secret to a man’s happiness is what is placed before him and shovelled into his mouth, the guarantee of a man’s ill-temper is what comes out the other end, if troublesome. I have little doubt that the brain, heart and arse share a common bond. If the last of these is troubled, the first two are in serious jeopardy. I was feeling very sorry for myself a few weeks ago after a night of dining a little too richly on kuzu shish kebabs and kemikli biftek washed down by Turkish red wine in a London Turkish restaurant called Haz. My gut had reacted rather more violently to some of the spices – which, I am sure, were delivered on a donkey to London all the way from Diyarbakir – than I had anticipated and I was laid low. Then the phone call came.

“Gitau, you old rascal, how the devil are you?” The caller was an old university chum of mine who delights in the splendid Caledonian name of Struan McGillivray. He had “found” me a few days earlier on facebook after at least twenty years’ disappearance.
“McGillivray, you pestilence, do please crawl back into the hole you crawled out of and leave me to die in peace,” I grunted.
“I see you’ve lost none of your radiant charm over the years. What ails you?” McGillivray is nothing if not persistent.
“Shish kebabs are a menace,” I moaned.
“Oh, I see,” he said, “the old exploding belly. Nothing to worry about. Hear that?”
“What?”
“That, my friend, is the invigorating sound of shish kebabs and British bangers sizzling on my barbeque!”
“McGillivray, you are a vile insect!”

McGillivray refused to go away but instead insisted on telling me that he had discovered this blog, read about my encounters with Ozlem in Paris (see Turkish Delights from 22 August 2007) and been prompted to look for me. After leaving university and becoming a tea taster with Twinings, McGillivray had got bored and decided to seek a little action by joining the British army. By the time of his last posting to the British army base in Dhekelia, Cyprus, he had seen sufficient action in Afghanistan to last him three lifetimes and longed for a return to a more sedate existence. As soon as he was able to, then, McGillivray resigned his commission and “went native”. He found himself a lass called Cennet on the Turkish side of the disputed Cypriot border and relocated the pair of them to run an eatery in a leafy suburb of Istanbul. Five years and five additional stone in weight later, McGillivray was the father of two Turko-Scot children, a boy called Alasdair and a girl called Leyla, and filled to the brim with bonhomie.

As I said, bad tummies do not make for good brains. If I had been myself at the time of the call from McGillivray, I would have sought to inveigle him into securing me a ticket and paddock pass for this weekend’s Turkish Grand Prix through his contacts in the hospitality industry in his adopted home city. As things stand, I will be spending the weekend trying to restrain Arabella from leaping off my knee and screaming into my ear as I attempt to make sense of television pictures of glamorous people at the Istanbul Park, while the rain pounds the grey streets of London outside. For, sure as mini skirts in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo on a summer’s day, the Turkish Grand Prix is always guaranteed to excite and invigorate.

I always have to pinch myself when I find myself saying this but the Istanbul Park has turned out to be one of my favourite circuits. After being repeatedly stung for producing shitty, boring, predictable racing circuits time after maddening time, Hermann Tilke (the German architect who somehow manages to get all the new F1 circuit design commissions) got it right when he put pencil to drawing board to design Turkey’s one and only F1 circuit. Having made sure his cheque was safely cleared, Tilke stuck his lower lip out and imagined he was Paul Gauguin in Tahiti. The result was a work of sheer genius, if a little mad. In particular, I have in mind an interlocking series of four corners – nicknamed “Turn 8” – which have managed to confound many an experienced driver since the Istanbul Park Circuit was first revealed to the world in 2005. The Istanbul Park, therefore, is a circuit which is deservedly worthy of much respect. By extension, one driver’s mastery of this circuit made me change my mind about him and abandon my earlier pooh-poohing of his claims of excellence. That driver is Felipe Massa.

When the young Brazilian achieved pole position and then went on to win the Turkish Grand Prix in 2006, I thought it was a lucky fluke – especially as it was his first ever Formula One victory. But when Massa went on to repeat the feat in 2007 and then 2008, I doffed my cap to him. At the end of last year’s race, I knew that Massa was going to be Lewis Hamilton’s main opponent in his quest for his first drivers’ F1 world championship. And so it came to pass.

Will Massa do it again in 2009? I am sure he would love to but I don’t think it will be easy. Admittedly, Ferrari’s 2009 car has come forward in leaps and bounds since the team’s disastrous start to this season – witness Kimi Raikkonen’s impressive bounce-back in Monaco - but there is an Englishman who is demonstrating serene unflappability this year and he is almost guaranteed to madden excitable Latin types like Massa.

Jenson Button seems to have got this year’s season by the scruff of the neck. With Ross Brawn – another unflappable Englishman – guiding operations and a thus far bullet-proof car beneath him, Button’s star appears inexorably to be on the rise. After a miraculous win in Australia at the start of the season, five wins out of six races later and it is now not foolhardy to speak of Jenson Button as the next world champion. This must be irritating for the ego of young Lewis Hamilton but I think it is good for him. If Hamilton had found 2009 to be an easy stroll to another world championship, he might have lost the motivation to be competitive. As it happens, some argue that this is precisely what happened to Kimi Raikkonen after becoming world champion in his first season at Ferrari.

Time will tell what will happen when things eventually shake out a little later. Best, I think, to wait until Silverstone in a fortnight’s time before we can begin to make measured predictions. For now, let us carry on drinking in the best of a delightful racing season. So, do have a great weekend and,

Enjoy Turkey!

Gitau
5 June 2009