The incorrigible Italians

The penny dropped when Stefano Domenicali, the Ferrari team boss, dragged his two drivers back to the podium to take a bow as boos and hisses rang out across Hockenheim yesterday after the German Grand Prix. Until then, I had thought that the essential quality required for a job in Ferrari team management was skin with the thickness of rhino hide. I now realise that I was wrong: it is masochism. What else could explain the actions of a team which had received death threats as recently as 2002?

In 2002, at the A-1 Ring in Austria, Brazilian driver Rubens Barrichello was comfortably going round the last corner of the last lap to take the chequered flag and win the Grand Prix when he was ordered by his Ferrari bosses to wait until Michael Schumacher – who was several seconds behind – had caught up with him and then let him through to take the chequered flag. It was such a flagrant example of race manipulation that the Formula One world was rocked by turmoil. Millions, including yours truly, threatened to cease watching races unless something was done. Something was indeed done. The FIA banned team orders that interfere with a race result. I heaved a sigh of relief for Formula One but nothing was ever going to make me support Ferrari again after the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix.

Eight years on and it is clear that Ferrari learned nothing at all from the experience. Starting from third place on the grid on the anniversary of his life-threatening accident in Hungary last year, Brazilian driver Felipe Massa took advantage of a clumsy attempt by Sebastian Vettel to defend himself from being overtaken on the right by Fernando Alonso. Seeing perfectly clear air ahead of him, Massa launched his Ferrari into the lead of the Grand Prix and never looked in danger of losing it until lap 48 when his racing engineer, Rob Smedley, came on the radio. The message Smedley had to deliver was clear and unmistakable: “Okay, so Fernando is faster than you. Can you confirm you understand that message?” We did not hear Massa’s reaction but as soon as the sister Ferrari of Fernando Alonso hove into the view of his wing mirror, he veered to the left and let it through. Smedley came back on the radio straight away to rub salt into the wound. “Good lad,” he said, “just stick with it now, sorry.”

“These deluded arseholes,” I thought, “now they are really going to get it with both barrels.” As the drivers mounted the podium for the prize-giving ceremony, you could see from the dejected expressions of both Ferrari drivers that they were not happy. Their team had landed them neck deep in the mulligatawny. Former team boss and BBC television pundit, Eddie Jordan, called it cheating and demanded that both cars were disqualified.

Journalists in the press conference afterwards abandoned any pretence of subtlety and laid the boot hard into the Ferrari drivers. “Fernando, you said after Valencia that the race had been manipulated in favour of Lewis,” said one British journalist. “Those words seem a bit hollow now. Where will this victory rank in your career, is it up there with Singapore 2008?” [Remember, in Singapore 2008, Nelson Piquet Jr was ordered to crash his Renault into a wall to help Alonso win.] “Fernando, I think we all know what happened on lap 48,” said a German hack, “and we don't need any fairy tales about tyres or anything to be clear of that. I just want to ask you, because in 2006 in Monza you said that Formula One is not a sport any more for you but was that which we saw today a sport?” On and on it went and there was nothing the hapless pair could do to calm the seething mob of furious reporters.

Team orders in F1, like corruption in the world, are a disease of the sport. Corruption is a global disease but in first world countries it is usually practiced with subtlety. Similarly, team orders are given in clever, difficult to detect circumstances by experienced operators like, say, McLaren. Unfortunately, Ferrari, like your average Kenyan politician, are none-too-subtle when engaging in dastardly acts. The Kenyan politician will ask you to turn up at his office with a Rolex watch and a briefcase stuffed with money regardless of who else might know this or that you may have a camera hidden in your clothing. Equally oblivious to the reaction of the watching world, Ferrari will audibly tell a driver to move over by a radio transmission in plain English.

The problem at Ferrari is that the masochistic Italians in charge – Luca de Montezemolo as overall boss and Domenicali as team principal – are head-over-heels in love with Fernando Alonso. An Italian in love is a dangerous thing. I once advised a friend contemplating suicide by swallowing a handful of paracetamol tablets with a bottle of vodka to do something more exciting. “Go out with a bang,” I said, “go to Italy and try and chat up a bride on her wedding day.”

The sentiment that runs through Alonso’s brain at every waking moment is this: I did the impossible. Twice. I dethroned the invincible Michael Schumacher and then came back and did it again in the following year. I am like God. This worthy feeling does not sit comfortably with the English stiff upper lip – generally speaking, prima donnas are an unloved species in England – and Alonso found it hard going at McLaren; a team he had joined as a double world champion. He stormed out of Mclaren back into the arms of the Italian boss of the Renault team, Flavio Briatore. Old Flav – serial shagger of super models – knew exactly how to soothe bruised egos. Accordingly, he did everything in his power to keep Alonso happy. It cost him his right to run a Formula One team after the Singaporean fiasco, but at least Alonso was happy.

Next came the men from Maranello. In full knowledge of the risks they ran, the Italians thought with their hearts and not their heads. At one point during yesterday’s race, Alonso was trying hard to overtake Massa but couldn’t get past. “This is ridiculous” he cried. The team complied. Domenicali got Massa’s race engineer to do the dirty job – perhaps to give the impression that he was not involved in the decision - but everybody knew the truth. The truth is that de Montezemolo got on the phone to Domenicali and gave clear instructions. An imperious man, de Montezemolo would have been unimpressed by Domenicali reminding him of the risks they ran in assisting Alonso. He probably said something like “Non mi importa niente, sei un rompi balle!” [I don’t care at all, arsehole!]

Ferrari’s punishment will be known when the FIA meets to decide it in a few weeks time. I hope they do the right thing.

The irony of all of this is nobody is paying any attention to how far Ferrari have come in terms of car development. They are now up at the top with Red Bull and McLaren are a long way down – at least half a second. Wouldn’t it be better to have been discussing this staggering achievement than yet another tawdry episode of Ferrari dishonesty?

Gitau
26 July 2010

Germany offers an opportunity to neutralise notoriety

Some stories sit comfortably under the heading “the universal story” because wherever you are in the world, you will find a version of them told with slight cultural nuances. There is a version of the universal story told in Italy about a visitor to a small Tuscan town who wanted to see what the town had to offer. A knowledgeable young man agreed to take him on a little walk around the town and show him its prominent features.

As the pair approached a magnificent cathedral, the guide asked rhetorically “Do you see that cathedral? My father, Giuseppe, built it with his own hands brick by brick. Do they call him Giuseppe the great builder of cathedrals? Never!” They walked on a little further and the guide pointed out a bridge. “Do you see that bridge? My father designed and built that bridge by himself. Do they call him Giuseppe the great builder of bridges? Never!” The guide grew more doleful as they walked. After a little while he pointed out a school wearily. “Do you see that school? My father, Giuseppe, built that school with his own hands. Then he found people and trained them to be teachers. Do they call him Giuseppe the great educator? No. Do they call him Giuseppe the greatest man ever to have been born in this town? Never!” There was a long pause and then the guide said “He shagged one chicken.”

A Formula One version of the universal story is told in the career of Michael Schumacher. At the beginning of the final race of the 1997 season, Schumacher had done enough to win the world championship by one point. His nearest opponent, Williams’ driver Jacques Villeneuve, was within a win of overhauling him. Schumacher did a hasty mental calculation and worked out that there was more to be gained by taking both cars out of the race than racing to the finish line. Halfway into the race, when Villeneuve attempted an overtaking move on Schumacher, who was leading, Schumacher suddenly turned his car viciously left into the Williams of Villeneuve.

Unfortunately the move did not work for Schumacher because only his car retired from the Grand Prix while Villeneuve was able to limp along in an injured car to finish in third place and become world champion. The move was so cynical, so blatant and so unsportsmanlike that the rest of Schumacher’s career was blighted by it. From then on, no matter how many pole positions, wins, or championships he earned, to many watchers of the sport, Schumacher was never “Schumacher the great champion”; he was and will forever remain “Schumacher the cheat”.

It must be said, though, that Schumacher went on to do a lot more to reinforce the epithet: requiring preferential status over team-mates; expecting team-mates to move over and let him win no matter what; and illegally blocking other drivers (egregiously so at Monaco in 2006 when he parked his Ferrari at the edge of a corner so as deliberately to block Fernando Alonso from performing a quick qualifying lap).

When Sebastian Vettel came into F1, he was such a prodigious talent that comparisons were instantly made with Michael Schumacher. The German Press at first called him “Little Schumi” – probably in recognition of the fact that Vettel offered the best chance Germany had of ever seeing another of her sons as F1 world champion (Schumacher was the first and only one). Vettel refused to recognise it as an accolade and insisted on being judged on his own merits.

But as we saw at Silverstone, life can be cruel. Vettel now runs the risk of forever being viewed as unsportsmanlike through no fault of his own but because of the behaviour of his Red Bull paymasters. The Austrian owners of the Red Bull seem to prefer young Vettel over Mark Webber as the face of the team for marketing purposes. I think this goes beyond the suspicion that there is some “tribal” loyalty felt by the Austrians to a German. Vettel has boyish good looks and an easy charm about him which lends itself well to, say, underwear adverts in the pages of GQ or Esquire. Webber’s more square-jawed, chiselled features, by contrast, give one the impression of a chap at ease wielding an axe at 40° Centigrade in the Australian outback. Webber is more the Marlboro man riding through the desert towards the sunset than the Calvin Klein perfumed pants Vettel.

Much has been said about the air having been cleared at Red Bull but I suspect that the team may have lost a crucial ingredient which, once lost, is almost impossible to regain. I fear that, like my hearty breakfast last Sunday, Mark Webber’s trust in the Red Bull team may have disappeared for ever and a day. In indicating a clear preference for one driver over the other the Red Bull people have shown that while they are involved with Mark Webber, they are committed to Sebastian Vettel. The difference between the two was immortalised in the words of the tennis legend, Martina Navratilova: “Think of bacon and eggs,” she said. “The chicken was involved; the pig was committed.”

There is more than enough time for Vettel to do some urgent repair work to the damage his team has inflicted on his hitherto unsullied reputation. A good start would be to put in a strong performance at his home Grand Prix at Hockenheim this weekend. The Red Bull car offers the best chance of a win at this unremarkable circuit and he should be in with a very good chance.

That is not to say that anybody else wants to make things easy for him. First of all there is the sinned-against Australian who received immense satisfaction when he won at Silverstone despite his team’s best sabotaging efforts. To stick the boot further in would feel very satisfying, I am sure. Then there is the McLaren pair who are never too far away from picking up any scraps the Red Bull drivers leave off the table. But most important are the Mercedes boys.

This will be Mercedes GP’s first home Grand prix. Nico Rosberg has done his best to keep the team respectable but Michael Schumacher has been shocking. If past behaviour of Mercedes team principal, Ross Brawn, is anything to go by, I think this is the last chance they have of getting ahead this season. If things do not work out at Hockenheim, I would not be surprised if Brawn does what he did at Honda in 2008 and halts development of the 2010 car while at the same time starting development of the 2011 one. This worked outrageously well for Brawn GP (the re-badged Honda) as we saw last year.

As ever, there is as much intrigue off track as there is racing on it. I am sure, therefore, that you will,

Enjoy Hockenheim!

Gitau
22 July 2010

Warfare at Red Bull

At the drivers’ press conference after the Japanese Grand Prix of 1997, Eddie Irvine was asked about the race in a room packed with perplexed journalists. He had driven spectacularly well, at one point overtaking two cars in the same manoeuvre, and looked every bit the driver of the day. Then he had, bizarrely, moved aside to let his Ferrari team-mate, Michael Schumacher, take the lead of the Grand Prix and then spent the rest of the race defending Schumacher from being challenged by Jacques Villeneuve. It was difficult for anyone to understand this behaviour and the journalists wanted an explanation. “Well,” said Irvine, “as soon as I had got the lead it was simply a matter of waiting for the phone call. Once it came I knew what to do.”

Irvine was this blasé about Ferrari’s blatant favouritism of his team-mate because there was no misunderstanding about his role at Ferrari. He had signed a contract which clearly stipulated that he was the number two driver; and he was paid handsomely for his trouble. In other words, Irvine was happy with his lot. In racing terms, he had signed a bum deal but in everything else he was content. He drove the best car for the richest team and earned lots of money. The fame of being associated with as illustrious a racing history as Ferrari meant that he was never lacking in opportunities for wide ranging Ugandan discussions with an endless stream of nubile lasses.

Fast forward to 2010 and we have an almost identical situation at Red Bull. But, as was made clear yesterday, the crucial difference is that Red Bull are not as fastidious about contracts as Ferrari were in Schumacher’s days. We did not know anything definite (but had good grounds for suspicion) about the team’s preferences until yesterday when Mark Webber screamed “not bad for a number two driver!” as he took the chequered flag to win the British Grand Prix.

Red Bull arrived at Silverstone with a specially designed front wing which was installed on Mark Webber’s car for qualifying on Saturday. When it became clear that the new front wing on Webber’s car worked better than the inferior one on Sebastian Vettel’s car, the powers that be ordered the mechanics to take Webber’s wing off his car and fix it onto Vettel’s. Webber still managed to qualify in second place but he was seething with fury after it. Even his father was concerned about the Australian’s state of mind. When they sat down to breakfast on Sunday, the younger Webber could hardly eat because he was so angry.

Come the afternoon and Webber translated the anger he was feeling into driving brilliance. As soon as the lights went out to indicate the start of the Grand Prix, Webber elbowed his team-mate aside at the first corner and knew then that he was going to receive his first ever British Grand Prix trophy less than two hours later. Despite the best efforts of second-placed man, Lewis Hamilton, Webber never once looked in danger of losing his lead, such was his determination.

Vettel, meanwhile, suffered a puncture in the melee and dropped to the back of the grid. Such was his courage and brilliance, though, that he never gave up and fought his way through the field to seventh place. But despite the respectable haul of constructors’ championship points the team earned yesterday, there is no disguising the poisonous situation at Red Bull. Civil war has erupted within the team. Mark Webber’s mechanics were openly taunting Sebastian Vettel’s lot after the race and mischievously waving a front wing at them. Webber himself won a crucial race but nevertheless felt it necessary to say in the press conference thereafter that he would never have agreed to extend his contract with Red Bull if he had known the team would treat him like it did on Saturday.

Christian Horner, the Red Bull team principal seems to have failed to realise two crucial and related factors. First, if you are going to have a ranking of drivers in your team, it is helpful if you notify the concerned players in advance. Secondly, the only effective way to have a number one, number two driver relationship in a team is to have both drivers sign contracts clearly specifying this. Instead of receiving the congratulatory chats with the media which team principals usually enjoy after winning a Grand Prix, Horner spent all of his time after the race defending his curious thinking during qualifying on the previous day. At one point he needed to remind everyone what had just happened. “By the way,” he said, “we’ve just won the f***ing British Grand Prix!”

Formula One drivers have massive egos – it goes with the territory. Red Bull need to massage Mark Webber’s ego rather a lot now if they are to retain any sense of team harmony for the remainder of the season.

If F1 drivers are sensitive souls, none come anywhere close to the self-importance routinely displayed by Ferrari driver Fernando Alonso. I have lost count of the number of times I have yelled “get over yourself, you Spanish twit!” at the television over the years. Yesterday was perhaps the best example I have yet seen of vintage “Alonso the prima donna” behaviour. He had a poor start to the race and tangled with Robert Kubica in an over-enthusiastic overtaking manoeuvre. When he received a drive-through penalty for this the red mists descended in the Spaniards helmet. “No more radio for the rest of the race,” he hissed at his team. The Ferrari recipient of this command understands how to manage prima donnas in high dudgeon. “Okay mate,” he said meekly. And Alonso fumed his way to finish out of the points without radio contact with his team. He needs to calm down as he will soon run out of time to reduce the deficit between himself and the championship leaders.

Contrast Alonso’s behaviour with that of Jenson Button. McLaren’s upgrades to their car have not really worked well and both he and Lewis Hamilton struggled in qualifying. Hamilton squeezed pace out of the car and managed to qualify in fourth position, but Button could do no better than fourteenth. Still, Button was able calmly to fight his way up to fourth place on Sunday. Second and fourth places at their home Grand Prix does not look like a bad afternoon’s work for McLaren, whichever way you choose to look at things. With Red Bull’s internal problems and Ferrari’s non-performance, McLaren are increasingly looking like the team to beat.

With ten races gone, the top ten drivers in the championship now stand as follows:

1. Lewis Hamilton 145 points
2. Jenson Button 133
3. Mark Webber 128
4. Sebastian Vettel 121
5. Fernando Alonso 98
6. Nico Rosberg 90
7. Robert Kubica 83
8. Felipe Massa 67
9. Michael Schumacher 36
10. Adrian Sutil 35

It is still tight at the top but the gaps are now widening. Watch this space…

Gitau
12 July 2010

British success

If you are a people living in the wettest country in Western Europe, you inevitably find that you have a lot of time indoors with which to plan what to do in the limited time you have outdoors. My pet theory is that the miserable weather the British population suffers for most of the time has been responsible for allowing it the time to invent a great many of the sports known and enjoyed throughout the world today. Without the British we would not have football, rugby, cricket, golf, field hockey, tennis and several others. But, as we have seen at each football world cup since 1966, each Wimbledon tennis championship since 1936, numerous cricket test matches, hundreds of golf tournaments and lots more, inventiveness is not the same thing as ability.

Up and down the country, during the first decent summer in three years, Brits are not walking about with puffed-out chests but instead crying into their beers at the laughable performance of Wayne Rooney and the rest of England 2010 in South Africa and the annihilation of Andy Murray by Rafael Nadal in the Wimbledon semi-finals. When hopes are raised as high as they were (cars everywhere flying the flag of St George, ad nauseum media build-up, the Queen appearing at Wimbledon for the first time since 1977 etc), it is understandable that a proud nation feels crushed by defeat.

There is, however, reason for the Brits to raise their chins a little. In the field of motor racing Britain is a world leader in the design and manufacture of outstanding cars, home to one of the best circuits on the Grand Prix calendar and possessed of a Grand Prix driving heritage going back to the very beginning of motor racing. As we return to Silverstone for the 2010 British Grand Prix, we do so for the first time since the 1960s when two British world champions are competing against each other for the drivers’ world championship in competitive cars. Since this also happens to be the halfway point of the 2010 season and, potentially, one of its highlights, it is worth taking a step back and re-examining the relative merits of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton.

Jenson Button was brought into Formula One at the age of 20 by Sir Frank Williams, one of the best talent spotters in the business. Early success went straight to his head. In an earnest attempt at emulating renowned F1 playboys of the past like James Hunt, Button got himself a yacht called Little Missy and dated a string of models. What Button failed to realise was that while rakish Hunt was never known willingly to spurn an opportunity to articulate enthusiastically and at length on the subject of Uganda, he did so having proved his prowess on the racing track and earned a world championship. Button was attempting to “do a Hunt” without ever having stepped onto a Grand Prix podium in his life! His lacklustre performance at the Grand Prix circuits suggested to one and all that the young lad’s mind was elsewhere. This inattention to the things that really mattered came very close to bringing his F1 career to an early end.

Not a man known to suffer fools gladly, Sir Frank Williams dispensed with the services of Jenson Button with great haste. After just one season in Formula One, Button lost his Williams drive at the end of his rookie season in 2000 to a Colombian maverick called Juan Pablo Montoya. (Montoya had the makings of a world champion but not quite the temperament and he eventually left a potential F1 championship drive with McLaren for a career in the nether depths of stock car racing in America.) Button then moved to Renault but was elbowed out after a year to make way for a chap about whom you might have heard called Fernando Alonso. Alonso, as we now know, went on to win back-to-back world championships at Renault. Button then had to languish in the inferior world of also-ran F1 teams for six years until he was mercifully rescued by Ross Brawn at the beginning of 2009.

By the middle of the 2009 season, all the naysayers, myself included, found that there had been ruthless ambition and ample raw talent lurking underneath the blokey exterior of Jenson Button all along. Delivering a world championship for a brand new team was never on anybody’s list of potential achievements for Button in 2000. Again, virtually every commentator did not rate his chances against Lewis Hamilton and thought it was unwise of him to move to McLaren. “Hamilton will make mincemeat of him,” said the Press. Well, after nine races, Button has achieved two wins and five podium positions and is now second in the championship standings with only six points difference between him and the leader. Button is hardly mincemeat! He had some growing up to do over nine years but there is no doubt that he is a worthy world championship contender.

The entry of Lewis Hamilton into Formula One was unlike that of any other driver in the sport’s history. He had been a McLaren protégé since his early teens and was so well prepared for the big stage, that he was a world championship challenger from the first qualifying session for his first Grand Prix in Australia in 2007. Bad luck and a few unforced errors of inexperience denied him the championship by one point in that year but he came back in 2008 to become the youngest world champion in F1 history.

Throughout his pre-F1 days and for the first three years at McLaren, Hamilton had the benefit of the guiding hand of his doting father, Anthony, as his manager. Some feared that the sudden onset of celebrity - which, as night followed day, produced top-end totty in the shape of an American pop star girlfriend – would derail the youngster even more profoundly than it had Button; but it did not. A combination of the militaristic regime at McLaren, Anthony Hamilton’s guidance and Lewis’s own focused ambition ensured that this was never at risk of happening.

2009 was a difficult year for Hamilton, mostly because McLaren had failed to engineer a competitive car with which he could take the fight to Brawn and Red Bull. He did his best, though, and succeeded in getting on the podium five times, twice as the winner. His performance this year suggests that he did not suffer a drop in confidence as a result of the bad season. He is now clearly mentally stronger than he was, as he does not seem to have suffered for ditching his father as manager at the end of last year – perhaps this is just because he is older.

Head to head, I now find it more difficult than ever to decide between Hamilton and Button. I think Hamilton has more raw talent but he is given to bursts of impetuousness. He sometimes finds it difficult to play the long game and maximise points. If there is a chance of an overtaking manoeuvre, Hamilton will almost always take it even if it means an end to his race. This makes him the more entertaining of the two. Button is a more measured, methodical driver who understands the merit to be had in nursing ones car to the chequered flag.

Which is the better approach? We will know the answer in November.

In the meantime, the Red Bull drivers and Fernando Alonso at Ferrari do not intend to make it easy for either Englishman.

Who would I bet on for Silverstone success on Sunday? A Spaniard won the men’s championship at Wimbledon and Spain is almost certainly going to win the football world cup on Sunday, so you could do a lot worse than put a bet on Alonso, couldn’t you?

Enjoy Silverstone!

Gitau
8 July 2010