Hamilton makes life harder in Singapore

I was watching a late evening news programme last week and was just about to switch off the television and retire for the night when something startling caught my eye. The main news item was the shambles in Delhi starkly demonstrated by collapsing bridges, glaring holes of muddy water swarming with dengue fever infested mosquitos and filthy toilets. All of this ghastliness only days before His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales was expected to declare the 19th Commonwealth Games open. BBC news cameras were showing pictures of hordes of miserable looking Indian workers carting wheelbarrows of cement and filling in holes as India rushed to show the world that it was equal to the challenge of hosting a major international sporting event notwithstanding the obvious ineptitude of the people tasked with the responsibility of organising it.

Nobody seemed to notice before it was too late but a little Indian chap dressed in rags had crept inside the huge stadium and scuttled across to where the cameras were positioned. Then he stood smartly at attention with his arms pressed firmly against his body and began singing a heavily accented rendition of the communist anthem The Internationale. This impressed me hugely. I was hoping he woud get away with singing more than he did but before he had even drawn breath to begin the second line of the first stanza ("Stand up, prisoners of hunger"), a policeman had sprinted across the field, clouted him across the back of the head and carted the poor chap away. I am sure all the policeman wanted was to offer the man a cup of tea and some biscuits but others may disagree.

The incident made me realise that if you want to use major international sporting events as showpieces of your country's progress, you need to instil a profound sense of order in the local populace first. If you look at the well-oiled efficiency of the organisers of the Singapore Grand Prix we saw this past weekend, you will know deep within your bone marrow that there is no conceivable way some shabby slum dwelling chap is going to emerge from the darkness beyond the street circuit of Marina Bay and begin belting out revolutionary songs. You will know that when the Singaporeans are charged with the responsibility of delivering something they do so with a minimum of fuss and with an abundance of competence.

Efficiency is a word that might well haunt Lewis Hamilton for a long time to come. Championships are seldom won by the banzai! approach to driving which he has seen fit to employ - disastrously - at two races in a row. At the first corner of the Italian Grand Prix, an ill judged overtaking manoeuvre resulted in his McLaren lying beached in the gravel. A similarly impetuous move on Mark Webber yesterday resulted in a collision and another retirement for Hamilton. Both times, if Hamilton had kept his head, he would have banked some useful world championship points by finishing in fourth place. Now, three DNFs ("Did Not Finish") in four races have thrown Hamilton 20 points adrift of championship leader, Mark Webber. With only four races to go, Hamilton - like the numbskulls putting together the Commonwealth Games in Delhi - now needs a miracle. Hamilton, Hamilton, Hamilton, you have been here before and yet you still haven't learned. Remember 2007?

In contrast to the tribulations of the McLaren driver, Hamilton's sworn enemy Fernando Alonso seems to have got his rythm going and is looking very good. Two race wins from pole position in a row have brought the Spaniard surging back into contention. Best of all for him, the momentum seems to be well and truly with him and the men from Maranello.

Nothing has changed the fascinating reality of a five man championship - it is still mathematically possible for any of the leading contenders to win - but something about Mark Webber's calm self-assuredness and Alonso's swagger suggests to me that the competition may just be down to the two of them as we come towards the end of the 2010 season. This is the time to get out a bunch of fivers and pop down to the bookies. Much as it sticks in my craw to acknowledge this, I think the smart money is on the arrogant little chap from Oviedo.

Here's how the drivers stand after Singapore:

1. Mark Webber 202 points.

2. Fernando Alonso 191.

3. Lewis Hamilton 182.

4. Sebastian Vettel 181.

5. Jenson Button 177.

The next race is supposed to be in Korea but the organisers seem to have gone to the same school as the chaps in Delhi and there is now no certainty that the circuit will be ready in time. As if there wasn't enough to give these drivers the heebie-jeebies!

Gitau
27 September 2010

Subtlety doesn't work in Monza

The fact that again Ferrari have been kissed warmly on both cheeks by the FIA and told to go back to Italy and worry themselves no more about "the silly English Press" because of "this stupid business about team orders" should not be too surprising if one compares the furore over controversial team tactics to global corruption.


In the early part of this century, a team of lawyers, bankers, technical experts, insurance advisors and others were working in London on a major power project in a deprived part of Africa at the behest of a large European engineering company and a syndicate of banks. I was a member of the vast team and enjoyed being involved in it much more than many other projects I had worked on because it felt as if we were actively doing something that would make a difference to peoples' lives long after we were beyond the world of the living.


Projects like that take months and years of preparation and negotiation in stuffy meeting rooms before a single bulldozer begins work at the project site and this one was no exception. Typically, the project participants are so fed up with the deal after a few years' work that they do not even trouble themselves with learning about local reaction when earth movers eventually turn up and the landscape begins unalterably to be altered for the inhabitants of the area.


We enjoyed a celebratory dinner in London once all the documentation was agreed and every project participant then drew a line underneath Project Banana (these projects always have a silly code name) and moved on to Project Giraffe. In the meantime, the project got under way.


One morning many months' later, my boss walked into my room with devastating news: the European banks had pulled out of the project and it was to be abandoned. The reason was simple: it had been discovered that the minister in charge of the project in the country concerned had received a payment of £20,000 into a bank account in his name in London from the European engineering company which was sponsoring the project. The minister had demanded the bribe as payment for his approval of the bid by the European engineering company over that of other interested participants.



"Funny that," my boss said, "we break our backs over a few billion dollars and we get scuppered by a greedy minister whose sole desire in this colossal project was twenty thousand quid in his back pocket. What the fuck is it with these African ministers? Corruption is nothing new; it has been around since human beings invented money. Why can't these Africans be just a bit more sophisticated about it? The point is that there are ways of being corrupt without making yourself look like an idiot. We could have engineered a couple of million quid for the arsehole in a clever way - all he had to do was ask - but he only understands the old brown paper bag stuffed with readies. Pathetic fuck! Did he even spare a thought f0r all those poor Africans choking their lungs out through charcoal smoke because there's fuck-all else? I despair, I really do!"


And that was it. The project - despite our efforts over three years - was over. Dead. Kaput.


Since Hockenheim, I have read reactions to the Ferrari team orders from opposite ends of the spectrum. There are those like Eddie Jordan, a former team owner and now a BBC pundit, who are incensed by the behaviour of Ferrari; and there are others who fail to see what all the fuss is about.


The latter camp argues that Formula One has always been a team sport and, accordingly, just as you wouldn't argue about the Manchester United team-manager appointing Wayne Rooney as the preferred goal-scorer of the day, nor should you argue about an F1 team requiring one driver to move over for the other. There is some merit in this argument. After all the constructors' championship may not be of particular relevance to you and me but it is a matter of life and death for the teams as television viewership revenues are divided up according to the number of constructors' championship points earned in the season. The team with the most points at the end gets the most money - simple.

The alternative argument receives greater press coverage: the expression of outrage at a pure contest being sullied by nefarious manipulation. Only the best driver and team - in that order - should be allowed to prevail.

The pragamatic argument - and my preferred view of matters - is that teams must do whatever is expedient to get the job done but they must not be seen to be destroying the spectacle of a fiercely contested championship. In other words, like corruption, there are ways of doing dastardly deeds with sophistication. Rather than cack-handedly issuing "move-over" orders down an audible team radio, why not "accidentally" fail to fix a car's wheel nuts, or give the unfavoured driver the wrong set of tyres at his pit stop?

To be fair, most teams use the "sophisticated" approach with one notable exception: Ferrari. The team from Maranello have always seen themselves as being the true embodiment of Formula One. What they say or want goes. They have no truck with subtlety, sophistication or "the purity of the sport". "Stuff all of that," they say, "winning is all that matters to us." This trenchant attitude has been aided in no small measure by the chaps in Paris comprising Ferrari International Assistance, sorry, Federation Internationale de l'Automobile.

In the week of the Italian Grand Prix, was anyone prepared to bet that the FIA was going to punish Ferrari for its infingement of the rule against team orders at Hockenheim? Hardly. But, excepting miraculous circumastances, Monza does not look to me like being the redemptive race Ferrari are looking for.

I am neither a Fernando Alonso nor a Ferrari fan, so I expect that, along with many like me, I will,

Enjoy Monza!

Gitau
10 September 2010