It's gotta be the car!

In the novel Trilby by George du Maurier, Trilby O’Farrell, a tone-deaf but stunningly beautiful girl comes under the influence of a magician called Svengali who decides to make her a star. While under Svengali’s hypnotic spell, Trilby sings like an angel. So sublime is her voice that she captivates critical audiences in the world’s eminent concert halls. She becomes famous. One day, before a performance in London, Svengali is afflicted by heart disease and drops dead. Without the power of Svengali’s hypnosis, Trilby attempts to sing but can only produce discordant noises. Without Svengali she is a laughing stock.

As Sebastian Vettel took the chequered flag for the fourth time this season, the television camera panned across to the Red Bull pit wall in time for us to see Christian Horner, the Red Bull team boss, turn to the man sitting on his left and envelop him in a big hug. The recipient of Horner’s warmth was none other than Adrian Newey, the man who designed the Red Bull RB7 which is currently causing such devastation in Formula One. Upon seeing Horner’s gesture, I immediately thought of Trilby. Newey is the Svengali of Formula One: he designs racing cars of such overwhelming brilliance that he transforms ordinary mortals into superstars.

In the 1980s Spike Lee made a series of advertisements for Nike featuring the legendary American basketball player, Michael Jordan. In one of them, Lee questioned Jordan’s brilliance by taunting him with “It can’t be just you, it’s gotta be the shoes!” Unlike basketball, however, Formula One is almost unique among sports in relying almost entirely on the equipment provided to each competitor by his team. The answer to the age old question “is it the car or is it the driver” is “it is a combination of both, but mostly the car”. A driver’s performance is to a massive extent – perhaps even 80% - dependent upon the car. That is why Adrian Newey at Red Bull is such a huge problem for all the other teams. The gap between the Red Bulls and the McLarens, Ferraris and Mercedes is so wide that it is difficult at this stage to visualise circumstances in which Red Bull will not win this year’s constructors’ championship and Sebastian Vettel, the drivers’ championship. Four consecutive pole positions and three flawless victories have put him so far ahead of everyone else (his nearest rival, Lewis Hamilton, is 34 points behind) that we seem destined to watch the rest of this season’s races to determine who will come second and third.

It would be easy to put everything down to Adrian Newey and let the matter rest there - but that would be dishonest. In qualifying on Saturday, Sebastian Vettel achieved pole position while his team-mate, Mark Webber, in an identical car, slotted himself in at second place. The difference between the two was half a second. The time gap between the pole-setter and the next three cars is typically a couple of hundredths of a second or, on a very good day, one tenth of a second. Half a second is like an entire day in F1 terms. To demonstrate the superiority of Vettel’s performance, the BBC showed both Red Bulls’ qualifying laps simultaneously on a split screen in slow motion. Vettel attacks the corners and uses the kerbs so expertly that he almost makes the car fly; his qualifying lap in Istanbul was the fastest lap ever recorded at the Istanbul Racing Circuit. He is able to do this despite being relatively inexperienced – he’s only 23. Just to put this in context, the minimum age for drinking alcohol in Turkey is 24, so Vettel would have been permitted to spray his magnum of winner’s champion on the podium on Sunday but it would have been against the law for him to take a swig of it!

If Newey isn’t hobbled by some Mafioso and Vettel sticks with Red Bull, we could be about to witness a period of unrelenting Grand Prix domination by a German driver more complete than the last one by Michael Schumacher. This is not good for the sport by any means but it is hardly Vettel’s or Red Bull’s fault. The other teams are going to have to raise their game, and do so quickly.

“Schumacher domination” is not a phrase you will hear mentioned very much in the Mercedes team’s motor home or Chez Schumacher in Switzerland. Since returning to Formula One at the start of last season, Michael Schumacher is proving right those of his detractors – including yours truly – who boldly said that it was a mistake for the seven times world champion to return to motor racing after three years in retirement. He is not able to hook his car up for a quick qualifying lap like he could in the old days and ends up in unfamiliar territory during races: the middle order where tangles with other drivers are almost inevitable. He drives petulantly and ungraciously. Schumacher behaves like an old man driving an old banger on the fast lane of the motorway, resentfully refusing to move over for faster vehicles. Eddie Jordan, Schumacher’s first ever F1 boss and now a BBC commentator, described watching Schumacher these days as akin to watching Muhammad Ali humiliating himself by coming out of retirement and taking on Larry Holmes. Never mind that he has a contract with Mercedes which runs out at the end of next season, it is time for Michael Schumacher to hang up his helmet and make way for younger talent.

I had a few chums flying the McLaren flag in Istanbul this past weekend but despite their best efforts, the team didn’t get its sums right. Lewis Hamilton might conceivably have battled with Fernando Alonso for third place but his race was compromised by the pit crew taking far too long to fix a wheel nut on front right tyre. Jenson Button’s race was wrecked by an even more fundamental error: in a race where the only viable strategy was four pit-stops for tyres, McLaren opted for three. By the closing laps of the race it was all Button could do to keep his car on the road. He could not even put up a pretence of a defence against Nico Rosberg for fifth place.

This baffled me. McLaren tell us that they have sophisticated telemetry in the pit wall and back at the factory in Woking and yet they cannot do a simple calculation like how many laps a set of tyres should last. We have seen this sort of schoolboy stuff from McLaren too many times in the recent past (remember Hamilton’s disastrous race in China in 2007 that did for his championship chances?). If the team carries on cocking up, don’t be surprised to see a star like Hamilton move elsewhere before long.

May is a good month for Grands Prix – it is like London buses, you wait for ages and then three come along. After Turkey, it is Spain in a fortnight and Monaco a week thereafter.

Gitau
10 May 2011

Is The Turkish Grand Prix European?

The weekend which began on 29th April 2011 was a fairy tale weekend. At one end of it, a beautiful girl married a charming prince; at the other, an evil villain was captured and killed. While the world applauded, Mehmet Yildiz sucked his teeth nervously as he sat in his Ankara study watching the news on television. “We are not at war with Islam,” said Barack Obama after he had informed the world that he had ordered his soldiers to kill Osama bin Laden. Yildiz sighed. “If only they would believe him,” he thought to himself. With trembling hands, he unlocked a secret chamber at the back of his desk, extracted a bottle of 21 year old Balvenie whisky and a crystal tumbler, poured out a healthy quantity of the Scottish amber nectar and began to drink like a man who needed to be elsewhere.

Before his retirement, Yildiz had been one of the principal negotiators for Turkey’s accelerated accession to membership of the European Union. At a meeting in Brussels in the dying years of the 20th century convened to discuss Turkish membership of the EU, Yildiz had carefully observed the faces around the table and found most to be untroubled. One of the troubled few was a thin, white-haired gentleman from Austria. Yildiz detected the slightest shadow cross the man’s face when the matter of Turkish membership was raised. He made a mental note of the man’s name and button-holed him during a coffee break.

“Mr Wolfgang Kerzendorfer, I presume?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Please forgive me for interrupting you. I am Mehmet Yildiz, leader of the Turkish delegation.”
“No, no interruption at all. It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr Yildiz.”
“If I may be so presumptuous, Mr Kerzendorfer, have you ever been to Turkey?”
“I can’t say that I have, no.”
“That is a pity. Still, all is not lost. As part of our charm offensive, I am authorised to offer a few free holidays in Turkey to selected individuals and I am minded to offer one to you if you will do me the honour of accepting it.”
“Why, that is very decent of you, Mr Yildiz.”

Kerzendorfer travelled to Turkey and was shown as many of the more salubrious parts of the beautiful country as were possible in the time by Yildiz. After a few toothsome Turkish meals lubricated by excellent Turkish wines from the Caucasus region, Kerzendorfer began to think differently about Turkey. His views about the barbarous nature of Islam and its potentially deleterious effects on Western European civilisation – which he had kept to himself but were obvious to a seasoned people-watcher like Yildiz – began to soften. He seemed genuinely to be interested in the things he saw and even spoke of the architecture of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque with feeling. Not without enthusiasm, Kerzendorfer also allowed himself to be delighted by the ministrations of a "special" Turkish belly dancer assigned exclusively to him for a night.

Yildiz felt himself lose some of his anxiety about his government’s EU application.

One afternoon on a walk around Istanbul to work off the effects of a hearty lunch, Kerzendorfer felt so relaxed in the splendour of his surroundings and the company of Yildiz that he waxed lyrical about the brilliance of his nine year old granddaughter, Simone. Just as he was enthusing about how beautifully Simone played Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5, the muezzin from a nearby mosque intoned the call for prayer from a tall minaret in a particularly compelling manner. Yildiz suspected from the look on his companion’s face that his bowels had suddenly loosened. His fears were confirmed when Kerzendorfer peremptorily demanded to be shown to the nearest toilet.

Weeks later, Yildiz and his delegation received the worst possible news. New applications for membership had to be put to the vote of every member of the European Union. A unanimous vote of approval was required for a successful application. Austria had made clear that it would exercise its right of veto.

Defeated and disheartened, Mehmet Yildiz decided to retire early from the Turkish civil service. His parting words to the Prime Minister were that a way had to be found for the Western Europeans to see the Turks as being “like them”. “As long as they see us as Muslim fanatics who will blow them up whenever we get a little upset, we are doomed. If we make them believe that we enjoy wine, women and song and think a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon is visit a race-track where motor cars are raced very fast, we may just get there.”

Yildiz hardly realised the prescience of his words, for only a few years later, the Turkish Grand Prix was born. It has been a feature of the Formula One Grand Prix circuit since 2005.

Since the last race in Shanghai nearly three weeks ago (yes, 3 weeks – F1 goes on holiday and returns to a changed world!), the 2011 season has come to life. After three successive wins from the front by Sebastian Vettel, F1 needed something different to keep us all interested. That something was supplied with sugar on top in Shanghai. Lewis Hamilton, a driver who believes in winning races the traditional way, provided more overtaking moves in one race than we have seen from the rest of the field put together this season.

Not since his outstanding rookie year in 2007 have I seen Hamilton quite so thrilled by an F1 victory: he flung himself at the McLaren team for a massive embrace, kissed the BBC TV camera and even hugged his rival, Vettel. We need more of this from Hamilton (the driving, I mean) and Turkey with its anti-clockwise track and high speed corners – including the now notorious turn 8 - is exactly the sort of place where he supplies it well.

Whenever one feels one’s eyelids dragged down by a dull race, Hamilton can be guaranteed to liven things up. He is, for my money at least, the most exciting driver we have at the moment.

If Australia, Malaysia and China constitute the early “fly-away” races before the start of F1’s home (i.e. European) season, where does Turkey fit in the picture? Half of the country is in Europe and the other half in Asia and Istanbul is plonked right between the two. The answer to the question depends upon whether or not you agree with Mr Mehmet Yildiz. Well, do you?

Enjoy Turkey!

Gitau

4 May 2011