non guardatela piu'
switters
At the Austrian grand prix on Sunday, the leader, Rubens Barrichello, was
ordered to pull over to let his team-mate, Michael Schumacher, win the race.
Ferrari said it was to guarantee them the championship, but the fans booed
in disgust and the German looked embarrassed. Here, a lifelong enthusiast of
formula one explains why he won't be watching any more
Clive James
Tuesday May 14, 2002
The Guardian
If the wheels can come off an empire, they came off Bernie Ecclestone's
formula-one empire in Austria on Sunday, when Rubens Barrichello, under team
orders from Ferrari, slowed down to let Michael Schumacher take the win. A
zillion petrol-heads all over the world were thus given an unmistakable
television signal that they might as well have been reading the business
section of their local newspaper. The fix was in.
The bottom line and the finishing line had revealed themselves as being
identical. The chequered flag was a cheque book. As a writer by profession,
I resorted naturally to word-associations for the expression of my outrage.
Elsewhere in the audience, there was probably a circus performer in
Singapore who threw knives at his wife, a removal man in Auckland who heaved
a chest of drawers out of his attic window. How apt, I exclaimed to one of
my study walls full of strangely noncommittal books, that the stitch-up
should have taken place on a circuit called the Spielberg. Ideally, a racing
circuit should be called the Hitchcock, to convey suspense. But when they're
racing on the Spielberg, a blockbuster production devotes a mountainous
investment to a predictable materialistic outcome with a spiritual quotient
the size of mouse. My metaphors became ever more mixed, the books ever more
aloof, scared by the spectacle of homicidal fervour from a man who had
previously confined his passion to fingering their spines. Far away in
Vancouver or perhaps Valletta, a dog breeder was filling a bucket of water
in his bathroom.
For many years now, the circus performer, the removal man, the dog breeder
and I have all been united by our propensity to rearrange any schedule so
that we can be seated before the television set to watch the latest grand
prix. All of us might have been racing drivers in a different life.
Circumstances having dictated otherwise, we are willing to let other men do
the driving for us. Admittedly, they have unfair advantages, these others:
they are younger than us, better looking, and they combine a flat stomach,
sensitive fingers, unflinching valour and an enormous salary into a sexual
signal that few fashion models can resist. The injustice cries to heaven,
which gives no answer. But we are content to let it happen. Let these gifted
children race for us: as long as they race.
Most of the time they do, and there is none of them who is not admirable for
his bravery alone, quite apart from his skill. Mainly owing to the tireless
efforts of Jackie Stewart, grand prix racing has become much safer than it
was when I started following it, but it is still a lot more dangerous than
writing. Takuma Sato could easily have been killed last Sunday when he was
side-swiped, and Juan Pablo Montoya was only a split second from being
decapitated in the same accident. The cars are very strong in the cockpit
area nowadays, but a high-speed impact against the wall can still do to a
driver what it would do to an egg in a steel box, no matter how tightly the
box fitted. Ayrton Senna was killed that way, Mika Hakkinen almost was, and
the carbon-fibre front end was only a partial protection for Schumacher's
legs when he sailed across the gravel trap and smacked the tyre wall at
Silverstone. It was probably the fresh memory of that incident which helped
to persuade the Ferrari management that they should stack up the
championship points for him while they could, even at the expense of
disappointing the watching world and painfully reminding Barrichello that
his newly extended contract carried a price in enforced humility. Schumacher
has a big say in what the Ferrari team does. He ought to: if they are on top
now, it is because he put them there, and he did it with his practical
wisdom as well as with his supernatural flair. If he shared in the Spielberg
decision through patching into a conference call from the radio in his car,
he, too, was probably remembering Silverstone. Brave by nature, as they all
are, he would have been more likely to recall what happened to his season
than what happened to his leg. I would have remembered the leg. Johnny
Herbert had his career ruined by smashed legs; Jacques Laffite had his
career ended by them; and Alessandro Zanardi actually lost them. I, however,
am not Michael Schumacher.
No, you're not, says the devil in my ear, and it's because you're a human
being. But the devil is a casuist as always. Admittedly, Michael Schumacher
is an easy man to dislike. It was especially unfortunate for him that the
driver he stole the victory from on Sunday was the hardest man to dislike in
formula one. Rubens Barrichello, a cuddly toy already nicely padded under
his padded suit, is the top half of Kelsey Grammer with a nervous smile to
match. Nobody so quick was ever so cute. But Schumacher gives the air of
having arrived at ordinary affability only by hard study, and the mask -
modelled in rubberised plaster by Arno Breker as an archetype of Aryan
manhood in a rare benevolent mood - is always apt to slip. He is a natural
sporting hero, but sportsmanship is not his natural mode. Let us not,
however, distract ourselves with a glib antipathy. Sportsmanship is not the
natural mode of formula one.
It might be, if it was just the drivers racing each other. But the
manufacturers are racing each other too, and there's the rub. Whatever way
the formula is readjusted, a few manufacturers will each produce a car
decisively faster than the rest of the pack, even if their respective cars
are only fractionally faster or slower than each other. But the cost of
producing a competitive car is so enormous that none of the top
manufacturers can protect its investment for long unless it has a champion,
or at least a championship contender. The best drivers are attracted to the
best teams. So instead of the contenders being spread evenly through the
field - as they might be through an equivalent of the draft-pick system in
American football - they are quite likely to end up two to a team.
Theoretically, the sharpest competitive edge in F1 racing is between the two
team members; and indeed this might be so; but only if the team allows them
to race each other. Unfortunately, it is in the team's interest to allow
only the opposite, so that the prospective champion is placed out of danger
from his closest rival.
Effectively, this has been true of modern grand prix racing since the
beginning. When Mercedes-Benz made its postwar comeback, it had a car that
nothing else could touch. Juan-Manuel Fangio was signed to come first,
Stirling Moss to come second; and that's the way the game played out, even
if Fangio loftily ceded Moss the British grand prix as a consolation prize.
(To prove it was a gesture, Fangio trailed Moss over the finish line by only
a few inches. To prove he was accepting a poisoned chalice, Barrichello,
poor mite, did the same at Spielberg.) If they had really been racing, Moss
might have given Fangio a proper fight in every race on the calendar. But it
never happened except in our dreams. Team orders prevailed. As Richard
Williams pointed out in the Guardian yesterday, team orders prevailed again
in 1958, when Phil Hill handed Mike Hawthorn the last race of the season and
the championship along with it. When Mario Andretti and Ronnie Peterson were
both driving for Lotus, the fix was blatant. Peterson was at least as fast
as Andretti, and sometimes needed all his skill to come second: he was
treading on the brakes while Andretti was treading on the accelerator. In a
later period at Lotus, Ayrton Senna, then clearly on his way to supremacy,
refused to have Derek Warwick as second driver because Warwick might have
been a contender, and Senna thought the team lacked the wherewithal to
support two contenders. Senna was probably right, but I remember the way
Warwick's wife said Senna's name at a restaurant near Monza on the evening
before Warwick went out to race in the slower car to which Senna's realism
had condemned him.
Before his untimely death canonised him, Senna's realism was commonly called
ruthlessness by everyone in the sport. To a certain extent it was: when he
figured out that he would become champion if Prost could be removed from the
track, he accomplished this by driving into Prost, thereby removing himself
as well, but with the championship in the bag. He engineered the impact
straight after doing the sums in his head, thus setting a bad precedent.
Such behaviour brought formula one close to being a demolition derby, but it
was a natural consequence of a team's readiness to back up its top man, even
if his conscience-free behaviour was at the expense of its second man. More
recently, tighter rules have made the deliberate shunt harder to pull off,
but as with the professional foul in football, the spirit of the thing is
hard to quench.
This depressing realpolitik comes with the financial commitment of the top
marques: they can't afford anything less. Unfortunately, we petrol-heads are
on their side. We don't want an Americanised version of the sport. In
American motor racing, all the cars are effectively the same, and thus run
beside each other, to the delight of the American audience, which, although
not dumb, as it is often painted, certainly likes things simple. But out
here in the undeveloped world - ie everywhere except America - we like the
complications of formula one, and so do bright new-world refugees such as
Juan Pablo Montoya. Montoya follows in the tradition of Mario Andretti and
Jacques Villeneuve: charioteers in standardised cars who had fun racing
wheel to wheel in America, but came over to formula one because it was more
interesting. And indeed the interest of formula one is enormous: the leading
manufacturers, interpreting the formula to its optimum, come up with
machines so precisely attuned to the task that the full distance is as far
as they can run before they fall apart while being measured by the
scrutineers. Petrol-heads all over the planet bore their friends and
families helpless with details of the technology before being left alone in
front of the piece of technology that eventually generates the cashflow for
the whole adventure: the television set.
Rarely does it provide a thrilling spectacle. Apart from the occasional
shunt, it mainly shows you a procession. But to the fan, the questions are
endless, convoluted and enthralling. Can the driver of the car that is a
second slower make up the difference? Montoya almost can, but Schumacher
either knows how to get another second of supremacy out of the Ferrari
engineers or else he is driving faster than ever. It is all, inherently,
fascinating. Unfortunately, it is also all as boring as hell. Schumacher and
Montoya won't be racing wheel to wheel unless their cars are identical in
performance, and at the moment Montoya's Williams is a second down. The only
people racing wheel to wheel will be the two drivers of the quickest marque,
because their cars are identical in all respects. And if the championship is
at stake, the fix will go in.
As things stand, Ferrari, Schumacher and Barrichello will go before motor
racing's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, on
June 26, for the Spielberg production to be investigated and solemnly ruled
upon. It will be a date in the annals of fatuity. First of all, there can be
no doubt about what happened. Second, formula one is ruled by Bernie
Ecclestone. He invented it, and it's all his. On the whole he has done a
brilliant job. He rules a community richer than most small countries; nobody
gets hurt except volunteers, and he diverts hundreds of millions of people
across the globe, thus fully justifying the hundreds of millions of pounds
he diverts into his own pocket. There is nothing Bernie can't arrange. It
was a wonder that he confined himself to slipping the Labour party a mere
million. Nobody who has ever met him would have been surprised if Cherie
Blair had started smoking two packs of Silk Cut Extra Mild every day in
public. But now he has to arrange something more challenging, and pronto.
Formula one is in the toilet, and looks even more obscene because the toilet
is made of gold. The only cure is to outlaw team orders. The circus
performer, the removal man, the dog breeder and I can all just about stand
watching two cars the same colour coming first and second. It's the reward
for technical achievement. But if their drivers aren't racing each other,
there is no reason to watch at all. For the next grand prix, the huge
worldwide television audience will be down by at least one name I can vouch
for. Anyone who feels like joining me can register his protest the same way
I will. It can be done at the touch of a button. You can bet that the man in
question will get the message. It's a boycott, Bernie: either the racers
race, or I read my books instead of shouting at them.