And why, for that matter, have the Americans had such a hard time of it, trying to find somewhere suitable to stage a Grand Prix?
The first couple of attempts, in the late 1950s, were at the Sebring track in Florida, and Riverside, California, with neither event generating a sufficiently big take at the gate to ensure a rerun. So the event moved on to Watkins Glen, which held its first United States Grand Prix in 1961, and which, as locus of the United States GP, was for a long while voted best-staged Grand Prix of the season (by the GPDA), very possibly in grateful recognition of the vast amount of prize money the Americans put on offer.
After all, in the mid-1960s, in Europe, it was starting money that kept many teams going – around £25,000 a race, split between perhaps ten outfits. That was the pot. And then they arrived at Watkins Glen, where, in 1966, instead of starting money, there was a single gargantuan bucket of prize money – over $100,000 in total, with $20,000 going to the race winner, all the way down to nearly $3,000 for whoever ended up in twentieth place. It seemed as if you couldn’t lose. In fact, the $20,000 cash prize for race winner was more than all the first-place prize money of all the other Grands Prix put together. ‘$100,000 was a magic number at the time,’ confessed Cameron Argetsinger, the race organiser, putting his finger right on it.
It should have been perfect, but it wasn’t. The happy relationship didn’t last. The 1960s were great, the early 1970s were okay, but by the end of the 1970s, the Glen had begun to turn from a fun-filled cash-cow into a slightly tawdry, behind-the-times hangover. There was a chronic lack of desire, somewhere in the system. The track wasn’t kept up to date, with the result that it was too lumpy for the new generation of ground-effect cars. The facilities for the teams and the press corps were increasingly cramped and tatty. There was (amazingly, for the States) a shortage of suitable nearby hotel accommodation. And there was, apparently, ‘hooliganism’ among the well-beered-up young guns who liked to frequent motor races.
This last sounds unlikely, but it was true. Down in the infield of the Glen lay an area of badly drained land which, after rainfall, turned into a bog. It was, in fact, known as The Bog, and it was here that drunken auto race fans would periodically hijack vehicles and then set them on fire: the record for hijackings and torchings actually standing at twelve vehicles (including three buses), set in 1973. In fact, FISA intended to ban Watkins Glen as a venue altogether at the end of 1979, and it was only a last-minute reprieve (urged on by Mario Andretti and tens of thousands of petitioners in the States) which saw the 1980 GP take place there at all.
But FISA had their way, 1980 saw the last Glen Grand Prix, and thereafter the race became increasingly nomadic, shifting around from New York State, to Long Beach, California (where it had been running in tandem with Watkins Glen for five years, as the United States Grand Prix West), to the Las Vegas Grand Prix (laid out in the car park of Caesar’s Palace, run anti-clockwise instead of the normal clockwise, and drawing depressingly modest crowds), to Detroit (a relatively successful seven-year stint), to Dallas, to Phoenix, Arizona (where, in 1989 a pitiful 18,000-strong crowd turned out, causing the Formula One teams to depart in disgust, never to return), to Indianapolis, where a Formula One-flavoured track had been laid out, partly in the infield of the famous banked track, partly on the hallowed oval itself.
This, the most recent arrangement, got off to a terrific start in 2000, with a crowd of over 220,000 in attendance to watch Michael Schumacher beat Mika Hakkinen. After that, though, interest flagged, especially after Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello were reduced to trading places in 2002, and Michelin screwed up the tyre compounds in 2005, leaving only six cars able to take part in an authentic, modern, motor-racing fiasco. The last US GP took place in 2007 (Lewis Hamilton winning), and, at the time of writing, the United States and Canadian Grands Prix were in abeyance, leaving Formula One nowhere to go – apart from Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, the Antipodes, or South America, of course.
It’s hard to know whom to blame for this state of affairs, or even if blame is the appropriate response. Formula One petrol-heads are apt to cite chronic North American insularity, coupled with modest attention spans and a weak-minded, childish fascination with mere display, as the reasons why Formula One has never really fixed itself in the hearts of the Yanks. That, and the ingrained cultural solipsism which (to pluck an example at random) enables the States to take no real interest in football (as in soccer), a truly international game, while hosting an annual event called the World Series for American-rules football, which is played almost nowhere except the United States. Decades ago, we cry, America looked outwards, to Europe especially, for items of culture and recreation. But in the last couple of generations, any interest in the rest of the world has vanished in a kind of triumphal self-absorption – taking Formula One with it.
On the other hand, and let’s be honest, here, a lot of Formula One racing can be breathtakingly dull. Back in the old days, it took real, priestly, dedication to post yourself as a spectator somewhere halfway round, say, the Nürburgring and consign yourself to an afternoon watching the occasional car roar past, often in solitary splendour, before it disappeared into the hills, where, for all you knew, something much more interesting might be happening. At Monaco, conversely, everything was/is a lot more compressed, but tended/tends to force drivers to tail one another around the narrow streets like slot-racers, with little overtaking possible. Silverstone, somewhere between the two, has its moments, but too often is familiar as a place where, once the pack has spread out, overtaking becomes a very distant possibility, and weary minutes can go by without anything of note happening. Even Monza suffers from longueurs. It’s just the way Formula One is.
The American fondness (conversely) for oval tracks and stadium circuits, with primitive but relatively closely matched machines, may seem a bit dumb and retrograde in comparison with the endless complexities of the F1 scene, but at least you get a chance to watch most of the action, see plenty of wheel-to-wheel racing, catch plenty of overtaking, observe some smart pit work, and maybe encounter the odd crash. And it’s no surprise that many of the newer Grand Prix circuits – Malaysia, Shanghai, Bahrain, as well as the redesigned Hockenheim – have strong stadium elements, while the old-school, improvised, somewhere-in-the-distance tracks like Silverstone, are losing their grip. Stadium circuits are good (in theory) for the racing; they’re good (in practice) for the TV; the punters (more or less) like them: they’re the American way.
So there is at least a dynamic in action. But if Formula One has managed to accommodate something of the American ethos in its changing approach to circuit design and crowd entertainment, it still hasn’t been enough to entice the Americans themselves back into the game. In fact, Andretti’s retirement from F1 in 1982 may well leave him as the final term in a series which once seemed to have so much life in it. Which is a shame. When he went, he took with him the Stars and Stripes on the podium, the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ over the PA, the general noisiness of Yanks at play. It’s a gap that still demands to be filled. And Phil Hill would never have wanted it this way.
18
JONES, PIQUET AND PROST: TWO GORILLAS AND A PROFESSOR
James Hunt may have packed it all in, not quite halfway through the 1979 season, but this did not mean the end of the larger-than-life, lock-up-your-daughters, racetrack character as a feature of the sport. There were, in fact, plenty to choose from; but the style had changed, become less flagrantly British, more intercontinental, more diverse. So diverse, in fact, that you hardly knew where to start.
Consider the Australian Alan Jones, the 1980 World Champion. Jones was a real tough guy: he once finished second in a race, despite having to drive with nothing less than a broken hand – the legacy of a punch-up in a pub, for God’s sake. Patrick Head, the stupendously unsentimental designer at the Williams F1 team, called him ‘a hard, competitive animal’. Frank Williams himself, one of the hardest nuts in a hardnut business, loved him, describing hi
m as a ‘man’s man’, and the kind of person who never ‘needed propping up mentally, because he was a very determined and bullish character. He didn’t need any babysitting or hand-holding.’ Jones referred to himself when younger as ‘an obnoxious little bastard’ and despised those drivers who were less than entirely involved in their work, complaining that ‘The car’s taking them for a drive half the time.’ He also referred to Australia, land of his birth, as ‘the best country in the world’, while, as a natural corollary to this, deriding all Frenchmen on sight. Alain Prost, terrified by these characteristics, reckoned that Jones was ‘the most fiery, powerful, even violent, driver’.
Carlos Reutemann, Jones’ team-mate at Williams, hated him, and he hated the moody Reutemann right back. Leading the Championship, halfway through 1980, Jones growled, ‘The only time team orders come into it is if we are running first and second eight or ten laps from the end and are not under any threat. If Carlos is ahead under those conditions, I would expect him to let me through.’ Which was exactly what failed to happen at the Brazilian Grand Prix the following year, leading to a fundamental collapse of relations within the team and, ultimately, to Reutemann’s ignominious departure from the sport in ’82. When Reutemann quite legitimately came second at the 1980 German GP, with Jones third (after a tyre disaster which robbed him of a sure win), Jones was so incredibly angry with everything he couldn’t even bring himself to share the podium with Reutemann and Jacques Lafitte, the winner. ‘This is just not possible,’ he kept muttering, ‘this is just too much. I was so close, and then this.’ Everything was gruntwork, toil, aggravation, battle, the realities of cash, and the drudgery of testing. ‘The sport,’ he said, boiling it down to the bleak essentials, ‘is work and money.’
At the same time, once Jones had won the Championship, he piously declared, ‘All I want is a good rest and to go home to see my wife and child.’ Which in turn made him the obverse of his great rival, Nelson Piquet.
While Jones wore his no-nonsense, uncompromised identity like a suit of chainmail, Piquet was devastatingly unstraight-forward and hard to pin down; fascinated by practical jokes and off-the-wall humour; highly sexed; occasionally over-whelmed by the demands of going the full length of a motor race (he collapsed on the podium after coming first in the 1982 Brazilian GP); and surprisingly sleepy. Apparently, even when Nelson was under extreme pressure – just before the last, and decisive, race of ’83, in South Africa, for instance – his tendency was to go to have a nap. He was even known to do it when sitting on the grid, in his car, waiting for the start. So comfortable was he generally with the notion of relaxation (unlike Jones) that, according to Lauda, ‘He used to tell me how he would take his boat out and fish, swim and skin-dive, how splendid it was spending a whole day doing nothing.’
Fair enough. You’d have to have a heart of granite not to admire him for being able to turn his back on the tiresome monomania of Formula One and show some true Brazilian commitment to pleasure. And his description of racing at Monaco as being ‘like riding a motorbike round your apartment’ has become part of the currency of the sport. But then it would also be hard to imagine (say) Alan Jones cheerfully admitting that ‘Winning is a feeling which you cannot imagine. I sometimes piss my pants on the slowing-down lap.’ Or, again, when Piquet got the drop on Carlos Reutemann at Las Vegas in 1981, causing an unnerved Reutemann simply to give up and let him overtake, Piquet’s encapsulation of the moment – ‘He just open the legs’ – would have made Jones, or indeed, anyone else, squirm. Ditto his remark, on passing Nigel Mansell at the Canadian GP of 1991, and winning the race: ‘I almost came!’
Oh, but this was all part of Piquet the rude boy, the joker, the shaggy-haired prankster with the goofy overbite. Because, if he wasn’t going out of his way to provoke people verbally, he was playing around with them in other, equally satisfying, ways. He would habitually greet Professor Sid Watkins by trying to unzip his flies. He tipped the contents of a bottle of mineral water into Jean-Marie Balestre’s jacket pocket while the magisterial head of FISA was delivering a lecture on track safety. And he once thieved all the toilet paper from the toilet, just before Nigel Mansell dashed in for an unstoppable crap.
Of course, the offbeat personal manner was a way of concealing personal ambition. Piquet wanted to win, and he wanted to win just as badly as Jones or Prost or Niki Lauda. Lauda, indeed, was almost effusive in his praise of Piquet’s style: ‘He seldom makes a mistake, he is always fast, he is always on form.’ Gordon Murray, Brabham’s – subsequently McLaren’s – legendary designer, reckoned that Piquet was the most ‘thinking’ driver he ever worked with. Alain Prost – for some, the cleverest racer of them all – acknowledged the sheer consistency of his rivals, Piquet and Patrick Tambay, in the close-fought 1983 season, remarking, ‘I climb up the podium and there they are alongside me.’ Later that year, when Piquet had snatched the title from him by two points, he graciously admitted that ‘The best car won the championship – and Nelson was the best man to drive it.’ The fact that this remark would help to get Prost fired from his own team, Renault, is neither here nor there: Piquet commanded respect.
Respect, Alan Jones-style, too. He even went so far as to physically attack another driver, in front of the TV cameras, when he tried to lamp Eliseo Salazar at Hockenheim in ’82, after Salazar had punted him off the track. Admittedly, Piquet’s hand-to-hand combat technique was poor – a lot of pawing and slapping and airy high-kicks, not a style Jones would have admired – but his aggressive, unhinged engagement in the moment was there for a global TV audience of 800 million to see. He even threatened to do Jones over after the latter had bounced him off the track in the ’81 Belgian GP – ‘He’s absolutely crazy! The next time he does that I’ll kill him!’ – but nothing came of it. Perhaps Iron Man Jones was just a bit too much to take on.
Later in his career, commentators (especially pro-Mansell British ones) beefed about his wavering involvement, his undependable form, his temperament. Piquet’s response was invariably that there was no point in killing yourself if the car was never going to be competitive, and that titles were won by the steady accumulation of points, not by winning a handful of show-stopping races. He would also point out (after his retirement) that he got to be World Champion three times; won 23 Grands Prix from 204 starts; took 24 pole positions and 23 fastest laps – and was sufficiently well regarded to command a first-year signing fee with Williams of $3.3 million, when he joined them from Brabham, in 1986.
And the money was almost as important as the winning. At the time of his departure, he said ‘The truth is that I moved to a similar team with the same potential, to make much more money. I told Bernie [Ecclestone, then Brabham boss] that I worked hard for him, so why couldn’t I make the same money that Niki and Prost and everybody was making?’ By the time he signed to Lotus for 1988, he had managed to extract a $6.5 million annual retainer from R. J. Reynolds, makers of Camel Cigarettes, some of which unbelievable lucre went on buying Nelson a 115-foot motor yacht with its own helipad. The money was an index of his significance and success as a driver as much as it was the key to a lifestyle of slobbing about in the Med, entertaining a succession of beautiful women, and siring seven children by four different mothers.
But was that all it came down to? Of course not. Piquet was a bit more frank about it than many others; but money, truth to tell, was now becoming the determining characteristic of F1 as a sport. It was the thing that made Grand Prix racing such an object of stunned fascination, worldwide – the fact that, now, such prodigious sums of cash were being poured into the game.
This was the 1980s, after all.
At the start of the decade, it was estimated that Formula One had a gross investment of around £100 million. It commanded 5,000 hours of international TV. It took a live gate of £15 million every year. By the time Piquet had signed to Williams – or rather, the Canon Williams Honda Team – the cost of a two-car team stood at about £8 million per annum, of which Canon paid £4 mi
llion, with Honda putting in £2 million for the engines, as well as supplying twenty-five full-time Honda technicians at the Williams HQ in Didcot; with over a thousand R&D technicians on call back in Japan. The upside for these big, big, players was in the incredible value of the TV exposure that went with the racing. In the States, the cost of advertising on primetime TV was put at $1 million a minute. Which meant that, viewed in this very specific sense, the 1986 British Grand Prix, won by Mansell in a Canon Williams Honda, repaid 50 per cent of Canon’s investment in one go.
Piquet, a top performer in the sport, was only showing a sensible awareness of his worth, just as Stirling Moss had done, twenty years earlier. It wasn’t so much a question of greed; it was merely that the money was now swilling around so stupendously, you had to help yourself before it all went to a less deserving cause.
But while Piquet made an art form out of living large and fooling around, Alain Prost worried incessantly. According to his sometime team-mate Patrick Tambay, he used to bite his fingernails ‘So deeply that it must be very painful for him. But he cannot stop it.’ As well as being a nail-chewer at Jim Clark level, Prost was a brooder, an obsessive deep thinker. Brian Hart, the celebrated engineer, argued that ‘Drivers like Prost think the race through on the Saturday night, think through the various permutations, where they’ll be and when they’ll be there, and it’s locked in their brains.’ Or, if not brooding on Saturday night, then obsessively churning things over with the chief designer – in this case, a suitably impressed John Barnard, who revealed that ‘If you said to Alain, “Listen, I really need to talk to you all of the night,” you’ve got it, no problem.’ Or again, recalling Prost’s mental clarity and retentiveness, ‘You could talk about something a week after it happened and he’d still give you the exact picture.’
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 14
