There was, of course, nothing sham about Prost’s driving abilities. As well as being able to hold an entire race plan in his head and think with analytical precision about the various probabilities unfolding in front of him as a race progressed, he was quick. He admired Jackie Stewart’s mixture of thought-fulness and devastating speed – and Stewart returned the compliment: ‘Prost is my kind of driver.’ Lauda – likewise, a tactician and a hard racer – was another model. ‘The only one,’ said Prost, champing at his fingers, ‘who taught me something, who dominated his subject, was Lauda.’ In return, Lauda generously confessed to John Barnard, ‘I don’t know, I just don’t understand this, I don’t know how the guy does it’, after Prost had just beaten him by half a second in qualifying. ‘I must go away and think about it.’
It all sounds very grown-up. Were Prost and Lauda, then, locked in a state of mutual reverence for all that time in the first half of the 1980s, the period when their careers overlapped? Lauda was equivocal. He described Prost as ‘a difficult character, to be honest. He’s a moaner, he is not a good politician.’ He also added, intriguingly, ‘He has a lot of problems in his private life which I don’t want to talk about.’ Prost was a perfectionist, brilliant at setting up his cars and getting the most out of them. But this made him prickly, too – and his time at Renault, in the early 1980s, instead of being the realisation of a dream of harmony (French team, French driver, French tyres, French fuel), was filled with issues of temperament, amour-propre and national pride.
It was at Renault where they coined the title ‘Professor’ for him, and allegedly never saw him lose his mantle of thoughtfulness, except on one occasion, when René Arnoux failed to respect the team hierarchy and overtook him, as a result of which, Prost had ‘a tearful tantrum’. At the same time, of course, there was a good deal of tricky Gallic wilfulness in the air – which came to a head in 1983, when Renault took advantage of Prost’s fourteen-point late-summer lead in the Championship, to chuck posters all over France, hailing ‘Our Champion’, only for Piquet to nick the title in the last three races and leave the Renault team bent double with chagrin.
Prost complained that Renault were killing him with fatuous promotional and administrative duties. Renault said that their demands were scarcely onerous and that Prost should complain a bit less. Prost didn’t stop complaining, however, but added to his litany of complaints by whingeing about the aggressive attention he was getting from the French press, later claiming that ‘By 1982 I had become the bad guy … the French really don’t like winners.’ His declaration that ‘The best car’ – Piquet’s Brabham-BMW – ‘won the Championship’ finally did for the relationship, as well as substantiating Lauda’s claim that Prost was a moaner and not a good politican. The fact that he then enjoyed several untroubled years (until Senna arrived) back with his original team, McLaren, didn’t mean that he was any more relaxed than before, but that the McLaren culture coped with him better.
Oh, and the sex. Whereas Alan Jones was a straight-up family man, and Piquet was a simple, uninhibited, lothario, Prost (according to a friend) was ‘very romantic and he is very erotic and very sexy’, and was prone to laying it so hot and heavy on the women he fancied ‘that somewhere they are so aroused they have to give in’. Nothing wrong with that, except that Prost was so keen on amatory matters (‘He spends a lot of time on it’) that sometimes it seemed in danger of getting in the way of the business of actually driving cars. You could scarcely blame him: as Prost was the first to admit, he was small, not in the least conventionally attractive, and had a broken nose, dating back to his all-wrestling, all-football-playing, pre-motor-racing days. The problem was that, the more celebrated he became, the more distractions there were, such that even an intellect as stern as his had trouble dealing with them: in Prost’s hands, skirt-chasing – as practised without a second thought by, say, James Hunt – became just one more thing that was perhaps more complex than it needed to be.
As a final touch, he detested the inescapable ground-effect cars, complaining that the net result of such fiendish technology was ‘cornering speeds that were absolutely horrendous and completely inconsistent with track safety’, leaving a car ‘pinned to the track’ and in a condition where driving skill was ‘virtually an irrelevance’. Once the side-skirts were banned in ’83, and the glue-like effects were mitigated, he was a lot happier. ‘The pleasure of driving has come back,’ he sang. ‘For me the cars are more difficult to drive because they demand more concentration. They are more … amusing. It is better now because it is the skill of the driver which counts.’
But in 1980 – when Prost was in his first F1 season, with McLaren – ground-effect was all the rage, and he had to live with it. He also had to live with the fact that McLaren were just starting to come out of a dismal losing streak, had only just formed a new partnership with Ron Dennis (who, clearly, was going to make a difference) and had a car which, while not without its interest, was really only a staging-post on the way to the all-conquering MP4 series. Prost managed to crash a fair bit. He then blamed the car for breaking, while at the same time blaming the team for blaming him for the crashes, before cutting short his contract and decamping to Renault, the land of promise. In the end, his rookie year was not particularly impressive. He came sixteenth in the Drivers’ Championship, behind John Watson, Jacques Lafitte, Elio de Angelis, a whole host of mainstream contenders.
But while Jones and Piquet slugged it out at the top (the result: Australia 5, Brazil 3) Prost was working, thinking his way up to the next level. And for the next few years it would mostly be the likes of Piquet, Prost, Lauda and Ayrton Senna who would take the titles – complex, sometimes inscrutable characters, subject to dark motivations and inner conflicts. Seen in this context, Jones was, in many ways, the last of the straightforward tough guys. Nigel Mansell did his best to keep the type from disappearing altogether (along with extra Mansell seasonings of suspicion and periodic complaining), but the real stars were far trickier, more labyrinthine, characters.
Which was great, if you were selling the sport to the rest of the world. A long time before there were Piquet and Prost, Grand Prix racing had traditionally been tucked away in the margins of the sports pages, a minority interest – except when Mike Hawthorn became champion, or Stirling Moss crashed. But now the teams and drivers were so big, so prominent, so international, that their media prominence called for constant new stories, personality angles, conflicts. Sportsmen were now sports personalities. The more diverse and trouble-some they became, the better. It sold papers.
Two gorillas and a professor: a mixed bag for 1980, then.
19
FRANK WILLIAMS – THE TEAM BOSS AS RUTHLESS CEO?
It was the 1980s that saw the Legend of Williams begin to take shape. And what a legend it is: at the time of writing, the tally for Williams F1 stands at seven Drivers’ Championships and nine Constructors’ Championships. Compare this with McLaren (twelve Drivers’, eight Constructors’ Championships), Lotus (six Drivers’, seven Constructors’ Championships) or Brabham (four Drivers’, two Constructors’ Championships) and it’s easy to see why people went around throughout the 1980s and 1990s declaring that Williams was going to become the most successful Formula One team ever – lining up to surpass even Ferrari, who, before the arrival of Michael Schumacher, had an eminently beatable eight Constructors’ and nine Drivers’ Championships to their name. If the last few years have seen a falling-off of form, it is nonetheless salutory to recall how staggeringly potent Williams were at the height of their powers.
It’s also salutory to recall that, before he became so very successful, Frank Williams spent a decade not getting very far at all. Back at the end of the 1960s, he was scuffling around in a blagged Brabham with Piers Courage. These were madcap days, young men in love with the sport, the same intense friendship that bound Chapman and Clark, the affable, dashing Courage showing great promise, coming second at Monaco and Watkins Glen. And then dying an appalling death
at the Dutch Grand Prix, 1970. Williams called him ‘totally adorable’, and, like Chapman after Clark, was never quite the same after his death: the iron entered his soul.
Unlike Chapman, however, he had the good fortune not to be a conceptual genius, but was instead an organiser, facilitator and strategist with rare talent, bottomless energy and, now, ruthless emotional detachment. Having survived the Scrounging Years which seem to afflict every team (apart from, arguably, Ferrari and McLaren) at some point in their evolution, he found himself at the end of the 1970s heading up a freshly reconstituted Williams F1, and poised to change the face of Grand Prix racing, once he and Alan Jones had got the Patrick Head-designed Williams-Ford FW07 to work properly.
Jones thought that Williams was The Man: ‘Frank is the best bloke I’ve ever driven for,’ he said. ‘The trust between us was absolute … he would always give me the benefit of the doubt because I was the guy with my bum in the car.’ Williams, in return, completely respected Jones, for his aggression, his commitment, his skills in testing and development, and the fact that he was entirely self-motivating, requiring almost no encouragement from his team manager. ‘We had an enormous amount of respect for each other,’ Jones claimed. ‘And,’ he added, unexpectedly, ‘we enjoyed ourselves.’
Others felt the same way, whether a senior engineer, such as Bernie Jones – ‘He’s just brilliant to work for’ – or Viv Orriss, who used to work for British Airways, and dealt with Williams the passenger all the time: ‘Everyone adored him … It was his smile which made you melt. It was devastating.’ Even when young – and before his dreadful accident of 1986 – Frank looked pretty tightly wound: like a rogue Jesuit with more than a hint of Death’s Head about the face. So the smile when it came must have been brighter than daylight.
Smile or no, he was also a lot better to work for than Bernie Ecclestone at Brabham, if Nelson Piquet was to be believed. ‘Maybe I made the move to Williams because I wanted to screw Bernie,’ Piquet said at the end of 1985, typically upfront and smutty, ‘because he is so clever: for the last seven years he’s been able to screw me in deals in other ways. Now I want people to see he’s not so clever. And he let go me [sic]. So now he’s in the shit with the sponsors, in the shit with Pirelli and in the shit with everybody, because he’s got no good drivers to put in his cars.’ And it worked all right for Piquet, who, in 1987, collected his third and final Championship in the Williams FW11B.
By this stage, though, a title with Williams ought to have been a formality for just about any driver, the team being so strong that they had taken the Drivers’ Championship in 1980 and 1982, and the Constructors’ in 1980, 1981 and 1986. So strong, indeed, that one wondered if it wasn’t doing something to their humanity. After all, chain-smoking, moustache-brandishing, keep-fit fanatic Keke Rosberg (‘Takes himself so unbelievably seriously,’ according to Lauda) had taken the Championship, in a Williams, in 1982, only to find that ‘The attitude was: “Okay, well done. The next problem is next week.” It was business.’ Not that there was actually bad blood anywhere – ‘The only time I ever had a cross word with Frank was when he told me Mansell was joining the team. I said I didn’t want him and I was leaving’ – but, to Rosberg’s way of thinking, the team, embodied by Frank Williams, had misplaced its emotions, or had somehow forgotten to acquire them in the first place. ‘Frank,’ said Rosberg, ‘thought in his own mind that he was very caring and yet he seemed to forget to do it. It was a strange thing. He wasn’t distant – and yet he was very remote.’ To which Lauda scathingly (but indirectly) riposted, ‘He [Rosberg] over-looks the really important things, the result being that he never seems to appreciate what is going on around him.’ Which was the appropriate tough guy response, and one that Frank Williams would have endorsed. Formula One was a kind of protracted war, and the last thing you needed was bleating from footsoldiers like Keke Rosberg.
But there was something undeniably chilling about the setup. Jones took the title in 1980 and left a year later. Rosberg got it in ’82 and was edged out after a couple of years. Piquet won the title in ’87 and left immediately, to join Lotus. Mansell won it in 1992 and likewise left immediately to go racing in the US. Prost won it in ’93 and retired at the end of the year. Damon Hill won it in ’96, but was given the sack, two-thirds of the way through the season. Jacques Villeneuve got it in ’97, and, a year later, was gone, to join BAR.
In other words, not only did no one ever stay on long enough to nail two titles for Williams, they were apt to depart with the briskness of someone being checked out of a hotel. It was the inverse of the kind of productive bonding that went on between Chapman and Clark, or Ken Tyrrell and Jackie Stewart. Alan Jones, determinedly loyal, insisted that Williams the man ‘has always been extremely analytical rather than hard – and there is a difference.’ But this was a nuance not always appreciated by other drivers.
After all, a team boss can be hard and soft, without losing effectiveness. Alfred Neubauer was quite rightly feared by the rest of the Grand Prix community – with his incredible cars, ruthless administrative efficiency, nightmarish physical presence – yet dedicated himself to providing his drivers with the tenderest comforts known to man. Yes, the Mercedes F1 experiment was short-lived, so Neubauer never had to face the chronic resentments that build up in a team over time; yes, he had two drivers who were not only geniuses, but who respected the team hierarchy; and the commercial pressures, although clear, weren’t quite the same as those burdening teams in the mid-1980s. But he was, nonetheless, ‘a mother hen with her chicks’, as opposed to a shark-eyed obsessive whose only real ambition was to make the outfit that bore his name the most successful in the history of the sport. Neubauer could be more than one thing at a time.
But Frank Williams’ insatiable need to prevail would lead a clear-eyed Eddie Irvine to muse (a) ‘I would certainly not want to play a game of poker with Frank’ and (b) ‘He has always liked to prove that it is his car, rather than the driver, which does the winning, and I have to say he seems to have a point.’ Peter Windsor, Williams team manager in the 1990s, saw it this way: ‘Frank is a loner, but I wouldn’t say he has a mean streak. I don’t think there is anything mean about Frank.’ No, Frank’s remorseless behaviour obeyed this slightly pretzel-shaped logic: ‘He’s a very hard person sometimes but he is no harder on anyone than he is on himself. Therefore he is very fair as a result.’ Cruel but fair. But also (Windsor again) ‘The most unpredictable person I have ever worked for in my life. It was impossible to predict what he was thinking or how he would react to any situation.’
To recap: cruel, fair, completely unpredictable. An ethical despot, in other words.
Enzo Ferrari was pretty much the same, of course, and it never stopped drivers wanting to sign for his team. And Colin Chapman was a notorious manipulator of other people. And no one would ever mistake Ron Dennis for Albert Schweitzer. But even former Williams press officer Ann Bradshaw had to confirm that, ‘Frank has never been someone who engaged in social chit-chat. He isn’t someone you would shoot the breeze with. He can be evasive.’ And if that’s what your own PR people say, then either you don’t give a damn about how the world sees you, or you do give a damn, and you want the world to regard you with, basically, intimidated respect. Ferrari was a despot, all right, but his favouritism and moodiness could also be taken as marks of vulnerability, of humanity, even. Frank Williams, on the other hand, seemed to be the equivalent of the cold-blooded, highly successful, CEO. Damon Hill said of Williams: ‘I have a soft spot for him. But I also know he is capable of doing despicable things – despicable in my terms.’ Williams was so absolutely in charge of his emotions that, even after Senna’s death, ‘He did cry on the flight back from Imola,’ according to the team’s Iain Cunningham, but ‘that was the only time I heard of any real emotion.’
Or would it be fairer to say that it is an intrinsic part of the appeal of Formula One, that it is so devious, multi-layered and conflict-prone – involving drivers, cars, designers, eng
ine suppliers, tyre manufacturers, teams, team bosses, sponsors, a none-too-transparent governing body and some of the biggest egos on the planet – that it requires a different level of sophisticated, worldly, cynical, engagement on the part of the fan, the driver, the team boss? Only Scuderia Ferrari really inspire simple-minded football-fan levels of tribal loyalty – my team, right or wrong. All the rest is like an incredibly well-funded game of three-dimensional chess, cunning, intelligent, sceptical, dazzled by money and power, and capable of being thrown into disarray by the unpredictable exercise of human frailty or whim. Even calling Formula One a sport seems somehow wrong, given the physical and emotional distancing of the sportsmen from the fans; combined with all this extra intellectual and material tendency towards hyper-complication.
Would it then be fairer and simpler to say that Frank Williams in the 1980s and 1990s epitomised this modern state of affairs, that he wasn’t a despot or a Machiavelli, but rather a highly developed and laudably candid incarnation of what everyone else was thinking, anyway? That he was the spirit of the sport, made flesh?
Or do we need to wait for the Mansell and Hill episodes to play out before we can reach a verdict?
20
MAY, 1982: GILLES VILLENEUVE, FERRARI, ANOTHER END
The harder-nosed an individual or a collective tries to be, the worse it is when sentiment does get through. You can only expend so much energy repressing your feelings. And when Formula One gets sentimental, it does so in a big way. In the case of Gilles Villeneuve, all the emotions got terribly overstimulated from the start and stayed that way to the end. As the death-or-glory, gladiatorially fixated Denis Jenkinson put it, ‘Villeneuve just drove with tremendous spirit all the time. I loved him for that. He was a hero.’ Such was the power of Villeneuve: bearded men fell in love with him.
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 15
