30
THE BEAT GOES ON
What was so special about 2006, then? For a start, Schumacher retired. Secondly, the Championship was won by Fernando Alonso, the first Spaniard to win the Drivers’ Championship, in 2005, and now the youngest person, at twenty-five, to win titles back to back. Thirdly, the season as a whole ran the risk of becoming interesting, once Schumacher had got his dander up and started to chase Alonso down in the second half of the year. Fourth, no native British team, no garagiste, won a single race: the first time since 1956 that this had happened. Everything went to Renault, Ferrari and (once) Honda. All right, Honda and Renault both had substantial specialist presences in the English Midlands, like so many others. But their souls lay elsewhere. In other words, there was a pleasant scent of insurrection in the air.
And Alonso was good, no two ways about it. After juvenile successes in the inevitable karting, he got into a Formula One car – a test with Minardi – and found himself immediately going more quickly than the established drivers. 2001 saw him compete in the Australian Grand Prix, the youngest driver ever to start an F1 race. 2003 rolled by, and in Hungary, at the wheel of a Renault, he became the youngest driver ever to win a GP. The 2004 season was all about Schumacher’s war of attrition against the rest of the world, but in 2005, using a mixture of cunning strategy and get-ahead hard charging, Master Fernando became the world’s youngest champion. He memorably asserted that ‘Spain is not a country with an F1 culture, and we had to fight alone, every step of the way, to make this happen.’
The next year was even more absorbing, with Schumacher going for final glory, and Alonso starting to fray at the edges. When he lost his Championship lead to the German in October, he claimed that ‘The whole team is gutted, apart from the handful who don’t want me to take the number one to McLaren.’ Really? ‘Some others are happy because we went past Ferrari in the team battle,’ he added, darkly alluding to the fact that Renault wanted the Constructors’ Championship first, the drivers’ second. ‘They are not helping me as much as they could.’ Renault at once replied with a frosty ‘There is no problem at all with the relations between him [Alonso] and the team,’ but it was clear that Fernando, in the manner of a champ who understands his own worth, was not going to hang about where he wasn’t wholly appreciated. So, having taken his second title, he went off, in a marked manner, to McLaren –
– Who had just had a frightful year of it. Not a single victory for a British team! Neither Williams nor McLaren could make it onto the top step of the podium. It was an index of how the world had changed. Britain was still pretty much at the centre of Formula One – maybe 350,000 people were directly employed by F1 teams in the UK, with Renault alone taking 600 of them – but the garagiste tradition, gamey, individuated, embodied in Brabham, Lotus, Tyrrell, March, McLaren, Williams, was dying. Indeed, McLaren only enjoyed its pre-eminence thanks to the investment and authority that came with Mercedes.
Nevertheless. The new McLaren MP4-22, lined up for the 2007 season, looked infinitely better than its 2006 predecessor: dazzling silver, dementedly aerodynamic – like a lobster on steroids – it compelled respect. The McLaren team as a whole, having had a mild crackup in 2006 with various key players defecting to other teams, was strong again. A new number two driver, Lewis Hamilton, was going to do all the right things to keep Alonso happy. There was no question of settling in, of spending a season getting to know people. The point, according to Alonso, was ‘to win the Championship’. That was all. ‘It’s for this reason that I switched to McLaren Mercedes. We both want to be world champions.’
How could he have known that it would turn into a revisiting of the Williams/Piquet/Mansell nightmare? How could he have foreseen that Hamilton was some kind of prodigy? What was it with McLaren? Six months after telling the world that he was going for a hat-trick of titles, Alonso found himself publicly griping away at the McLaren ethos. ‘Well, right from the start I’ve never felt totally comfortable,’ he announced in a radio interview. ‘I have a British team-mate in a British team, and he’s doing a great job and we know that all the support and help is going to him, and I understood that from the beginning.’ In an attempt to make his complaint sound like something else, he added, ‘I’m not complaining,’ and, ‘I would be worse if I were at Renault, or Honda, or any other team.’ It wasn’t a big thing, really it wasn’t. ‘I’m calm, I’m fine, but I know there’s a certain impatience to return to the top and dominate.’ The only problem being that the impatience was his, mostly: everyone else was staring in disbelief at Lewis Hamilton.
After all, Hamilton’s time in F1 could still be measured in weeks, rather than years. And yet, halfway through the racing calendar, he had been on the podium in every single race, had won twice and grabbed two pole positions. People were cracking up at the very mention of his name. Fantastically talented, hard-working, a tale of virtuous hard graft to the very top, good-looking, self-deprecating: Hamilton had the oldsters fighting to praise him. Sir Stirling Moss reckoned that ‘He’s the best thing I’ve ever seen,’ that ‘I can’t think of anybody who has shown that much talent,’ and – reaching for the very top drawer of greatness – ‘Lewis certainly has the qualifications to be up there with Fangio.’ Sir Jackie Stewart, equally aglow, claimed that Hamilton had ‘been able to accomplish more in a shorter time than any driver I’ve ever seen.’ Nigel Mansell drizzled on the whole thing by pointing out that ‘Lewis has lucked into a fabulous car,’ and ‘What he’s done has been very impressive but it’s what he should have been doing anyway.’ But no one cared. Hamilton was an absolute sensation. And (what a riposte to 2006) he was a British driver, in a British team, with the first real chance at a Championship since Damon Hill, ten years earlier.
Of course, it didn’t work out like that. For all his petulant gloom at the way McLaren refused to give him, the twice-champion, absolute and categorical first billing, Alonso kept toiling away, winning at Monza and collecting a third in China, where Hamilton managed to break the hearts of millions by falling off the pit lane and into a gravel trap.
Who, though, was the real beneficiary of all this? None other than the fiendishly composed, often outlandishly fast, Kimi Raikkonen. Let’s be frank: the Finns are not as other people. They have produced more Formula One world champions, as a proportion of their population, than any other country. There are just over 5 million of them, but they’ve turned out Keke Rosberg, the great Mika Hakkinen (champ in 1998 and ’99) and now they have Kimi Raikkonen, who crept like a thief in his Ferrari among the McLarens and hung the wretched Alonso and the bedazzled Hamilton out to dry.
Known as ‘Iceman’, Raikkonen was being paid something over £20 million at Ferrari in 2007 and was, apart from an occasional tendency to party too hard, too cool for words. According to his compatriot, Mika Salo, ‘Things like family stuff and so on are not close to us. During my time in F1 my grandfather and grandmother died, and I never even went to the funeral. It was not a big thing for me, and I believe it’s the same here [Finland] for everybody.’ There you go. He also revealed that Finns were ‘very stubborn, jealous and selfish people. So you’d rather do well yourself than let somebody else do well.’ It was perfect for Raikkonen. Fatally for the two McLaren drivers, he won three out of the last four races, in a Ferrari so bristling with aerodynamic aids, it was impossible to count each separate flange and flap without getting a headache. Alonso was deeply frustrated: four wins came his way, but so did four seconds and four thirds – Raikkonen, or Hamilton, or Massa, forever scuppering his chances.
‘I just like to be alone, or to be with my friends,’ Raikkonen said, writhing in the glare of fame. At the wheel? ‘I just go out and try to go as fast as I can.’ The pressures of competition? ‘I don’t think about too many things too much. I just do it.’ A £20 million salary, big house in Switzerland, former Miss Scandinavia as a wife? ‘I can’t complain.’
* * *
On the other hand, Max Mosley was belatedly fretting over what he c
alled ‘the Schumacher effect’, the lurking problem that Hamilton might soon be so unreasonably successful it would cause people to ‘start writing to me saying can’t you do something to slow him down’. This, shortly after Hamilton had effectively lost the title. But was he right to worry?
Probably not. The 2008 season turned out to be an exercise in – yes! – thrills, with Hamilton locked in a struggle with Felipe Massa, Raikkonen getting some hot action at the start before fading in the points (although setting an inordinate number of fastest laps – ten in all), and Alonso coming back on form in the second half of the year. Having moved back to Renault, he was typically touchy and plaintive at first, but brightened once he picked up a win at the teeming, floodlit Singapore GP (of which, more later). He subsequently felt so good about things, he could even bestow a kind word on his former boss, Ron Dennis, declaring that ‘There is respect for each other,’ and that ‘There are not many people like Ron any more.’ By the time everyone arrived in China, it was almost preposterously exciting, with twelve points separating the top three drivers, Hamilton getting edgy after crashing around in Japan (‘What can I say? it was a bad day’), and Alonso beaming over the improvements in his Renault (‘The feeling I have now is that we can do anything’).
And then Hamilton did his nut in China (on Hermann Tilke’s squiggly Shanghai circuit), taking pole position, setting the fastest lap, and winning the race, fifteen seconds ahead of Massa. This, after six Grands Prix without a win, one of which was in Belgium, where the stewards bumped him down from first to third, following an infraction of the rules. ‘Another step towards my dream,’ he said, before driving the British viewing public into a collective nervous breakdown by nearly winning, then nearly losing, then finally winning the Championship, on the last bend of the last lap of the Brazilian Grand Prix. ‘I was shouting, “Do I have it? Do I have it?” on the radio,’ Hamilton later revealed. ‘It was only when I took the chequered flag and got to turn one that the team told me I was world champion. I was ecstatic.’
You can bet he was. The youngest-ever world champion, at twenty-three. No wonder Alonso looked pissed off after the race. And as for poor Massa …
Stefano Domenicali, Sporting Director at Ferrari, went straightaway over to Hamilton at the end, to congratulate him. ‘I did my job. I think this is correct,’ he sighed. ‘At the end of the day he won by one point and it means he was better by one point. He is a world champion. He lost last year by one point. And next season? We will see.’
31
AND ON
Another interesting year in F1? What are the chances? Amazingly, 2009 gave us, among other things: teams back from the dead, a world champion from out of left-field, the disappearance of Max Mosley, back-to-front starting grids, plus at least two hand-wringing scandals and one almost career-ending accident.
First things first. The superhumanly clever Ross Brawn, one-time technical director for Ferrari and Benetton in the Schumacher years, took over what was left of the Honda F1 team after the original owners had bid a tearful farewell from the sport, taking their engines with them. Brawn promptly renamed the team after himself, fitted some Mercedes power units at the backs of the cars and, thanks to a millimetre-close reading of the season’s new rule book, attached a rear diffuser which worked an awful lot better than the other teams’ rear diffusers.
The result? Jenson Button took his six GPs and was transformed from a likeable has-been skirt-chaser into a driver whose substantial talents had at last been rewarded with the right kind of vehicle. Nigel Mansell did an impersonation of a damp fog, by reckoning initially that it was the car that the won races, not the driver (‘That car looks just amazing. I mean, the balance of that car’), before yielding enough to say that Button ‘is not letting this go, he is staying focused. He is more focused than I have ever seen him and better than ever. It’s his Championship.’
Which it was, in a slightly minor key. For the first few months of the season, it was indeed nearly always Button’s Imax grin that met the press at the end of each race (‘It’s a very special feeling to have got this win … To win here is fantastic … You guys are absolute legends’), while tough guy Mark Webber declared that Button was ‘on another level’, confirming that the 2009 Championship was already a foregone conclusion.
But then the project started to lose vitality. Other teams caught up. Button was infected by inner hesitancy. Red Bull, by Jaguar out of Stewart, turned out to have the next Michael Schumacher driving for them – a guy called Sebastian Vettel, distinguished by having even more teeth in his head than Jenson Button, and who, like Schumacher and Senna before him, was ‘blindingly fast from the start’. As a consequence, he broke Button’s winning run at Shanghai, scoring Red Bull’s debut win on the way. He did it again, to everyone’s horror, at the British Grand Prix, while Webber took the German GP. Worse: McLaren, having started the year with the wrong sort of car, got it working by July, when an exultant Lewis Hamilton won the Hungarian GP (‘It’s an incredible feeling to be back here’), and suddenly Button was looking less than magisterial.
Did he panic? As it turned out, he played a thoughtful game, consolidated his points and secured the title by driving like a bandit at Brazil and battling his way up from fourteenth on the grid to fifth place by the end: a fantastic drive. The only snag was that, overall, Button’s year seemed to lack the terrible ruthlessness that a Schumacher or Clark or Fangio would have commanded. He could have wrapped it up by August, but didn’t. Nor did he manage a grandstanding final win; settling instead for a grandstanding fifth. There was, retrospectively, something about it of the just-caught-the-bus feel of Hawthorn’s title (one race win, one point ahead of Moss) or James Hunt’s (one point, Lauda injured), or even Lewis Hamilton’s (except that Hamilton was given the benefit of the doubt, because he was obviously such a racer at heart). Was this somehow expressive of the English condition?
In the scheme of things, it won’t matter. History will record that Jenson Button took the Championship with a healthy six wins, four poles and two fastest laps, and will have been the first back-to-back British champion since Jackie Stewart (1969) took over from Graham Hill (1968).
And where, for that matter, was the great Fernando Alonso in all this? Or Kimi Raikkonen? Or Felipe Massa? Where was the opposition? Well, poor Massa ended up badly hurt after being hit by an errant bit of Barrichello’s suspension and slamming into a tyre wall at 130 mph. ‘I thought we’d seen an end to all this sort of thing,’ Bernie Ecclestone muttered, after visiting Massa in hospital. ‘It’s mad.’ Barrichello was in tears, and Ferrari as a whole continued the decline they had gone into after having the title thieved from them by Hamilton, seven months earlier. Raikkonen did get a win at Belgium, yes, but by the end of the season they were in fourth place in the Constructors’ Championship and 100 points behind Brawn, those hilarious upstarts. Gloomier commentators ended the year with much head-shaking and numerous predictions that, without Schumacher (fleetingly earmarked to fill in for Massa mid-season) and all his startling energies, the Scuderia was about to enter one of its periodic Dark Ages again.
Or would Fernando Alonso turn it all round? ‘Driving a single-seater from the Prancing Horse is everybody’s dream in this sport, and today I have the opportunity to make this dream come true,’ he gushed, on signing a three-year deal. ‘I can’t wait to start working with my new team.’ But then, whoever he drove for, it could hardly be worse than working with Renault – who had not only failed to get their R29 working (third place in Singapore the best they could manage), but also found themselves at the centre of a race-fixing scandal of scarcely credible dimensions.
This was, of course, the Nelson Piquet Jr/Singapore 2008/Premeditated Crash fiasco.
The wretched Piquet, having repressed his guilty conscience for nearly a year, found, on being dropped by Renault in August 2009, that he was at last free to blow the gaff on an authentically scandalising piece of news: that Renault’s team boss, Flavio Briatore, had, at Singap
ore the previous year, told him to stick his car into the circuit wall so as to force out the safety car and allow Alonso to capitalise on a surprisingly prescient pit stop. Which, as it happened, enabled him to go on and win the race.
Formula One has become fairly inured to moral shoddiness by now, what with Senna stuffing Prost at Suzuka (1990), Schumacher crashing into Villeneuve (1997), McLaren being found guilty of thieving technical information from Ferrari (2007) and getting a severe reprimand for misleading the stewards at the Australian Grand Prix (2009). But Piquet at Singapore seemed to be taking us into a new world of crazed duplicity. How could he be sure he wouldn’t total himself as well as the car? How could he be sure he wouldn’t total someone else’s car? ‘I bitterly regret my actions to follow the orders I was given. I wish every day that I had not done it,’ he announced, before attempting to place the blame on his boss, Flavio Briatore. ‘All I can tell you,’ he argued, ‘is that my situation at Renault turned into a nightmare,’ and Briatore, according to him, was the man responsible. The FIA promptly held an inquiry. Piquet was granted immunity by the FIA for fessing up. Briatore and Pat Symonds, the Renault team engineer, were not. Symonds was given a five-year suspension. Briatore didn’t turn up at the hearing and was banned from the sport indefinitely. He then disappeared from view, before re-emerging to appeal against the judgement, at the same time claiming €1 million in compensation from the FIA.
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 24
