Life After F1

At one time, when a F1 driver hung up his helmet, it usually meant the end of his racing career, full stop. The likes of Juan Manuel Fangio, Guiseppe Farina, Phil Hill and John Surtees all called time on their professional racing life altogether around the time they quit Formula 1.

There were a number of reasons why it used to be unusual for drivers to go on racing beyond the length of their F1 career. Self preservation was probably high on the list. As the ticket stubs remind us spectators even now, Motor Racing is Dangerous. It used to be much more so. Some of the sport's early post-war stars I haven't mentioned above for the simple reason that they never made it to the end of their F1 career - Clark, Ascari and, in a sense, Moss, for example. Continuing to put your life on the line once you knew you were past your peak probably struck many drivers of that era as a gamble too far.

Perhaps just as important was the fact that racing drivers tended to be older by the time they retired. Fangio was 46 when he won his final title. Farina was nearly 50 by the time he entered his last F1 race. There were various reasons for this. In the early 1950s, the after-effects of the Second World War were still being felt and drivers whose 1930s careers had been arrested by hostilities still felt they had something to prove, while those might have spent the 40s in the junior formulae were only just getting started. Added to that is the fact that with the first go-karts still perhaps 15 years away, it was not possible for drivers to start as young as it would later be. Drivers didn't tend to reach F1 in their early 20s. It took longer for all but the most supernaturally talented to build up the kind of experience they needed to compete at the highest level.


Added to that is the fact that, at least until the late 1960s, the demands placed upon an F1 driver were not so great as to prevent him from competing elsewhere if he so fancied. So Graham Hill was able to do the Indy 500 and Le Mans at the same time as he competed in F1. Jackie Stewart frequently turned up behind the wheel of a sportscar at endurance events, and Jim Clark did amazing things with a Lotus Cortina both in touring car racing and, on one occasion, on the RAC Rally. There wasn't the need to go and do these things only after being finished with Grand Prix racing.

There were odd exceptions to the rule. Jack Brabham occasionally dabbled in touring car racing in his native Australia well into the late 1970s. In '76 he even teamed up with Stirling Moss, who came out of retirement to attempt the Bathurst 1000kms in a Holden and as late as 1998, he shared a VW Beetle in a 6hr race around the old Nordschliefe. Denny Hulme came out of retirement in the 1980s to race in TWR's Austin Rover squad and would go on racing right up to his death, from a heart attack, at the wheel of a BMW M3 in a touring car race in Australia. For the most part, though, through the 1960s, F1 drivers tended not to go on racing professionally once they were done with F1.

It was Emerson Fittipaldi who broke with this pattern. With a works Lotus drive, he became world champion at the age of just 25, in only his second full season of Formula 1. He would remain the youngest ever champion for over thirty years, until first Fernando Alonso and then Lewis Hamilton lowered the bar still further. A second title came with Mclaren in 1974, but after that his career went into freefall. Signing for his brother's Copersucar team in 1976, he would never win another race, and would score just one more podium, from 24th on the grid in a race of high attrition at Long Beach in 1980. By the end of that year, he was washed up, disillusioned, and out of the sport, at the age of just 33.

He was, thus, young enough to contemplate a come-back. In 1984, aged 37, he began racing in Indy Cars and carved out a very successful second career, winning the Indy 500 twice and taking the CART championship in 1989. His final victory came as late as 1995, when he was not far off 50 years old. In establishing his second career in the US, he became the first of a very small band of former F1 champions who went on to find success elsewhere in the motor racing world.

It could be argued that Mario Andretti falls into the same category, although he had established himself as a star in his adopted home country of the US before he ever made his F1 debut. He'd won NASCAR's Daytona 500 and was a front-runner in the USAC Champ Car Series and had a string of US sports car victories to his name. His F1 career is perhaps best seen as a particularly successful interlude in a largely US-based racing life. Like Clark and (Graham) Hill before him, he was one of the sport's real all-rounders and F1 was but one part of a long and immensely successful racing life.

From the early 1980s, it has seemed almost the rule that the sport's leading F1 drivers go on to race elsewhere when they have tired of the globe-trotting Grand Prix life, or else, have run out of options at the very top of the sport. Alan Jones dabbled in Australian touring car racing. Nelson Piquet was set to make an attempt at the Indy 500 after retiring from F1, only to fall victim to a career-ending crash in practice for the event (though he did return a few years back to share an Aston Martin sportscar with his son at the Mil Milhas Brasleiras, which they won.) Keke Rosberg tried his hand at sportscar racing with Peugeot, a few years after his retirement from F1, but never seemed at home there and switched to DTM where he raced for some years before finally retiring from racing at the end of 1995, nearly ten years after he left F1.

Other former champions have trodden rather less travelled paths. For years after retiring from the sport as reigning champion at the end of 1993, Alain Prost did not race competitively, not least because his time was taken up with running the ill-fated Prost GP team. A brief sojourn in the French GT championship brought little in the way of results and in 2005 he turned to the peculiar world of ice-racing. It seemed an odd choice for a man famed for his smooth, unhurried style at the wheel of a racing car, but he turned out to be rather good at going sideways, and won the Andros Ice-Race trophy twice. Michael Schumacher, meanwhile, perhaps feeling that he has nothing left to prove in cars, has switched to motorbike racing. Strictly for fun, he says, but he's no slouch and rumours persist that he'll make an appearance in the World Superbike Series at some point.

In recent years, former GP winners Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Jean Alesi have been joined by double World Champion Mika Hakkinen in the DTM. With their high-tech aerodynamics and around 500BHP, the DTM machines are perhaps about as close as touring cars are ever going to get to being thoroughbred racing cars. However, it is notable that, like Rosberg before them, Frentzen, Alesi and Hakkinen all performed respectably, but not one of them was an out and out front-runner in the series.

In fact, it is remarkable how few former top-F1 drivers who went on to race elsewhere ever found real success. Perhaps it is not surprising. Did, say, Hakkinen really have the same level of motivation as young guns like Mattias Ekstrom, Paul Di Resta or Gary Paffett? Come to that, was there the same will to win as drivers of his generation who never got the breaks they deserved in F1, like Bernd Schneider?

This might go some way to explaining why some of the ex-F1 drivers who have met with the greatest success elsewhere in the sport have been those who didn't achieve what they might have done in F1. Perhaps it's because they feel they still have something to prove, and perhaps it's because, unlike the big stars they have to show they are worthy of a paid drive on their own merits, rather than because they are a star name who will bring people through the gates and guarantee press interest. After all, Schneider, a man who had but a couple of seasons in an awful Zakspeed, was the dominant force in DTM for years. Of the ex-F1 drivers who have plied their trade in S2000 and Super-Tourer spec touring cars, it has been Gabriele Tarquini and Nicola Larini who have done best. Two drivers who showed flashes of real pace in Formula 1, but who never really had the equipment to show what they might be capable of (though Larini, to be fair, did get a couple of runs in a Ferrari in 1994 - his best result, a second place at Imola being understandably overshadowed by the deaths of Senna and Ratzenberger that weekend.)

Perhaps the one exception to this rule was Nigel Mansell. Fresh from winning the world title with Williams in 1992, he was unable to agree terms with Sir Frank to carry on at the team, who had a rather differing view on Mansell's worth to that of the man himself. The result? He went off to race in Indycars with the all-conquering Newman Haas team and duly won the Indycar title at his very first attempt. Why was Mansell different? Well probably it helped that he went straight into one of the very top cars - though that wasn't enough for Michael Andretti, who left Newman Haas for Mclaren in F1 and found himself out of his depth. I suspect, though, that Mansell's chip on his shoulder, the way that nobody rated him as highly as he himself did, gave him a drive and motivation which other retiring F1 champions might have lacked in their post-F1 careers. When he came out of retirement again in the late 1990s to race a Mondeo Touring Car, he might have lacked a certain finesse, but there was no doubting that, when the mood took him, he was certainly very spectacular.

David Coulthard finally hung up his helmet at the end of last year. He's apparently still a test driver for Red Bull - though he has not been seen at the wheel of the car since Australia, and since the testing restrictions agreed by FOTA kicked in, it would appear he's surplus to requirements on that front. Of course, newly married and with a young child, he might have other things to occupy him for a while, but I wouldn't bet against him reappearing eventually, in a touring or sportscar. Rubens Barrichello didn't appear ready to retire at the end of last year. In fact, he had one of his best seasons in years. Nonetheless, with the collapse of Honda Racing, the decision may have been made for him. Perhaps a ride with the Acura ALMS squad would be up his street...

On Beauty

There have been some hideous looking racing cars over the years, but I have to say that the 2009-spec F1 cars have frankly raised the bar to a whole new level. Anyone who might have been hoping that the return to slick tyres and the banning of the aerodynamic ‘flip ups’ and sundry add-ons might result in purer, more elegant looking F1 cars will be sorely disappointed. The new rules have produced the most absurd looking F1 cars I can recall, at least since the late 60s when F1 cars briefly sprouted very tall rear wings, before the governing body clamped down on them as highly dangerous. With their huge front wings and narrow, tall rear wings, they look like nothing so much as poor quality cheap toy models of F1 cars, rather than the real thing – or like photos which have been wrongly resized in Photoshop by someone who has forgot to retain the original picture’s aspect ratio.

It sparked a train of thought though – if 2009’s F1 cars are quite the ugliest there have ever been, what were the prettiest? In recent years, the rules have become ever more constrained and one would be hard-pushed to tell one F1 car apart from another once stripped of their liveries (I know this is true in my case because I failed miserably with Autosport’s Christmas challenge of identifying last year’s cars, sans-paintwork) but that wasn’t true, even as recently as the late 1980s and early 1990s. I always thought that, aesthetically, the trend for raised noses was a negative development, but I do have a soft spot for the first car to adopt this design, the Tyrrell 019. Ken’s anhedral winged machine had an elegance that the solution which the F1 designers all eventually arrived at does not. A year later, Gary Anderson’s Jordan 191 stands out as perhaps the last real F1 design classic. A car born not out of wind tunnel data and scientific research, for the fledgling Jordan team had no access to such things, but out from the inspiration and intuition of designer Gary Anderson. In the years since then, it has been hard to pick

The Jordan 191 was as quick as it was good looking, but sadly, the old adage that if it looks right, it will go right has been disproved on many an occasion. I still rate Michael Tetu’s 1988 Ligier JS31 as one of the most outright stunning racing cars ever to turn a wheel, at least in its early season guise, before it sprouted a rather unsightly airbox. Sadly it was an absolute dog on the track. It’s unusual lines were the result of the designer having opted to run two side-mounted fuel tanks, which perhaps contributed to its wayward handling.

Nor was it the only car I can think of which looked fast but turned out to be worse than useless once it turned a wheel. A couple of years before, Gordon Murray stunned the world when he unveiled Brabham’s low-line BT55. It looked quite unlike anything which had preceded it, low-slung, sleek, in short, it looked fast. Unfortunately, it had no traction out of slow corners, and the low-line shape was achieved by mounting the BMW turbo engine on its side, which caused all manner of problems in itself. The following year, Bernie Ecclestone’s men returned with a much more conventional looking car.

Gordon Murray’s basic concept, though, would later be much better executed by the men at Woking. The 1988 Mclaren MP4/4 wasn’t so extreme as the Brabham but it followed the low-line philosophy Murray had pioneered in the BT55, and , unlike the Brabham, proved to be very effective indeed. Whether the MP4/4 deserves to be considered the best F1 car of all time is an open question – it won 15 of the 16 Grands Prix that year, but with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost on the books, and with Honda’s matchless Honda V6 turbo providing the power – it was always going to be quick, wasn’t it? Maybe, although Lotus, who also had use of Honda’s V6 that year, and who had triple world champion Nelson Piquet on the books, might beg to differ…What it does have is a memorable, simple, elegance.

It might have been the most successful car of the period, but to my mind, it wasn’t the best looking of the lot. That honour, to my eye, goes to the following year’s Ferrari 640. The first car that John Barnard designed for Ferrari, it was also the first Formula 1 car to feature a steering-wheel mounted semi-automatic gearbox. For me, it could have been the most mechanically conventional racing car and it would still stand out. It is in all honesty one of only a very few F1 cars, certainly of the last 30 years, which would not look out of place in an art museum.

Sometimes, it is not the shape of a car which makes it memorable, or beautiful, but the livery that does the job. Euroracing’s rather ineffectual Alfa Romeo 184T stood out not so much for its shape as for its green and red Benetton livery and it’s gold wheels. Ferraris, even the most visually unappealing ones, have always had the team’s scarlet colours working in their favour. On the flip side, Alan Jenkins’ pretty little Onyx ORE1 was ruined by the hideous blue and pink ‘Moneytron’ livery it ran in…

To my my mind, the most beautiful racing cars, though, have come not from F1, but from sportscar racing. Not the open-top Spyders which currently bedevil the category (and which were similarly ubiquitous, and just as unattractive, in the late 1970s) but the closed-top sportscar racers of the late 1960s and the Group C era some twenty years later. The Porsche 917 might have been the most memorable of them, but to my mind, the Ferrari 330 P4 was the prettiest. The Alfa Romeo T33 was a strong contender too.

Later on, the Sauber C9, in its Mercedes silver-arrows livery is perhaps as perfect a racing car design as there has ever been. It was devastatingly quick too, dominating sportscar racing in 1989 and 1990. The last, 3.5 atmo engined Group C cars were a little too clearly the product of the wind tunnel rather than the designer’s imagination, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Lola’s T92/10. It was intended as a customer sports prototype, filling the niche left vacant by the Porsche 962, but only two ever ran in the final year of the WSC, and they never stood a chance against the works entries of Toyota and Peugeot.

Rally cars have always been more about brutality than about beauty. The most striking examples, perhaps, come from the Group B era, with the Metro 6R4 and the Peugeot 205T16 standing out as the epitome of this. There have been occasional stunning looking rally cars though. I always had a soft spot for the curves of that orphan child of the Group B era, the Ford RS200. The Lancia 037 was a classic of its time, somehow contriving to take the Lancia Beta as a starting point and yet end up with something truly purposeful.

Asked what he thought of the this year’s Ferrari F60 F1 car, Luca Di Montezemelo joked “The new car looks fairly ugly, rather small, a bit disgusting...” He might have had his tongue in his cheek, but at the same time, I’d be surprised if any of this year’s F1 cars were to make it into a future list of the most beautiful F1 cars.

(I have incorporated links to pictures of the cars mentioned above. I don’t have photographs of most of them myself, and don’t wish to ‘steal’ others’ photos, so I thought this would be the best compromise).

The 2009 Rules: A Blessing or a KERS?

If last weekend's European Grand Prix made one thing abundantly clear, it is that the sport is in dire need of rules changes to make overtaking if not easy, then at least a little less contrary to the laws of physics than it is at present. Here we were on a brand new track which is wide, features several slow corners at the end of long straights and plenty run-off area to play with should drivers fancy a gamble, and yet still the racing was processional, and nobody seemed able to pass anyone else.

I have heard it said that it is the very fact that the cars are so closely matched in performance that militates against passing at the moment. In the second part of qualifying, where the cars are all on the same fuel load, just 0.9s separated fastest man Sebastian Vettel from 15th placed Nelson Piquet, so there is no doubt that little separates the fast guys from the tail-enders right now, at least over a single lap. I'm not convinced, though, that this lies at the root of the overtaking problem. After all, there was a reasonable amount of passing in the supporting GP2 races. While the gaps in GP2 are larger, I suspect this has much to do with the greater variation in driver ability than anything else. After all, unlike in F1, the cars are all built to exactly the same specification, and while some teams may be better able to set up their cars than others, that surely can't count for as much as having a fundamentally different chassis in the first place.

The reason overtaking has become so difficult in F1 over the last few years has, to my mind, less to do with how closely matched the cars are, as the fact that the current design of F1 cars massively militates against overtaking. The cars are on a knife-edge aerodynamically, immensely sensitive to 'dirty air' coming off the back of a car in front so that following the car in front closely through corners is all but impossible. Braking distances are so short that a pass under braking requires a courage bordering on foolhardiness and in any case, the fuel/tyre stop pattern of the modern Grand Prix is such that a driver is usually better advised to wait until the pit stops to pass the guy in front.

It's a problem which the FIA are finally coming round to recognising, and attempting to address with what is being talked about as the most major shake-up of the F1 rulebook in over 20 years. Years ago, FIA Head Max Mosley might have talked of the need to see F1 as a "game of high speed chess" but at last, perhaps, wiser counsel is beginning to prevail. The question is, have they got it right?

The biggest, and perhaps the most talked about change is the introduction of Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) which use energy generated under braking, which would otherwise be wasted, to be used to provide additional power for the car. The rules for KERS are remarkably complicated. The KERS units will be limited by the rules to 60Kw and storage capacity for the device is limited to 400Kj. This means that a driver will be able to call upon an additional 80BHP for about 6 seconds a lap. It could help to promote overtaking, as it can be seen as a kind of "push to pass" button as used in A1GP and in Champ Car last year. The trouble is, that as it can only be used for 6s or so a lap, it is likely that every driver will simply hit the button on the longest straight, where the additional power will give the greatest advantage. Push to pass is, itself, no panacea for the problem of overtaking, but one can't help feel that this is probably not the solution. I have to confess I'm disappointed too that the rules are placing artificial limits on how efficient the device is allowed to be - no matter how much energy the teams may be able to get the devices to reclaim from braking each lap, they will not be allowed to claw back more than 400Kj. How this is supposed to meet the other objective of KERS - spurring improvement in vehicle fuel efficiency - I fail to see.

Much less talked about, but arguably of more significance, moveable aerodynamic devices are being allowed back into the sport (like KERS, it's not in itself a new technology. Mclaren had a KERS system back in 1999 before it was banned and adjustable wings go back to the 1960s). It will be possible for drivers to adjust their front wing angle by up to 6 degrees, a maximum of twice a lap. The idea is apparently to improve overtaking opportunities by enabling drivers to dial in more downforce at the front when in the slipstream, enabling a driver to have more confidence in the car under braking. I can't help thinking that the change might have wider application that that. It would be possible to change the oversteer/understeer characteristics for specific parts of the circuit - perhaps running more front wing angle through the twisty bits at the end of circuits like Hockenheim and Silverstone. It will certainly add an intriguing new variable to car set up. Whether it will help overtaking is another matter...

Perhaps the biggest changes, but also the most difficult to analyse as a layman, are the changes to the aerodynamics rules. Many a race fan has complained about the profusion of aerodynamic extrusions - 'chimneys', 'horns' and 'barge boards' on the grounds that they're aesthetically unappealing. Maybe I simply have a very unusual sense of what is beautiful, but I always rather appreciated them myself. To my mind the designs made the cars look like immensely intricate paeans to the laws of physics - shaped exactly as they were because that was what the wind tunnel insisted upon - no matter how counter-intuitive it looked. It is undeniable, though, that the profusion of 'upper body' aerodynamic pieces has made the cars still more sensitive to running in turbulent air, and I'm perfectly happy to see them go if it is going to mean better racing.

The decision to allow lower ground clearance on front wings, on the other hand, is a positive development both in terms of aesthetics and in terms of improving overtaking. The 50mm ground clearance of the front wings on current F1 cars just looks wrong, and on top of that, drivers report that the change made cars notably more sensitive to running turbulent air (though this is in part because teams tried to claw back the lost downforce by developing ever more complicated upper body aerodynamics - see above...) Presumably, the idea is that by banning said upper-body aero pieces, the lower front wings can be lowered without cornering speeds getting out of control.

At the same time, the rear wings are getting taller and narrower. I rather like the look myself, although Autosport's resident F1 design expert questions whether the effect might be to make the cars less aerodynamically stable and more sensitive to turbulent air (and consequently less able to run closely to the car in front) than they are at present. My degree not being in aeronautics or physics (I was a software man) I don't have the faintest clue whether this is the case or not. I hope the FIA have done their sums right, but it wouldn't be the first time that they hadn't.

What seems like a backward step even to an ignoramus like myself is the decision to reduce the maximum size of the rear diffuser on the 2009 F1 cars. Downforce generated by underbody diffusers is much less affected by turbulent air, and cars which rely to a greater extent on downforce generated by the underside of the car (such as the first generation GP2 car and the Panoz Champ Car raced last year) tend to be consequently much more able to run closely together. I only hope that the change is not sufficient to undo all the good work brought about by other changes to the rules.

Slick tyres will ensure the cars look more like proper single seaters than they do with the silly grooved tyres but whether it will make much difference to the racing is another matter. Drivers such as Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve always insisted, at the time that slicks were kicked out of F1, that the change resulted in the cars having much less 'feel' than they did previously, so I suppose it is possible that their reintroduction will enable drivers to push that little bit closer to the absolute limit without going over it, but that said, guys like Alonso, Kubica or Hamilton don't look to me like they are struggling with the tyres they have at present...

Will it all work? I'm in no better position than anyone else to say, really. I certainly hope it does, because, though F1 was never about constant wheel-to-wheel action in the way that some rose-tinted misty-eyed old guys insist it once was, it was rarely as processional as last weekend's European Grand Prix. And if none of the above works? Guys like Flavio Briatore might agitate for reverse grids or weight penalties or some other such nonsense that benights touring car racing these days.

Me, I've no time for any of that. There should be no penalties for success at the top level of international motorsport, any more than Usain Bolt should have to start a couple of metres back from his rivals at the next Olympics. I do recall, though, a rule change a few years back that led to overtaking at Monaco, only to be carelessly cast aside for reasons unclear. Restricting drivers to one set of tyres per race led to some of the most intensely fought individual races in years. Now there's a control tyre, there seems even less reason not to bring it back. Failing that, how about water sprinklers by the side of the track?