The Narrowest of Margins

I watched the Brazilian Grand Prix in a bar in France. In all honesty, my French really wasn't up to following what was going on. I can just about understand it when its written down, but the accent defeats me completely. However, I did make out one very familiar voice among the commentary team, that of four time world champion Alain Prost.

It was apposite, I suppose, as there are distinct parallels between Kimi Raikkonen's stealthy run to the 2007 World Championship and the greatest of Prost's four title victories - for Mclaren in 1986. Both went into the final race as outsiders, and both were interlopers in an intra-team battle between team mates who had grabbed the lion's share of the press attention, and who did not get on at all. While it is hard to imagine two more different individuals than Prost and Raikkonen, there were certain similarities in the way that they won the title too. In 1986 Alain Prost didn't have the fastest car, and in 2007, Kimi Raikkonen did not have the most reliable car, but both made sure that they did not compound any disadvantage they had by making mistakes of their own.

There has been some debate as to whether this year's title went to the right man this year. An argument can be made, I think, that any of the three drivers separated by a single point at the end of the year would have been a worthy world champion, and certainly the very narrow gap at the top accurately refelcts what has been a very close fought season. In the run up to the final race, Keith Collantine's excellent F1 Fanatic blog had guest articles making the case for each of Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen. To my mind, they all made a good case and it simply underlines the fact that this was an incredibly close fought championship, where nobody succeeded in establishing themselves as the runaway favourite.

Off track, I have to admit that Fernando Alonso's antics have left a somewhat sour taste in my mouth (although that could be because everything I read is refracted through the British press, who needed a villain), but on the circuit, he has out in many impressive performances. If his 2007 season didn't quite live up to his incredible 2006 title drive? Well, how many drivers ever have a season as good as that?

However, while I could point easily enough to mistakes by Hamilton and Alonso which cost them points (Alonso's crash in Fuji, Hamilton's gravelly exit from the Chinese Grand Prix, not to mention Alonso's scrappy race in Canada, or Hamilton's off at the Nurburgring) I really struggled to think of any similar errors on Raikkonen's part. There was the qualifying accident in Monaco, but if we were to restrict ourselves to what went on during Sunday afternoon, then the only thing one could really accuse him of is being a little too cautious on occasion.

I was disappointed that he didn't make more of an effort to pass Heikki Kovalainen at Fuji (think how his team mate fought tooth and nail with Kubica, further back) and felt he ought to have been able to do more to keep Lewis Hamilton behind him at Monza. This is, after all, the Ice Man, reputed by many who ought to know to be the outright fastest driver in the world. But perhaps I do him a disservice. After all, it was quite possibly Hamilton's desire to win the title from the front (at Shanghai) which cost him his chance to win it at all. The Kimi of old might have taken more risks, but then the Kimi of old never won a world championship. I never had Raikkonen down as a percentages player, but its hard to argue that he played them other than brilliantly this year. Sure, he might have got another couple of points in Fuji if he could have got past Kovalainen's Renault, but he might equally have collided with his fellow Finn and eliminated himself from the title battle entirely.

In a predecessor to this blog, I argued that Kimi Raikkonen ought to have won the World Championship as far back at 2003 (I'm afraid I can't find the article, so you'll have to bear with me). With a year-old Mclaren which was not the match of either that year's Ferrari or the Williams BMW, he forced the championship all the way down to the wire, and came within a handful of points of denying Michael Schumacher his sixth world championship. Critics might point out that he only won one race all season, though he would have won a second, had his engine not failed at the Nurburgring. In the car he had, though, he was never going to win a lot of races, so he concentrated on racking up points. Even as early in his career as that, Raikkonen knew when to attack and when discretion might be the better part of valour. And had the Mclaren been a shade more reliable, that might have been enough.

If I'm honest, I really do think that Lewis Hamilton actually did the best job of the title protagonists this year and I would have liked to have seen him wrap up the title in Interlagos. Much as I have got sick to the back teeth of hearing about him in the media (one of the big plusses of being on holiday in France when the final race took place was not having to put up with James Allen's commentary) I think he did a pretty outstanding job against some seriously tough opposition. The fact that it was his first season in an F1 car and that he had never seen several of the tracks before only added to what would have been a pretty remarkable performance for even a seasoned superstar.

I'm glad, though, that an unreconstructed, old fashioned, 1970s kind of racing driver can still succeed at the highest level in the sport. When Raikkonen had a lacklustre start to the season, there were many who questioned whether he really had the commitment and the professionalism to succeed in the modern era - there were even dark (and by all accounts unfounded) rumours that his drinking was out of control. He ignored all of that, kept his head down, refused to engage in the tit-for-tat media war that his rivals sometimes got dragged into, and simply got on with the business of winning more races, and scoring more points, than anyone else. A worthy champion.

Post Script: Fuel temperatures? Appeals? Championships decided in the courtrooms? Let's hope it all goes no further. I'll be charitable and just assume that Ron Dennis and Martin Whitmarsh just want to get one over Max Mosley by showing up how bad the FIA are at enforcing their own rules (Imagine having a rule about how fuel temperature relates to ambient temperature and neglecting to decide how ambient temperature would be determined.... And this is meant to be the pinnacle of technology...) None of the drivers appear to want the result to change. And quite right too.

The March of Time

Earlier this year, Baron Emmanuel 'Toulo' De Graffenreid passed away at the age of 93. With his death, just months after that of Eugene Martin, the last of the men who took part in the inaugural race in the Formula 1 World Championship back in May 1950, at Silverstone, was gone. A last link with an earlier era severed.

This could easily be filed away as just another mildly diverting but ultimately trivial statistic, but actually on closer inspection it reveals something rather interesting. I can well remember a time when no Formula 1 world champion had died of natural causes, and if the march of time has put paid to that, its still hard to get around the fact that 1950 is hardly so long ago as to be lost in the mists of time. My grandmother, still alive today, was older than most of the current Grand Prix grid when it took place. Put another way, plague, world war and pestilence aside, it would be a little surprising if, come 2064, there is not a single survivor from the 2007 British Grand Prix.

The key statistic which explains it all is the average age of those who took the start that day - 40 years. The meteoric rise of the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, the fact that Fernando Alonso is a double world champion at 25 and the impressive debut of the teenaged Sebastien Vettel at Indianapolis all help to illustrate that motorsport, and F1 in particular, is a young man's game these days. It emphatically was not back in 1950, though, and it is interesting to go back and ask why this should be so.

Perhaps the biggest factor was the impact of the Second World War. The conflict served to interrupt the careers of many drivers whose careers, in the late 1930s, were either at their peak, or else just beginning to flower. Had the war never happened, perhaps the likes of Guiseppe Farina (44), Louis Rosier (45) and Luigi Fagioli (52) would have been contemplating retirement by the mid to late 1940s. As it was, there was an unusual number of older drivers who still felt they had something left to prove - who were still captivated by the sport.

The corollary of that is that the younger generation - those born between, say 1920 and 1930, hadn't really had the opportunities to hone their craft in either the junior formulae or (as was more common in that era) in more minor Grands Prix. The war might have ended in 1945 , but austerity measures, in particular petrol rationing and the shortage of raw metals, went on a good deal longer. The Paris Cup may have taken place just after VJ Day, on the 9th September 1945, but all in all, the 1940s were a quiet time for motorsport. As an aside, it is perhaps notable that two of the younger front-runners in the first years of the World Championship, Juan Manuel Fangio and Jose Froilan Gonzalez, were from
South America, where the War took longer to interrupt racing activities, and where the post-war recovery was swifter.

There was another only partly related reason why the field at that first race was so old. The F1 championship was then a new development (though it had an antecedent of sorts in the European Championship that ran in the 1930s) and carried little of the cachet that it does now. Whilst there were a few works cars (the pre-war Alfa Romeo 158s that were, by some distance, the class of the field, and a couple of Maseratis and Talbot-Lagos) the vast bulk of the field was made up of wealthy gentleman amateurs, in private Maseratis, Altas and ERAs. Only a small handful of these were remotely competitive. It follows, unsurprisingly, that on the whole, those in a position to buy and run their own F1 car were a good deal older than most of today's paid professionals.

There may, however, have been yet another factor at work - one perhaps of more relevance to understanding why modern motor racing is the way that it is. A few years ago, Martin Brundle testeda 1950s Mercedes F1 car. Two things struck him about the experience. The first was how physically easy the car was to drive. With no downforce and relatively low-grip tyres, cornering speeds were, in comparison with today, very low, and the physical forces acting on the driver much reduced. One did not need to be an athlete to drive a racing car competitively in the early 1950s (as pictures of the rather portly Gonzalez amply illustrate - and to think these days people say Juan Montoya is porky!) With fewer physical demands on the driver, the impact of the ageing process on driver performance is reduced. Its true today, after all, that drivers too old for F1 can often build successful second careers in sports and touring cars.

Brundle's other observation was that he was amazed how mentally demanding the car was to drive. Not so much that it was difficult per se, but that there was so little room for error. Without modern crash protection structures (or even seatbelts - the thinking at the time being that in a serious crash, you were better off being thrown out of the car), any accident was potentially life-threatening.

In such circumstances, one would tend to be a little bit more circumspect when it comes to exploring exactly where the limits lie. The razor-sharp reactions of youth are less relevant - what mattered was experience. Learning where the limits lie by going over them and working back from there was a strategy for ending up in a pine box. The idea that for a young charger, a few big accidents were all part of the learning curve, was no part of racing in the early 1950s. The only way to find out where the limits were in such cars was through much practice (although as was ever the case, the extremely naturally gifted will always learn quicker, and learn better, than their peers). The scales, in those days, were tilted a notch or too further towards old age and experience, and away from youth and enthusiasm.

Lets not get things out of proportion though. I've seen repeated from time to time the suggestion that F1 cars are too easy to drive these days because "a quick kid can just jump in and be quick straight away". There may be some truth in this, but I wouldn't overestimate it., After all, when Boris Becker won Wimbledon at 17, and Martina Hingis at 16, nobody suggested that tennis was suddenly too easy. Hingis and Becker had been playing since they were very young children. What's changed is that this is now true of racing drivers too. In 1950, there was no such thing as karting, and there were no junior single-seater formulae open to 15 year olds (like FBMW today). Sebastien Vettel might seem inexperienced, but he had probably driven more testing miles in the BMW than the majority of those taking the start at Silverstone in 1950. In fact, after 2 seasons of Formula BMW, 2 seasons of F3, a Friday driver job with BMW in 2006 and a few Renault World Series drives (not to mention 8 years of karting) he was probably more race-experienced than Guiseppe Farina was when he won the opening round of the 1950 world championship.