The Quiet Champion

He died ten years before I was born, and yet, in a round-about way, I suppose he is ultimately responsible for my life-long fascination with the world of motorsport. Jim Clark was my father's boyhood hero, and as with many a racing fan I've known, it's an obsession I picked up from my dad. He took me to my first race as a seven year old kid - the European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch. I still remember the impact of seeing mid-80s turbo cars sprinting down into Hawthorn Bend, showers of sparks flying up from their titanium skid plates. I remember too, being taken around the pitlane to look at the cars in the fading light of early evening in October and getting my photo taken sat in the cockpit of Derek Warwick's Renault.

Had it not been for that trip, I might never have been drawn to the sport. Certainly, motorsport aside, I was always more interested in music, film and novels than I was in sport. So perhaps it really does all come down to the impact that an unassuming hill-farmer from the Scottish Borders made on a teenager in Cheshire nearly fifty years ago.

Last weekend's BBC4 documentary, Jim Clark: The Quiet Champion (UK readers can watch it on Iplayer until 8pm on Saturday) used archive footage, interviews with those who knew him and interviews with the man himself, told the story of the man whom many, my father amongst them, regard as the greatest racing driver there has ever been.

The film, the last of the BBC's triptych concerning Britain's multiple F1 champions, following on from Graham Hill: Driven and Jackie Stewart: The Flying Scot, transports viewers back into a world far removed from the modern sport. Ian Scott-Watson, who is interviewed for the programme, was Clark's early mentor, and lent him use of his DKW car to compete in a local sportscar race in 1956. Scott-Watson found that, within a few laps, Clark was able to lap 3 seconds quicker than he had been able to. A year and a half later, he was a works driver for Colin Chapman's then fledgling Lotus team, and by 1960, he was a Formula 1 driver.

In today's world, where F1 drivers have typically been racing karts since they were barely out of nappies, have come up through highly structured (and very expensive) junior formulae, often with the help of manufacturer-backed driver development programmes, it is amazing to think that, at one time, it was possible to go from being a hobbyist amateur, racing a borrowed car at a local motor club to a paid F1 driver in the space of under four years. It drives home the fact that the racing world was much more ad-hoc, much less commercialised than it is now.

Two years later, Clark was winning Grands Prix - picking up three wins in 1962 for Lotus, and a year later, he had won his, and Lotus' first World Championship. He was also an accomplished sportscar and touring car racer, particularly spectacular at the wheel of a Lotus Cortina. The documentary gives considerable time over to his trips to the US to compete in the Indianapolis 500. At that time, it was all but unheard of for European road circuit drivers to make the journey across the pond to pit themselves against the best of America's oval racers. Yet Clark proved to be a natural - leading 28 laps and finishing second on his debut. Two years later, in 1965, he won the race outright and becoming the first non-US driver to do so.

The documentary's title - The Quiet Champion hints at what stood out about Clark at the time. In an era when racing drivers were expected to be larger-than-life daredevils, Clark was, according to former Lotus mechanic Bob Dance "diffident and shy, not at all like any other racing driver." As someone who lives not far from the Border farming country where Clark grew up though, it doesn't surprise me so much. Even now, fifty years on, the Borders appear a quiet, conservative kind of place where the pace of life is slow, and not much ever changes. How much more true this must have been the case in the late 1950s and early 1960s?

As the documentary tells it, it is in the aftermath of that Indianapolis win that the commercial pressures begin to enter into Clark's life. Formula 1 might not have had anything like the media profile it does now, but an Indy 500 win was enough to get Clark on the front of Time Magazine. Whether this sat comfortably with a man who liked to relax while away from racing by returning to his Borders farm and tending to his sheep is not entirely clear. Certainly, he doesn't come across as being as comfortable in the spotlight as his contemporaries and subject of the two earlier documentaries, Stewart and Hill.

How he would have coped with the modern media-saturated version of the sport, where drivers are expected to be constantly available to speak to the press, to be figureheads for the corporations that fund their teams, that is hard to know... Perhaps it's simply a wrong-headed way to think about it. He was as much of his time as anyone, and even in today's racing world there are those who seem more comfortable in the spotlight than others. Today a Nico Rosberg or a Lewis Hamilton comes across happier being the centre of attention than say, a Fernando Alonso or a Kimi Raikkonen...

One moment in the film really rams home how different racing really was in Clark's day though. Clark is asked by a television interviewer "What's left to prove, how do you assess your chances of reaching old age, or even middle age, if you push it any further?" These days, such a question would be hyperbolic - motor racing may not be safe in the workaday sense of the word, but it has been 15 years since a driver died in a Grand Prix, and the possibility of dying at the wheel probably doesn't much trouble the average F1 driver. In Clark's day, though, such a question might be impertinent, but it wasn't sensationalist. it was a very different and much more dangerous world for a racing driver. A clip from the film drives the point home forcefully - "In 1958 these 16 men lined up for the start of the 1958 season. Today 7 of them are dead" a TV announcer declares in a stentorian tone.

In the end, Clark's luck ran out. A still unexplained accident in a minor Formula 2 race at Hockenheim, Germany saw his Lotus plunge off into the trees, killing him instantly. For all that death was far from unknown in the sport in those days, the impact of his death was still immense - for the simple reason that he was seen by his peers as the best of them all. Every racing driver, while knowing the dangers, probably preferred to think that others might have fatal accidents, but it wouldn't happen to them. But, as Chris Amon would later say "If it could happen to him, what chance do the rest of us have? I think we all felt that. It seemed like we'd lost our leader."

Was Clark the best of his generation? From this distance, I couldn't possibly say. I wasn't there at the time and the bare statistics can't tell the whole story. Those statistics are damned impressive though, with 25 wins from 72 race starts, his win/race ratio is bettered only by Michael Schumacher, at least once you strip out the anomalies who competed in only a few Grands Prix. And Schumacher, it should be remembered, was competing in an era where mechanical reliability was vastly better than it was in the 1960s. My father always thought, though, that the most telling statistic was that, in his whole career, he only ever finished second twice. As he put it, if the car held together, Clark usually won.

The damage done

A commonly told morality tale in the history of war, or at least in fictional accounts of it, is that of two bitter enemies who fight a brutal and bloody war of attrition, and at the end of it, the nominal winner sadly surveys the horrendous damage and devastation they have sustained and is forced to ask: Was it all worth it? In what sense have we really won?

It's a rather melodramatic way of looking at the recently ended US single seater conflict between Tony George's Indy Racing League and the Champ Car World Series (nee CART) but it there's some truth in it. The recent developments have been billed as a 'merger' between the two series, but in truth, it has been game, set and match for the IRL. The unifited series will be called the IRL, they ill use the IRL's cars, the IRL's engines and will race (mostly) at IRL';s venues. The CHamp Car teams able to raise the budget to compete at all will be at a huge starting disadvantage and outgoing Champ Car champion Sebastien Bourdais thinks even Newman Haas, the dominant Champ Car team of the past five years, will struggle to be half way competitive. So make no mistake: IRL won. But at what cost?

This article provides an excellent precis of the causes of the IRL split, and the differing visions of the IRL and the then CART series. Fundamentally, the IRL was founded on Tony George's vision of an authentically American oval racing series, with lower budgets and less complex technology than the CART series, as he considered that the series had become too international, too expensive, and lacked home drivers. Yet, ten years on, the cars are built by the Italian Dallara firm, the engines come from Japanese car giant Honda, the leading teams, Chip Ganassi, Andretti-Green and Rahal-Letterman are all relatively recent converts from Champ Car, and for the past two years, both the Indy 500 and the IRL title have been won by foreign drivers (British drivers, as it happens). Tony George's IRL won the battle in the end, probably because it always held the trump card in the form of the Indy 500, the one truly well known race in US single seater racing, but in order to do so, the IRL had to become a virtual clone of the series it was seeking to usurp.

So is it simply a matter of 'as you were' with the unified series being essentially the same as the old CART series that dominated the US racing landscape through the 1980s and 1990s? Sadly, that is far too optimistic a gloss to put on matters. The old series had real star drivers, a huge international following and was without question the most important series outside of F1. When top CART drivers went across the Atlantic to race in F1, they did so in the top teams of the day. Michael Andretti partnered Ayrton Senna at Mclaren in 1993, Jacques Villeneuve went to Williams in 1996, and Juan Pablo Montoya did the same 5 years later.

It's a marked contrast with the state of things today. Reigning Champ Car series champion Sebastien Bourdais has taken a ride with tailend Toro Rosso in F1, while IRL champion Dario Franchitti has joined fellow front-runner Sam Hornish Jr in deciding that his future lies in NASCAR. While its rivals divided and fell in the 21st Century, the US stock car series has emerged from its deep south roots to dominate the US motorsport landscape today (though, to be fair, it has it's own problems). The split was immensely damaging, not just for Champ Car, which has now folded, but for the surviving series too.

Can the IRL, with its main rival extinguished, now recover? Much depends on what happens this year. With its move to include road and street circuits on its calendar, as well as short ovals and superspeedways, the series can with some justification claim to be the most complete test of a single seater driver's versatility. If the most competitive Champ Car teams successfully make the switch, it will have the strongest line-up of teams that any US single seater series has had since the late 1990s. Unfortunately, the news that Forsythe Championship Racing will fold having been unable to raise the budget to compete in IRL hardly bodes well. One hopes that Minardi Team USA, Newman Haas and Team Australia don't go the same way.

On the other hand, set against these strengths, the series is sorely lacking in star drivers. Racing afficionados may know that Dan Wheldon, Helio Castroneves, Scott Dixon, Justin Wilson and Will Power are real talents, but their names will mean nothing to the wider US public. The closest thing that the series has to a household name is Danica Patrick, who has never actually won a major race, and who is famous chiefly for being female. There's Marco Andretti and Graham RAhal, but one suspects that while the surnames may mean something, their first names probably will not.

This will inevitably take time to correct. A good first step would be to stop the flow of young US talents towards NASCAR. Two good junior series, in the form of Formula Atlantic and the Infiniti Pro Series should help, though the former, in particular, is dominated by foreign drivers whose European junior careers have stalled. Attracting back AJ Allmendinger, who was a real star in Champ Car and is now also-ran in NASCAR, would be an encouraging sign.

I hope they succeed. With ever more drivers coming up through the junior single seater ranks and only 22 slots on the F1 grid, there is a desperate need for a viable alternative (and NASCAR, with its emphasis on turning left, spurious safety cars and bumping and boring just doesn't cut it for me). I want the newly unified series to succeed. I'll not pretend that I was ever other than a Champ Car partisan in the single-seater wars, but more than anything, I thought it important that there was a merger. It's going to be a long hard slog, but fingers crossed, they just might do it.

Grand Slams and Quadruple Crowns - Villeneuve Goes to Le Mans

So Jacques Villeneuve is going to Peugeot to race at Le Mans. After all the talk of his going to NASCAR, he has decided that his year will instead focus on June in La Sarthe. This is good news, I think, for the race itself. In recent years, topline rally drivers, Colin McRae and Sebastien Loeb, have turned their hand to the event and generated plenty of publicity for a race which, thanks to Volkswagen Audi Group's domination since the turn of the century, has not been at its most exciting. A formula one world champion though? Its been a while since a top line F1 driver has had a go at Le Mans. Plenty of drivers try Le Mans as junior drivers - Michael Schumacher raced for Mercedes there in 1990, Mark Webber did the same ten years later. Eddie Irvine came close to winning the event for Toyota in 1993 and 1994, and Johnny Herbert actually did win for Mazda in 1991. But bona fide F1 stars, guys with world championships to their name? To my memory, the last to appear on the entry list was Mario Andretti, back in 2000. By that time, he was 60 years old, and driving a Panoz, so there wasn't much chance of him achieving a great deal, but Le Mans was an itch he had tried to scratch several times before, never quite succeeding.

He first came to the race in 1983, paired with his young son Michael Andretti and equally precocious Frenchman Alliot. In a Porsche 956, they finished 3rd at their first attempt. Andretti would be back a few years later with his son Michael joined by brother John, attempting to win the race as a family. That time, they could only manage 6th overall. It would be late on in his career, once he had retired from the Champ Car World Series, that he would come closest to winning at Le Mans. In 1995, against a motley grid of hamstrung prototypes and GT cars, Andretti partnered Bob Wollek and Eric Helary to second place in a Courage C34 Porsche. Even allowing for the rain, which played into the hands of the Mclaren GT runners, the race ought to have been his for the taking, but an incident between Andretti and a rent-a-driver in a GT car lost them time and handed Mclaren its only Le Mans victory.

What is interesting is why Mario Andretti kept going back to Le Mans well into his 6th decade, and long after he had stopped racing in any other category. The answer: unfinished business. Andretti had the F1 world championship, and the Indy 500 to his name, and he very much wanted to add victory at Le Mans to his list of achievements - the motor racing equivalent of the Grand Slam. He never did achieve it, but it is this record which Jacques Villeneuve, Indy Car Champion and Indy 500 winner of 1995 and Formula 1 World Champion of 1997, is now chasing.

Only one driver has ever claimed all three: Graham Hill took the F1 world championship twice, in 1962 and 1968, was victorious in the Indy 500 in 1966 and paired up with French Le Mans expert Henri Pescarolo to win the 24hr race in 1972 in a Matra. Others have claimed victory in two of these events - Texan AJ Foyt won at Le Mans in 1967 and won the Indy 500 no less than four times, but never had any interest in Formula 1. Jim Clark won at Indy and had 2 F1 titles to his name, but never won Le Mans. Emerson Fittipaldi also claimed both the Indy 500 and the F1 title. Going further back, to a time when sportscar racing perhaps held more significance, Jochen Rindt and Mike Hawthorn were F1 champions who at Le Mans and American Phil Hill won the F1 title and took no less than 3 victories at Le Mans but, despite being born on the far side of the pond, to my knowledge never so much as started the Indy 500.

Comparisons with a Grand Slam of the major tennis or golf tournaments, though, are not entirely warranted. For a start, its absolutely clear that, in tennis, the four major championships are Wimbledon, Roland Garros, Flushing Meadows and the Australian Open. In Golf, there is perhaps ever so slightly more room for debate, but those who care about the sport (I do not) would list The Masters, the US Open, The British Open and the PGA Championship as the big four.

In motor racing, its all a bit more confusing. Its pretty clear that Le Mans is the biggest sports car race, but is winning Le Mans more important than a sportscar world title? Perhaps, given that the quality of the field at Le Mans has, throughout most of the last fifty years, been higher than that to be found in the sportscar championship as a whole. A driver can fit Le Mans around an F1 or Champ Car campaign, but couldn't do the whole Sportscar championship (and that's not forgetting that in some years there hasn't even been such a thing). More to the point, is winning the Indy 500 more of an achievement than winning the Indy Car Series? The race might mean more to the man on the street, but is one race really more important than a whole championship? How to rank Nigel Mansell's achievement - winning the F1 championship and the CART championship in consecutive years, but never (quite) winning at Indianapolis? Perhaps its better to forget the additional complications caused by the IRL/Champ Car split...

If Jacques Villeneuve wins Le Mans, his achievement will in fact be unique. He will become the first driver ever to claim the F1 championship, the Indy 500, the CART Championship and victory in Le Mans, a quadruple crown, if you like. Exactly what kind of achievement is this though? Every top tennis player might dream of winning the Grand Slam (or at least compete in all the Grand Slam events) but there have been great racing drivers who never showed much interest in any category outside their chosen specialism. Michael Schumacher never much liked Le Mans, and never showed the slightest interest in attempting the Indy 500. AJ Foyt was famously indifferent to Formula 1. Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost never tried their hand at either Le Mans or the Indy 500, feeling that F1 was the pinnacle of the sport and everything else a mere distraction (though Prost has had a successful second career as an ice-racer, of all things). The truth is, the great majority of drivers aren't much interested in chasing Graham Hill's triple crown, or any similar such achievement. And even if they were, increasing specialisation and the nature of driver contracts makes doing so very difficult.

In the end, the motor-racing grand slam is a more esoteric task - the kind of personal goal which some great drivers feel they must set themselves, but not the gold standard measure of success that it is in some other sports. After all, did not Mario Andretti have his own quadruple crown of sorts? He may never have won Le Mans, but he did have the Indy 500, the Indycar and F1 championships and the Daytona 500, the world's premier stock car race, to his name. And if its big races, rather than world championships, that count, maybe Juan Pablo Montoya might like to try to add that to his Monaco Grand Prix and Indy 500 victories. After all, neither Andretti nor Villeneuve ever won round the streets of Monte Carlo.

I've always liked the concept of the all-rounder, and I wish Villeneuve the best of luck in his efforts at Le Mans. He might need another year to pull it off, given that Peugeot are going up against the dominant Audi team, who have won 6 of the last 7 24 hour races. But maybe we're thinking too narrowly. Villeneuve won the F1 championship in a Renault powered Williams. Perhaps, if and when he's done with Le Mans and Peugeot, he'd like to have a word about a Monte Carlo rally campaign with Citroen?

US Open Wheel Racing: Time To Bash Some Heads Together

I was looking through some old copies of Autosport the other day, dating back to the early 1990s when reigning F1 world champion Nigel Mansell had defected to the CART series to partner Mario Andretti at Newman Haas. At the time, there were those who seriously wondered whether the CART championship, with its more open competition and its mix of ovals, wonderful road courses like Road America and Laguna Seca and successful street events like Long Beach and Surfers Paradise, might become a serious rival to Formula 1. In fact, if you were living in the US at the time, the question might have been better framed the other way round. The CART IndyCar series was much bigger news than F1 ever was - especially given that in 1993, there was no US Grand Prix and Mario's son Michael was taking one hell of a pounding over at McLaren.

Fast forward to the present and Champ Car drivers like Timo Glock and Antonio Pizzonia have defected not to F1, but to GP2, to further their careers. Leading young IRL star, Mario's grandson, Marco Andretti is talked about as a potential future F1 driver. Pundits reckon though that he too would first have to prove himself in GP2. Champ Car and IRL champions Dan Wheldon and Sebastien Bourdais can't get a drive in F1 at all. And could anyone imagine that Michael Schumacher might have decided to spend this year in the IRL as a prelude to retirement?

The simple fact is that, aside from a few open-wheel purists, nobody is really watching the Champ Car World Series or the Indy Racing League these days, even in the US. And if they ain't popular at home, there's no way these series are going to find a big audience abroad. In America, 'motor racing' is spelt 'NASCAR' to the average man on the street. And indeed, its to NASCAR that washed up F1 stars are now defecting - first Juan Montoya and now, if the rumours are to be believed, Jacques Villeneuve.

And the reason for this dramatic fall? Its always hard to know for sure, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that it hasn't been the promotional brilliance of the France family alone. Instead it has been the confusing and self-defeating split between Indianapolis circuit owner Tony George and the men behind the then CART series which must take the lion's share of the blame.

On the surface, having two major open wheel series rather than one might seem like a good deal for the fans. There are twice the number of races that there would otherwise be, and two championship contests to follow. In practice, though, it has not worked out that way. Neither series is in good health, and arguably, aside from Champ Car in the late 1990s, neither series ever really has been.

Champ Car seems to attract the slightly larger raceday crowds, thanks to their policy of concentrating on street venues within easy reach of large population centres. IRL has, at least arguably, the greater strength in terms of driver quality, with more serious professionals and fewer pay-drivers. But its relative, isn't it? Neither championship has anything like the variety of circuits that the old CART series (or even the early Champ Car series) had, with Champ Car's calendar made up largely of street circuits and IRL's dominated by ovals. It is significant that neither series is able to support races at two of America's finest road circuits, Mid-Ohio and Laguna Seca.

Perhaps the most serious sign of failure, though, is that American race fans I have spoken to tell me that the vast majority of their compatriots, even those who consider themselves motorsport (i.e. NASCAR) enthusiasts, would have little idea who either Sam Hornish Jr or Sebastien Bourdais are. And if Sea-Bass' name rang any bells, it would probably be thanks to his efforts in the IROC series, rather than his three Champ Car titles. If fame and fortune are what either of these men are seeking, then, as AJ Allmendinger has done, they would have to go off and take their chances in stock cars on ovals.

So reunification is what is needed, but is it going to happen? Personally, I doubt that there will be any deal between Tony George and his opposite numbers, Gentilozzi, Kalkhoven et al in the foreseeable future. Both series have contracts to fulfil with chassis manufacturers, circuit promoters and so on, and it is not clear how these could easily be resolved to create a single series. The current IRL series is fundamentally built around ovals, and the new Panoz Champ Cars are not really oval machines. Any series would have to adopt either the Dallara or Panoz chassis, and either the Honda atmo engine or the Cosworth turbo. I can't say which of the two would be quicker were they allowed to race against each other, but I very much doubt that any meaningful equivalency formula could be instituted to allow the two types of car to race against each other in a single unified series.

This is a shame, because I can't help feeling that there is one really good series lurking in there. Imagine Dan Wheldon, Sam Hornish Jr, Helio Castroneves, Tony Kanaan, Dario Franchitti, Marco Andretti and Scott Dixon up against Sebastien Bourdais, Justin Wilson, the recently departed AJ Allmendinger (who could surely have been persuaded to stay in a unified series) and Bruno Junquiera. This would be an awful lot more like a serious major open wheel series grid, with no room for timewasters and journeymen like Nicky Pastorelli, Tonis Kasemets, Roger Yasukawa, Jeff Bucknum et al.

A series boasting Forsythe, Newman-Haas, Andretti-Green, Penske and Chip-Ganassi might not instantly rival Formula 1, but should at least stop shedding drivers to GP2 and would be easier to see as some kind of serious career move, rather than being the next best thing if you can't secure a drive at Super-Aguri or Toro Rosso. Especially if they were racing at the best of the tracks the two series have to offer: street circuits like Long Beach and St Petersburg, ovals like Indianapolis and the Milwaukee Mile, the massively successful airport race at Edmonton and road courses like Watkins Glen, St Jovite and Road America.

Don't get me wrong, it won't surpass the popularity of NASCAR overnight. Too much damage has been done by the squabbling over the last decade or so. There is a serious dearth of a US single seater racing talent as a result, and a series dominated by foreigners, hell, Frenchmen at that, is going to be a difficult sell to the US public. Nonetheless, a single premier open wheel series would have a credibility that neither IRL nor Champ Car do at present. As I said earlier, I really doubt its going to happen. I fear that the most likely outcome is that the 'winner' will be the last series left standing, though in their currently weakened states, I doubt that it will be much of a winner at all. But come on Tony, Kevin and Paul, go and prove me wrong for once...