Champion Versus. Champion

The news that reigning World Champion Jenson Button will be joining 2008 World Champion Lewis Hamilton at Mclaren to form an all-British superteam is one of many interesting prospects we can anticipate this season, a year which leaves us with very many intriguing unanswered questions. It's been more than 20 years since a team last fielded two champions alongside each other. That team was Mclaren, when it ran Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost together for a second year in 1989, after the Brazilian had wrapped up his first title.

Perhaps it was the sheer fractiousness of relations between the two champions that year which has subsequently dissuaded any other team from following suit. Certainly, Martin Whitmarsh will be hoping that history does not repeat itself for the team in 2010. It's tempting to draw parallels. I've always seen a hint of Senna in Hamilton's all-out attacking approach, and I don't think that's just my brain playing tricks on me because Lewis has copied Ayrton's distinctive yellow helmet. And as for Jenson, his smooth, unhurried style, his deceptive pace, well, that's more than a little reminiscent of a certain French driver.... In the end, though, for reasons I'll come to later, I don't think Whitmarsh et al should lose too much sleep. As a pairing, Button and Hamilton just doesn't strike me as having quite the same combustible potential as Senna and Prost did.

When Senna was hired by Mclaren in 1988 to partner their double World Champion, Prost, though, he had yet to win the first of his three titles, and was merely a promising youngster who had won six races for a Lotus team which no longer looked to be quite what it once was. You have to go back another few years to 1986 to find the last time a World Champion was hired to drive alongside another. Again, the team in question was Mclaren, and the driver line-up featured the reigning world champion, Prost, and 1982 title-winner Keke Rosberg, seen by some as the outright fastest driver in the world at the time. As it turned out, the Finn proved to be no match for Prost, who snuck between the warring Williams boys, Piquet and Mansell, to win the 1986 title in a car which was not really the equal of the Williams Honda. Rosberg, by contrast, failed even to win a race, never at home with the understeery MP4/2B.

If one wants to be really pedantic, though, one could point out that, at the time at which Mclaren signed Rosberg to drive for them in 1986, Alain Prost had not yet wrapped up the 1985 title. Yes, it seemed unlikely that Michele Alboreto would succeed in denying Prost the title yet again - after coming so close in 1982, 1983 and 1984, but it was not impossible...

No, the last time that a team made a conscious choice to hire two World Champions was all the way back in 1967, when Colin Chapman signed 1962 World Champion Graham Hill to drive alongside Lotus stalwart and double champion Jim Clark. And it's this pairing, which to me, most closely echoes Mclaren's 2009 line-up. Hamilton in the role of the supremely naturally gifted Clark, an integral part of the Mclaren team as Lotus had been built around Clark. Each seen by many as the great talent of their age. And Button? A solid, quick racing driver, comfortable in the spotlight, but whose ultimate ability, whose fitness to sit alongside the sport's real all-time greats, remains a matter of debate. The parallels with Graham Hill, whom many did not see as being in quite the same league as his Scottish contemporaries, Stewart and Clark, are certainly there. Hill and Clark didn't fall out as Prost and Senna did and perhaps in part it was because it was a more relaxed age, but I can't help thinking that fundamentally, they got on because there was no doubt as to who was quicker. And I don't necessarily see the pairing of Button and Hamilton being any different.

When Clark and Hill teamed up in 1967, it was Clark who decisively got the upper hand, winning four Grands Prix that year, while Hill managed but a solitary second place. That doesn't tell the whole picture, though, for the Lotus 49 was a fast but very fragile machine, and Hill got the lion's share of their considerable mechanical misfortune. Nonetheless, while he went on to win the 1968 title, few saw him as being truly a match for Clark.

So will Button get his comeuppance at Mclaren? Maybe. If I was a betting man, I'd certainly be putting my stake on Hamilton to win that intra-team battle. But history doesn't always repeat itself, doesn't always tell the same story. There is, I think, still a chance that Button could up-end the form book and establish himself as Mclaren's lead driver. One thing that could just tilt the odds his way is the ban on refueling. All bar Rubens Barrichello and Michael Schumacher will have to learn for the first time what an F1 car with 180kgs of fuel onboard is like to drive, and an ability to be smooth, gentle on brakes and tyres, will pay dividends. I for one am convinced that Hamilton is an out and out faster driver than Button, but Button has a mechanical sympathy and a smooth, silky style, reminiscent of Prost or De Angelis. Will Hamilton's improvisational aggression prove too much for the tyres with a full fuel load aboard?

Another factor is that Button is coming in, not as a man who won a title five years back like Hill did, but as the current, reigning World Champion, carrying the Number 1 on his car. Among sportsmen competing at this level, it really shouldn't make a difference, but all the same, the extra self-assurance and confidence that comes from knowing that, right now, you are the World Number 1, maybe, just maybe, it can be enough to unsettle Hamilton, to leave him wondering whether he's still Mclaren's number one man. It was interesting to see veteran F1 journalist Maurice Hamilton remark on his twitter feed that Button looked much more comfortable and at home on the stage at the launch of the MP4-25 than Hamilton, and Joe Saward passed on the comment of one reader of his blog that "the body language of Hamilton and Button was interesting...there's no love lost between those two..." Another leap - it's just possible that might have a negative impact on his driving, unsettle him, lead him to over-drive as he did at Silverstone in qualifying in 2008 when Kovalainen, just for once, appeared to have the upper hand.

It's probably a forlorn hope for Jenson. Button will doubtless remember what happened the following day in the wet race at the Northamptonshire circuit. Hamilton drove perhaps the single greatest race of his career so far to win comfortably. Kovalainen was nowhere. No, the chances are, if Button wants to win back to back titles, even assuming that Mclaren can produce the car to enable him to do it, he's going to have to raise his game to a level well beyond even what was required to net him last year's championship. It's going to be interesting to see whether he can do it, and if not... If the Mclaren battle turns out to be a walkover... Well, there's a Brazilian guy been flying round Jerez teamed up with a double world champion who really doesn't take well to being beaten by his team mates. That Ferrari line-up looks very intriguing, doesn't it...

Waving the Saltire

Trivia Question: Name the small Northern European country whose drivers have racked up five Formula 1 World Titles over the years. If you think the answer is Finland, then you're wrong. Between them, Keke Rosberg, Hakkinen and Raikkonen have racked up four titles, though there remains the possibility that Raikkonen or perhaps even Kovalainen, could add to that total (Rosberg fils races under a German licence and doesn't count).

The correct answer is my adopted home, Scotland, as a recent visit to the National Museum of Scotland, where Jackie Young Stewart's 1973 Tyrrell currently takes pride of place by the entrance, reminded me. Now you can get into an argument as to whether Scotland is really a 'country' in its own right at all (though it's not necessarily a debate I'd recommend starting on the streets of Glasgow or Edinburgh, especially in the evening after the rugby or the football), but there is no doubt that for a decade, between 1963 and 1973, Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart ensured that Scotland was preeminent in the world of Formula 1.



For all that the two men came from the same small part of the world - southern Scotland, they appeared to be very different people. Where Jim is remembered as a quiet, shy man of few words, who let his driving do the talking - a BBC documentary on his career, which aired earlier this year, was titled The Quiet Champion', Jackie was and remains a flamboyant, outspoken personality, never afraid to say what is on his mind. He campaigned hard on driver safety, and an astute businessman, he was perhaps the first to see race driving as a 'career' in the modern sense of the word. What the two men did have in common was that they were the outstanding talents of their age.



Despite its achievements in the F1 world, motorsport has a low profile north of the border. The two big Scottish newspapers, The Scotsman and The Herald, generally provide only the most cursory coverage of the sport (in marked contrast with some London-based broadsheets, perhaps most surprisingly the left-leaning and hardly car-loving Guardian which has, perhaps, the best coverage of the lot). Nor does it much impinge on the popular consciousness. Certainly, in my office, I'm in a minority of one in being more interested in Button vs. Barrichello vs. Vettel than in the Auld Firm rivalry and the latest tribulations of Hearts under its Lithuanian owner. I don't think anyone else regularly tunes in to BBC1 for the F1. And as for any other forms of motorsport....

Part of the explanation, I suspect, lies in the absence of any really successful Scottish racing drivers for the best part of 20 years after Jackie Stewart retired. Yes, Johnny Dumfries won the British F3 championship, but his career never recovered after he found himself partnered with Ayrton Senna at Lotus in 1986, though he did go on to win Le Mans with Jaguar. At a national level, the likes of John Cleland and David Leslie met with considerable success, but for 20 years, no Scottish driver really established himself on the international stage (though I always thought that the late David Leslie had the talent to do so, if not the breaks).

I suspect it doesn't help, either, that there is now only one permanent race track in Scotland - the small though deceptively tricky Knockhill circuit, across the bridge from Edinburgh. At just 1.3m in length, and lacking much in the way of passing places for anything not capable of running door-handle to door-handle it means that, an annual visit by the BTCC circus aside, it rarely plays host to race meets of real significance (though the Scottish Motor Racing Club do put on a good show). Contrast that with the south and midlands of England, with Silverstone, Donington Park, Brands Hatch, Oulton Park and a host of smaller venues and its easy to see why the sport has never caught the public imagination to the same degree up here. At one time, there was the Ingliston circuit on the outskirts of Edinburgh, but that had disappeared by the time I moved here in the mid-1990s and the place is now used only for the Royal Highland Show - rather oddly as it is a good 3 hours train ride from the Highlands...

It can't be down to a lack of successful Scottish racers any longer though. In the early 1990s a trio of youngsters driving for the father-and-son David Leslie Racing operation would go on to make a very significant impact on the sport. First came Allan McNish. Shooting to prominence in the 1990 F3000 championship, his career thereafter spent some time in the doldrums, before he hooked up with Porsche to win Le Mans, and then moved to Toyota to work first with their sportscar programme and eventually with their fledgling F1 effort. This led to a season in F1 in 2002, but things never really worked out there, and he has subsequently established himself as a sportscar racer par excellence, one of the lynchpins of Audi's sportscar programme, winning the ALMS three times and claiming another Le Mans victory in 2008.

Next up came another Dumfries and Galloway man, David Coulthard. In his early years, he didn't strike me as quite as quick as McNish, but he was the one who progressed easily to F1, first with Williams and then with Mclaren. If he never quite had the last couple of tenths that might have enabled him to add to the five titles picked up by Clark and Stewart, but though he may never have entirely convinced people like myself he was truly from the top drawer, he did win 13 Grands Prix which is more than all but a small handful of racing drivers can claim.

A year or two behind him was Scots-Italian Dario Franchitti. Unable to make the break into Formula 1, he instead went off to ply his trade in the US, first in the then-strong Champ Car Series, and later in the Indy Racing League. In 2007, ten years after his debut, he won the IRL series and the Indianapolis 500. There followed an unsuccessful diversion into NASCAR, but this year he came back to the IRL with Chip Ganassi Racing and secured his second title by winning the final race at Homestead last weekend.

And what was the extent to which all this was followed in Scotland? A brief mention on the evening news and that was it. Chances are, nothing short of a Scottish rival to Lewis Hamilton will change that. Though you never know, maybe a street-race round Glasgow would be just the ticket....

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.