How to go Motor Racing

Peter Sauber's old boys are doing rather well aren't they. There's little doubt that, after the first 3 races, Ferrari and Mclaren are some way out in front of the field, but contrary to what might have been expected, it is BMW which is leading the chasing pack. Renault, Williams, Toyota, Honda and Red Bull would certainly be happy to swap their position with that of the Swiss/German team.

I have to confess that when BMW took over the Sauber team, I didn't think any good would ever come of it. I wasn't alone on this, either - Mike Lawrence confidently predicted that they would never win a race - save in the kind of circumstances which led to Giancarlo Fisichella's shock win for Jordan at Interlagos in 2003. The doubters had good reason to be pessimistic. After all, Mario Thiessen had spent six years trying and failing to win the world championship with Williams - a real racer's team which had won multiple titles with Renault, Honda and Cosworth. One got the impression that both parties were more interested in apportioning blame for failure than in seeking success. Certainly, there appeared to be a degree of resentment from Frank's men at what they saw as inappropriate meddling on the chassis side of things. The odds seemed against Thiessen achieving anything with the solid and respectable, but hardly front-running Sauber team. It looked for all the world that BMW's board had sanctioned a colossal ego-trip on the part of their motor-racing chief.

And yet it hasn't worked out that way. Maybe Thiessen was simply capable of much more when given complete control. Maybe Frank Williams and Patrick Head are simply out of touch these days. Maybe the shared Germanic culture of Sauber and BMW has smoothed working relations, but BMW have emerged as the front running full manufacturer team in just their second season of F1.

This begs an interesting question. If, for example, Volkswagen's board was looking at putting together an F1 programme, what lessons are there to be learned about how to go about it. More importantly, perhaps, what traps should definitely be avoided. Here are 6 useful pointers:

Resist the temptation to start from scratch

Formula 1 is a seriously complicated business these days. The balance of power between the teams may shift from one year to the next, but all are relying on a vast bank of knowledge and past experience. Toyota have spent perhaps more than any other team in establishing their Formula 1 team over the past five years, and yet still it has not paid off. BMW and Renault, on the other hand, have done well out of buying up a midfield team and injecting fresh capital. Chassis manufacture, in particular, remains something of a black art even now, and its better to buy in the experience of an existing privateer team. Going further back, Renault did everything in house first time around, and while they came close to winning the title in 1983, there is little doubt that they squandered a huge early advantage with their turbo engines because they didn't know enough about chassis building. Michiel Mol, and perhaps even Dietrich Mateschitz or Frank Williams could probably be persuaded to sell at the right price.

Leave the job to the racing people

I may not be Mario Theissen's greatest fan, but he has been around motor racing for a long time and he understands how the business works. Likewise, Renault have taken a very hands-off approach to the running of their race team. They have left the Enstone team in the guiding hands of Flavio Briatore, a man who may not understand what makes a car fast, but certainly knows how to manage racing people. By contrast, Toyota have always more directly involved their company's senior management, and recently, it appears Honda have begun to head down the same track. The task of building two fast racing cars is very different from that of building hundreds of thousands of reliable cars that people want to buy. Don't assume the skills are interchangeable.

Don't hire and fire

Surely nobody made a bigger mess of running their works Formula 1 team than Ford/Jaguar did. In the five years they were in F1, they got through countless team principals and managers - Neil Ressler, Niki Lauda, Bobby Rahal, Tony Purnell and Dave Pitchforth. Nobody was in the job long enough, or was given enough freedom, to turn things around. It's worth remembering, too, that top F1 people tend to come with massive egos and an unshakeable belief that they are right and senior management are wrong. Let them think that. When it comes to F1, they're probably right. Toyota and Honda are widely rumoured to have sacked Geoff Willis and Mike Gascoygne because they showed insufficient respect for company bigwigs, and look where that got them. Renault and BMW, on the other hand, have tended to be able to keep hold of their technical people.

Don't think an F1 team is just another corporate department

I've pointed out before in a piece about Toyota that running an F1 team as if it is a department in a large corporation is unlikely to work out. Recent anonymous articles from a Honda insider at Pitpass indicate that the same problem is infecting them now. I think it was Jackie Stewart who said that an F1 team should have a "corner shop" rather than a "big store" mentality. This means a degree of flexibility and a distrust of strict hierarchies that is uncommon in any large commercial organisation. Renault, in particular, seem to have done a very good job of maintaining this feel to their race team, and the result is that the best people want to work for them, even though they are not thought to offer the same kind of financial incentives as, say, Toyota or Mclaren.

Making sure that the parent company doesnt interfere with the operational decisions of the team for non-racing reasons is equally important. When Jaguar came into F1, they had a much greater budget than in their later years but it was squandered on things like ensuring that the computer systems were in line with Ford company procurement policy. Toyota's switch to Bridgestone tyres in 2006, long after the team had begun designing their 06 car around Michelin rubber was rumoured to be similarly motivated by corporate, rather than racing reasons (Toyota road cars come with Bridgestone, rather than Michelin tyres, apparently). The long and the short of it is that F1 is too cut-throat a business to allow for these kind of compromises.

Sort out the drivers

Getting the right drivers is a notoriously tricky business. As Patrick Head once said, the problem is that its always a bit of a shot in the dark. There are, however, some obvious mistakes to avoid. Don't pay over the odds for a driver who is clearly not from the very top drawer. There is really very little reason to pay more than, say £2m to any driver who is not Raikkonen, Alonso or (it would now seem) Hamilton. In particular, there really is no earthly explanation for why Toyota have made Ralf Schumacher the second highest paid driver in the F1 paddock. He's not necessarily a bad choice of driver for Toyota. He's competent and fast, if not quite from the very top drawer, and he arguably makes more sense than an unproven youngster, but there is no way he is worth what he is paid. Jaguar Racing, who made pretty much every mistake in the book, made an arguably even greater error in paying a vast fortune to Eddie Irvine to tool around in a series of awful Jaguars for 3 years.

Ask whether its really worth it...

I don't have the definitive answer to the question of whether "win on Sunday, sell on Monday" really holds true. I think that various marques have enhanced their image by their involvement in F1. This may have helped them to sell cars. It may not have done. It is entirely possible that advertising/branding itself is a great swindle perpetrated on the industrial classes by cunning arts and media studies graduates. That's for another time. What I do know is that Mercedes stick to building engines, and leave the racing car manufacturing to Mclaren. It saves them an awful lot of work, and right now, I'm not sure they're getting any less positive publicity than they would if the car was simply a 'Mercedes'. In fact, by being directly associated with a famous racing name like Mclaren, they might even benefit more. Did winning the world title as 'Renault' really do Renault any more for their image than winning it as the engine supplier to Williams or Benetton? Perhaps Toyota should sell the racing team and jump into bed with Williams...

The Write Stuff

I've spent the last 8 months on this site writing about motorsport of one form or another - and by and large, I have enjoyed the challenge. I have taken as my brief the idea of producing a column which, allowing for the fact that this is only a hobby and I can't attend the races and don't know any of the drivers or team bosses personally, is modelled loosely on Nigel Roebuck's Fifth Column in terms of subject matter, albeit with less of an F1 bent.

Up to now, though, I haven't written anything on the business of writing about motorsport itself. I thought that this was an interesting subject though. After all, most of us can attend only a few races a year, and many of the major series aren't televised, so it is only through the written word that we get to find out what is going on. I am aware that, in what I say below, there is the distinct danger of wandering into a pot/kettle colour trap. My only defence is that I make no claim to be anything more than an amateur.

Time was when, unless you had a great big white satellite dish on the side of your home, the only way you could find out about the weekend's motor racing was through the specialist press. In practice, in the UK, that meant Autosport. Sure, there was Motoring News, but, then as now, it felt a little cheaply produced, and its principal focus was on rallying, rather than circuit racing. There were also a couple of specialist monthly magazines, but by the time these came to print, what they were reporting was decidedly yesterday's news. Grand Prix races, though not qualifying sessions, were televised, and you might find mention of Le Mans or the Indy 500 in the results columns of the quality newspapers, but for the rest, you had to wait until Thursday morning.

To my mind, Autosport usually did a very good job in those days (I'm talking here of the mid to late 1980s). All the major international and national races were covered in some detail and the coverage of what were then the 3 major international championships below F1 was superb in terms of botrh quality and depth. Keith Oswin (what became of him?) handled the bobble hat and bacon butty brigade of world rallying, while Tony Dodgins brought a real enthusiast's eye to the young turks of the F3000 championship and Adam Cooper specialised in the then rather fascinating World Sportscar Championship.

The Grand Prix coverage, though, was particularly noteworthy. In those days, the job of reporting on races was split between Joe Saward and Nigel Roebuck. Saward brought a dryly humorous and sometimes travelogue-ish feel to qualifying reports (I've subsequently wondered whether he stole his style from Clive James, whose report on the 1984 Portuguese Grand Prix I was recently pointed to.) Nigel Roebuck played more of a straight bat with the race reports, but made great use of the fact that he appeared to know many of the drivers personally, and counted several as friends. For me, at least, this remains the golden age of Autosport's Grand Prix coverage. Those who can remember further back than I speak in hushed tones of Pete Lyons, although personally, what little I have read from him seems a little self-conscious and overdone - but each to their own.

I can hardly be alone though, among more dyed-in-the-wool motorsport fans in lamenting what has become of Autosport over the last decade and a half. It still has reasonably wide coverage of most international racing series in between its pages, but you'd never know it from the cover. The front cover these days almost always follows a tabloid-F1 driven news agenda, rather than focusing on the major race of the weekend, whatever that may have been. If this was all that was wrong with Autosport, I could live with it, but sadly its not. Across the board, wordcounts are down, and more space is given over to pictures. There has been a move away from straight narrative towards messy little "fact boxes" which more often than not get in the way of telling the story. The news pages contain very little news, especially when it comes to F1 - where they would more accurately be described as "statements of the bleeding obvious".

A couple of years ago, I met up with an old schoolfriend for a pint and a reminisce. He works in the rag trade, and has been involved in motorsports journalism, even at one time sharing office space with the guys from Autosport (whom he described as "frighteningly obsessive race nuts" - what did he expect?). He did point out though, that these were changes that were happening across the board in the publishing industry - almost everywhere you look, the trend is towards lower wordcounts, less detail, a greater eye for the casual reader - and the belief that magazines are somehow primarily "lifestyle accessories".

He's probably right. For example, around 10 or 12 years ago, I used to be a regular reader of a UK music paper called the NME. Even then, it had its moments of rather tiresomely puerile 'humour' and tabloid silliness. Come to that, it also had a rather unpleasant habit of hyping the mental health problems of rock musicians, but that's another article for another blog entirely..... More often than not, though, the album reviews were quite thoughtful, well-written pieces which told you something useful about the release in question. No more. I picked up a copy out of sheer boredom while stuck in a train station in London a few months back. The magazine now has the feel of one of those horrible, and I believe now defunct teen pop rags. Album reviews, of course, were cut back to at most 1/3 of their previous length - not enough space for even the most gifted of writers to say anything worthwhile.

And yet my journalist friend insists that this is what sells copies - this, apparently, is what the great unwashed actually want. He assured me that any attempt to, for example, revert Autosport to its more purist 1980s format would be commercially disastrous - while hinting at the same time that the majority of the staff writers would dearly love to do just that. To be fair, those working in the particular field of motorsports writing have a couple of additional problems to contend with. The first is the growth of "press officers". With F1, in particular, becoming ever more the play-thing of large corporations, the last thing the teams want is drivers who might actually speak their minds. So where once it might have been possible for friendships to develop between drivers and writers, now it is all but impossible for them to so much as speak to them without their 'minders' present. A second problem is, simply, the internet. These days, there's no need to wait for the copy of Autosport or (if you like that sort of thing) Motorsport News to drop through your door to find out what happened at the race circuits over the weekend. You can simply go online on Sunday evening - if of course you haven't watched it all on digital or satellite.

Having read the diatribe above, you might be surprised to learn that I still read Autosport. From a pragmatic point of view, its still a reasonable summary of what has been happening in the world of motorsport each week, and i'm just old enough to want such information on good old fashioned tangible paper. While I'm rather of the impression that Nigel Roebuck has lost interest in the sport and that his once unmissable Fifth Column has suffered for it, he's still often worth a read all the same.

More importantly, though, I think his replacement as lead Grand Prix reporter, Mark Hughes is actually a better writer. Within the tight confines of the modern Autosport style, Hughes has written some of the most inventive and captivating pieces of sports reportage I've ever read. Safe in the knowledge that if the reader wants a blow by blow account of what happened to every driver in the race, then he or she can simply look up the team's press releases on the internet, he opts to tell the race as a story. Occasionally he will tell it through the prism of a single driver. More often than not it is the story of the battle between the main players that weekend and why the race turned out as it did.
Sometimes, it doesn't quite hang together properly (one wonders if he is often rather ruthlessly subedited for length) but more often than not it does. Not for nothing has he been called the "Ernest Hemmingway of Grand Prix writing". His understanding of what is involved in actually driving an F1 car, in particular is considerably greater than that of most of his fellow scribes. Perhaps not surprising, given that he was a pretty decent club racer himself in his day, and his brother, Warren, rather better than that. While I make no bones about the fact that I preferred the old "start with Friday practice and tell the story going forward" approach taken by the magazine 20 years back, I do have a lot of respect for Hughes, if not for the people who decide the overall tone of Autosport these days.

Where else can one find worthwhile writing about motorsport these days? Thankfully, the internet, while it may be doing its best to destroy the printed motorsport press, does contain some pretty good motorsport writing. Joe Saward continues to write his offbeat Globetrotter column over at grandprix.com. His 'The Mole' columns, under which he writes his more speculative pieces on the goings on behind the scenes in F1 have rather lost their novelty (These days, frankly, I'm sick of reading about the bloody Penelopes) but his Grand Prix reports usually provide a good precis of the weekend's action for those who find Mark Hughes' approach a little flowery.

These days, to my mind, the best writer on the murky underbelly of Formula 1 is the rather eccentric Shakespeare scholar and playwright, Dr Mike Lawrence. His well written, forthright columns are the best thing about Chris Balfe's Pitpass site. As a long time follower of the sport, he understands the driving side as well as the 'political' side. Check out, in particular, Natural Winners. For what it's worth, I'd also strongly recommend his recent book, Colin Chapman: Wayward Genius as one of the best motor racing history books I've ever read.

Anyone frustrated by the lack of detailed coverage of the excellent GP2 series in the mainstream press would be well advised to look at David Cameron's (that's the writer, not the globulous fraud who would be Prime Minister) GP2 blog, with its detailed race weekend reports. They give a real feel for what it was actually like to be there and are far better than anything that appears in Autosport on the series.

Official sites aren't usually worth the electrons they are written on, but the Champ Car World Series site is an honourable exception. In particular, Robin Miller's 'Straight From The Gearbox' column is a must-read, while Gordon Kirby's Inside Track is often also worth a look too. Sadly, the site is a nightmare to navigate, but you can find them here.

Staying with Champ Cars, I'm usually of the opinion that driver-penned columns can safely be given a miss. For one thing, they are most probably written by the driver's Press Officer, and for another, they are usually just PR-puff pieces, calculated to say as little as possible and certainly nothing that hasn't been said elsewhere. PKV Driver Katherine Legge's First Legge columns for Crash.net are worth a look though, with a degree of honesty and of detail which is most unusual for driver columns. Her writing gives rather more of an insight into what is involved in top-flight single seater racing than any driver column I have seen before. It also feels as if Legge herself actually wrote it. Either that or she has a particularly talented press officer.

Whatever Joe Saward might claim, there are also some fairly worthwhile amateur efforts on the web (though, to be fair, these don't tend to specialise in news-gathering). I must single out in particular Dennis David's excellent piece on Alain Prost, Appreciating The Professor. Some excellent, usually historically themed driver and team profiles, generally much better than anything to be found in Motorsport, can be found at Leif Snellman's 8W (who?, what?, where?, when?, why on the world wide web) site - with contributions from a number of journalists and from readers. A particular favourite of mine is Snellman's Talent Overplayed .
This being a blog, I'd also like to draw attention to the efforts of my fellow motorsports bloggers. For instance, there's Rhm's admirable attempts to understand F1 technology from the outside, and to report it in layman's terms over at The Racing Blog. Checkpoint10 have been providing intelligent commentary on motor racing, with a focus on F1 and Champ Cars, for some time now. I particularly liked their piece on the disappearance of Montoya and Villeneuve from the grid this summer. Probably the most comprehensive of the blogs is Roy Madden's large and remarkably successful team-authored Linksheaven F1 Blog. Those looking for images, rather than words, could do worse than to check out Flickr's Racing Images Pool, with over 7,000 photos from around the world (I'm one of about 750 contributors). Another site I stumbled on quite by accident the other day, though strictly speaking a personal blog rather than a racing blog, is smtfhw's weblog - which contains an vast archive of her F3 reports over the years (if you have the patience to find them) and a rather moving meditation on death in motorsport. There are plenty more besides - many of them linked via the sidebar on the right, if you want to explore further.

So if the article started off rather downbeat about the current state of motorsports journalism, I hope it hasn't ended that way. At the end of all this, I'm forced to conclude that, while the printed specialist press may not be in the best of states, and this probably reflects changes in the media more generally, there is in fact as much good motorsports writing out there as ever. Its just takes a little more effort to find it these days.