04/10/2007
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
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My last piece, on Stepneygate, brought me an unprecedented mailbox. If you have not had a response, please try again, AOL has been acting oddly. I now know 15 people in New Delhi and six in Bangalore. We're thinking about a cricket match.
The vast majority of the mail was in support, but three people thought I was being hard on Italians. For the record, I love the country so much that I am trying to learn the language with the intention of moving there. Hey, I become Michele Lorenzo and wave my arms around.
One thing I love about the country is the inspired chaos. Take the National Pasta Museum in Rome. What do you think you might see there? Wrong! It can happen only in Italy. You have a prime site, beautiful design, national treasure, and not one item of pasta. There are photographs, and machines once used for making spaghetti, and that's it.
At one of Rome's airports is a gentleman's comfort zone. Try to work this out: there were four urinals, eight stalls and sixteen washbasins.
Italian drivers belie the myth, they are courteous apart from a sub-group who drive Audi Estates. There may be a speed limit on Italian roads but it appears that nobody has found it. A couple of years ago, I took a break on the autostrada from Rome to Milan. As usual, it was a joy, the panini was fresh and tasty, the setting was immaculate and the service was friendly.
On the site was a shop selling things for your garden. For 540 euros I could have bought a full-size suit of armour. At such stops I have made the odd impulse purchase, a cut-price book, but a suit of armour? 'There's no room in the car. We will have to leave Momma behind. Next year, Momma, it's a promise.'
The armour was not the main challenge. There were the full-size statues of ladies wearing not enough to keep warm. Try getting one of those into a Fiat Seicento.
You might do the arrangements with a garden centre, but this was a stop on an autostrada in the middle of nowhere.
Italy does not have much of a motor racing industry. There was a time when it spawned a plethora of small constructors: Stanguellini, Nardi, Moretti, Ermini, de Sanctis, Taraschi, Osca... the list was a long one. One reason was that there was a tradition of small outfits skilled in the casting of metal. Tiny companies built their own engines, sometimes just the odd one or two.
Those constructors have long since disappeared and Italian motor sport means Fiat. There used to be a joke that in France, the State owned the biggest car company, while in Italy... As well as Ferrari and Maserati, Fiat owns Moretti, Alfa Romeo, and Lancia and is reviving Abarth as a distinct line of modified Fiat saloons.
In Britain and America there are any number of motor racing companies. Through its various series, NASCAR alone has built a massive industry. The British industry not only embraces most F1 teams (including half of Scuderia Toro Rosso), but it supplies CART and IRL. Apart from the Fiat companies the only Italian racing car constructor of note is Dallara.
In countries with large motor racing industries, personnel move and outfits are constantly refreshed. The industry is cosmopolitan because if you are, say, Iranian and want to be a motor racing engineer, you move to England. Go around English teams and you find a mini-United Nations.
The industry is not what it was once. The FIA, under Max Mosley, has ruined opportunity. You can no longer be a kid making a special for your own use and expect to rise, but that is what Adrian Reynard did. Rory Byrne arrived from South Africa and designed Formula Ford cars for Royale.
A London cabbie called Ronnie Grant was told by his doctor that he was working too hard and needed a hobby. He took up motor racing as relaxation. Ronnie bought a Lola FF2000 car and paid a couple of junior guys at the works to prepare it for him. They were John Barnard and Patrick Head.
There was once cut and thrust among junior marques. Mosley ended that in the interests of a rational approach. He missed the point that rationality should play no part in motor racing.
I want to see people like Adrian Reynard scrimp and save to build a special and become a multi-millionaire. That is what Max hoped for when he became a founder-member of March Engineering.
By the way, Max, among my readers there is a chap called Chris Amon. I wonder if you have any plans to pay what March Engineering still owes him from 1970.
Then there is what March Engineering owes the estate of the late Frank Costin for his work on the March 711.
You sold Frank Williams a 'new' March 761 and it turned out to be rather less than new. It got dented and the orange paint showed, it was a 1975 tub, formerly used by Vittorio Brambilla, the 'Monza Gorilla'.
None of this is hearsay, Max, I wrote the book and you cooperated. You read every word before publication. You asked me to delete one word from a reproduction of a document you had written while setting up March Engineering. The word was 'Liechtenstein', the next two words were 'bank accounts'.
My, how far have you progressed from being a used car salesman who would stand no more than two terms as President of the FIA. Your rationalisation has wrecked the sub-structure of the sport. There is no opportunity similar to the one Adrian Reynard had and there is nowhere for a new Rory Byrne to learn his trade.
Ferrari has done best when it has brought in non-Italians to work with the core personnel which is overwhelmingly Italian.
A parallel instance was Honda working with English teams. To get a different perspective, Mr. Honda deliberately broke with Japanese tradition which tended to be rigid. For a start, he set up his son in a different business, Mugen. That sent the message to every bright young engineer that the boss's son would not be blocking the way to the top. Indeed, his two successors as President of Honda, Mr Tadashi Kume and Mr Nobuhiko Kawamoto, had both been mechanics with the Brabham Formula Two team, 1965/6.
They designed the 1966 F2 engine, but Mr Kawamoto was then sent overseas as a mechanic. It seems to have done him no harm.
When John Barnard joined Ferrari in 1986, he banned wine with lunch at Maranello. It was a sensible thing to do, but I don't think that an Italian manager could have done it without causing strife. Italian trade unions are powerful and the country has a fairly large Communist Party.
Catholic Italy and Protestant England have long enjoyed an agreeable relationship - look where Shakespeare set many of his plays. Look where Verdi drew inspiration for some of his greatest operas. We should not get on, but we do. Perhaps it is because each admires the other for something it lacks. Two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fit because the lump in one matches the gap in the other.
John Surtees was recruited by Ferrari not only because he was a great driver, but because he was also a fine engineer. With Surtees went Mike Parkes, another driver/engineer. Surtees and Parkes brought new thinking to Ferrari and Surtees made a huge technical contribution to his 1964 World Championship.
If you are running an American IRL team, you do not have to stray far from Indianapolis to change jobs. If you are an engineer with Renault, you do not have to move house if you go for a job with Williams, Red Bull, Honda or Super Aguri. The wife can continue her career and the kids are not up-rooted.
The only way that Ferrari can refresh its personnel is by recruiting abroad and English is the language of motor racing. If Ferrari remains resolutely Italian, the gene pool stagnates because, apart from Dallara and half of STR, just about everything else is Fiat. Large companies develop cultures which can stifle imagination.
We see this at Toyota Motorsport. There is a core of motor racing people, but many members of the senior management have F1 as part of their career structure. After a spell at Cologne, they could be headed to the States and trucks. That's fine if you are running a business like Toyota, which does just about everything right with road vehicles, but not if you want to win races.
Some years ago, Tony Southgate was employed to design a sports-racer for Toyota. He told me, "Back home, I am one of the old guys. In Japan they revere age. I'd say. 'We should have an engine.' Everyone else would nod, 'Southgate-San mentions engine, we must have engine.' 'And wheels'. 'Southgate-San brings up issue of wheels.'"
The tradition of small Italian constructors was given a death-blow in 1960 when the Brits joined Formula Junior. Lotus, Lola, Cooper, Elva and the rest had developed cars for smooth circuits, in the UK and the States. Many Italian races were held on road circuits with cobblestones, manhole covers and so on. Chassis were designed for strength, not subtlety.
Lotus's formula was rigid frame, soft suspension, and that worked on street circuits. Lotus also had the new Ford 105E engine, tuned by Cosworth. Most Italian makers were tied to Fiat lumps. The Italian motor racing industry was dead within a year. as was the French industry.
The Maserati T80/81 'birdcage' was one of the best front-engined of all sports-racers. Its designer, Guilio Alfieri, wanted to use a monocoque, but there was nobody in Italy who made one. The 'birdcage' spaceframe, which used lots of small-diameter tubes, was the closest that Alfieri could get to a monocoque.
When Ferrari wanted a pure monocoque, it turned to John Thompson in Northamptonshire. The monocoque had to be delivered, so John put his family in the car for a tour of Europe. Ferrari's first monocoque arrived at Maranello strapped to John Thompson's roof-rack.
When McLaren wanted a carbonfibre monocoque for the MP4/1, it turned to the Hercules Corporation in America. When it was delivered, it was the largest single item ever made of carbonfibre. Luca di Montezolo has said that he wants an 'all-Italian' team and I think that this is madness.
It is not that Italy does not produce fine engineers, it has done so for years, but it faces a problem with recruitment.
When the field assembled at Fuji, twenty cars complied with the directive to start on full-wet tyres, two did not. Half a world away, I knew about the directive because James Allen was telling me. Ferrari claims not to have known about the directive, something which certainly lost Kimi second place and possibly a win.
I cannot imagine that the cars would have lined up on intermediates had Ross Brawn and Nigel Stepney been on hand, unless they had a cunning plan. They made mistakes, but they did not do incompetence.
If one wants to take a darker view, and there is no firm evidence either way, there is an alternative to incompetence.
Ferrari may have deliberately ignored the directive and hoped that a plea of ignorance would suffice. Intermediates would have worked at the pace of a safety car and might have given an advantage when, if, the safety car peeled off.
Hey, it's Ferrari. it has its own rule book.
One thing is clear. the Ferraris ate full-wet tyres which means that the wet weather set-up was rubbish. I cannot recall something like this happening when Ross Brawn was at the helm.
Kimi drove his heart out. I suspect that his Ferrari was among the worst to drive. It is very difficult to wreck wet tyres in the conditions that he was driving in. Someone may be able to prompt me, but I cannot recall wet tyres giving up in a monsoon.
Fuji issued challenges. Most teams answered those challenges as did most drivers. Everyone who brought his car home is a hero in my book.
The one team which screwed its drivers was Ferrari and it began on the grid with the wrong tyres. Spyker and Super Aguri had the correct rubber, Ferrari did not. Ferrari did not have the right tyres, but it had excuses.
Speaking only for myself, I've had it with Ferrari excuses. I am tired of the bullshit that surrounds Ferrari. When John Barnard joined the team, he received a Ferrari Mondiale as his company car. An Italian journalist was so unwise as to ask him, directly, what he thought of it.
A direct question was asked so John gave a direct answer. Much diplomacy was involved in the aftermath. The engineering on Ferrari road cars was risible. It was common knowledge to we who spoke to engineers. It was also known to many journalists who conducted road tests but, thanks to the mystique, due largely to Pininfarina, nobody spoke out.
Raikkonen could have got a win and Massa could have been on the podium as well, but Ferrari sent them out on incorrect tyres and did not have the proper settings for the conditions.
I think that we are about to see Ferrari descend into its usual state of chaos. That is one reason why I want to live in Italy. At my time of life, chaos becomes interesting.
An American based in Rome gave me good advice about crossing the street. It was, 'never hesitate because it will confuse.' In most of Italy, traffic lights are decoration, as on a Christmas tree. I put the advice to the test, I did not break step. Motorcycles whizzed by me, inches away, but I had walked with confidence. That is Italy.
If Luca di Montezemolo has his way, Ferrari must fail. The gene pool has to be regenerated and the regeneration cannot rely on Fiat.
Postscript. The best analysis on Stepneygate I have seen is in the current issue of 'Motor Sport', now, thankfully, liberated from Haymarket Publishing. Nigel Roebuck is at his mighty best and there are substantial comments from the like of Dan, Mario and Sir Jackie. The FIA Press Release is printed in full.
Mario mentions hauling a rival designer from his Lotus 79, but is too polite to say who. I know who it was and he is mentioned above. Here is a clue, he was not John Barnard.
Mike Lawrence
mike@pitpass.com
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