> From Autosport....
"The barge boards at the centre of the dispute were first run at last
month's European GP, and have been kept covered at every opportunity.
Before Sunday's race, Eddie Irvine said that they had significantly
improved performance....[insert previous quotation here]"
I'm more curious than ever, now: while I've found the Irvine quote that
begins "An all Ferrari front row is not bad for tomorrow. The car is
pretty much the same as before the Nurburgring..." several times
(including Autosport), I still haven't found the all-important
contextual prolegomenon that you've quoted above. If you have the
Autosport issue (paper mag) or E-zine quote at hand, please let me know
the date of (better yet, a hypertext link to) the quote. I've been
through every online archived story from the Sepang weekend at
Autosport's site, and I just can't find it. I'd truly appreciate help in
solving this mystery, moot point though it may seem to some...I'm
keeping a chronicle of this season, and I hate to miss a direct quote as
important as this.
Speaking of moot points, did anyone seriously expect the FIA to rule
otherwise? The F1 Drivers' and Manufacturers' championships are a
business, not a sport -- though I still believe that on the track and in
the pits, it's very much a sport for the drivers, engineers, and
mechanics. On the track, the racing is real; it's the Championships that
are manufactured and manipulated. Stirling Moss had a very interesting
thing to say about the subject of his one-point miss of the 1958
Championship in his book with Ken Purdy: [my rough paraphrase] "If I was
leading the race that would win me the championship today -- far in the
lead, car going like a bomb, tires and oil to burn -- do you know what
I'd do? On the last turn of the last lap, I'd pull over, park the car
under a tree, pull of my helmet, and watch the end of the race. Why?
What would winning one championship mean? Mike Hawthorn won a World
Championship; did that make Mike a better driver than I am? I liked
Mike, he was a wonderful chap, and when he was "on" he was very good.
But Mike had a lot of "off" days, and when he was off, well...if Mike
was a couple laps behind, he just gave it up. If I won five
Championships, would that make me as good a driver as Fangio? Not on
your life: I always felt I was better in sports cars than Fangio; he
just didn't like them -- but in a GP car, he was the best, in my day. If
I won the Championship TEN times it wouldn't have made me as GOOD a
driver as Fangio."
The last decade or so of F1 has seemed to me to have artificially
blurred the drivers' side of the racing equation, Enzo Ferrari's 'ratio
of car to driver." In Moss' era, and to a lesser extent on into the '60s
and '70s, the good drivers picked the cars, not the other way around.
Moss won GP races in Vanwalls, Maseratis, Mercedes, and Loti. Fangio in
Ferraris, Mercedes, and Maseratis. Except for the Italian drivers, for
whom driving for Ferrari was the Holy Grail, the good drivers who could
afford to pick and choose picked the best, whatever they were; the rest
got what was left over. When teams started getting the commercial
wherewithal to fund an arms race, part of that arms race was buying the
best drivers -- the relationship between manufacturers and drivers had
changed, quietly but fundamentally. It changed even further in the
Cosworth kitcar -- or, in Ferrari's pungent phrase, "garagiste" -- era,
when there was less and less "manufacturer" identity, that role
gravitating more toward the commercial entities -- tobacco companies and
the like -- that provided the money. As has been cited many times, when
Lotus gave up its name to become "John Player's Specials," a fundamental
cog in the cosmos of F1 racing moved quite significantly. It has never
moved back, though with the trend toward nationalism and "manufacturer"
identity seen in the Stewart-Ford/Jaguar and "More Mercedes, Less
McLaren" prospects for 2000, even THAT pendulum may be on a sort of backswing.
So that leaves the drivers: the hired guns, loyal to none. Their world
is, of necessity, different from that of the manufacturers': they
maneuver for the best salaries, yes. They play the near-NASCAR game of
"well, my Marlboro/Nokia/Tampax/Grecian Formula/Arrows was running
pretty well...", yes. But just like In NASCAR, or anywhere where men and
women have endured the many hardships required to get to the top of any
motorports series, in the end they race. If you took Michael and Mika
and Eddie and DC and the entire F1 field of drivers and dropped them
into NASCAR sedans, likewise took Dale and Dale and Jeff and Bobby and
the entire field of Winston Cup and dropped them into F1 cars, they
would race...it might not be pretty, but every one of them would give it
all they had within themselves to give. That's why we still watch --
after all the Byzantine politics, commercial maneuvering, internecine
power plays, and just plain bullshit, these people race. Drop Moss in
the middle of them, and he'd race, too -- anyone who caught this year's
Monterey Historics would have to -- however bitterly -- agree to that.
These men and women who strap themselves in and have a go, a *real* go,
are special: they represent us; the level of commitment, skill, and
dedication that we all, as humans, strive for, but rarely have the
chance to demonstrate in such a simple, direct, and unequivocal way.
Unlike most sports, the drivers perform alone, as we, in our deepest
hearts, perform alone. They skirt the edge of danger which we --
civilized, coddled, and compartmentalized -- rarely, if ever, confront.
That we live vicariously through them is trite, yet completely true.
