The destination of James Allison

Once upon a time, in the world before Bruce Willis, a genteel form of entertainment was to go to the local theatre to watch Agatha Christie whodunnits, which had been translated into theatre from the original novels. It was always fun to try to work out who had murdered whom and why. The Mousetrap is still playing every night in London, 61 years and 25,000 performances after its opening. Everyone likes a nice mystery.

At the moment F1 has a great whodunnit going on. Lotus F1 has announced that its Technical Director is leaving, but no one knows to where he is headed. All the likely suspects have denied that they are responsible and the man himself is giving away no clues, except that he has signed an NDA and cannot speak. The primary clues are thus: who would make him sign an NDA and why and what the different teams have told one another and the media. McLaren and Ferrari have assured one another that they are not signing James, but perhaps some semantics has been involved. Perhaps when asked they had not actually signed, but were on the point of doing so. F1 is often like that. They tell “the technical truth”. I explained this some years ago, as follows:

“There is, let us say, a rumor in the paddock that Subaru is talking to Blue Wombat Racing and that a deal has been done for Blue Wombat to use Subaru V10 engines.
What does a good journalist do? He goes to ask the team if the stories are true. Oh look, here comes Mr. Talking Head, the team’s blue-eyed front man. Hello, you say. Can I have a word? No, he replies, and sweeps by, disappearing into a motorhome.

Grrr… An hour later he re-emerges. Can I have a word? You say politely. No, he says and sweeps by, mumbling some excuse about Bernie… Oh, you say loudly, that’s such a shame. I just wanted to know if you still have a job. This usually works when the talking head is a mere employee or a minority shareholder. If he is a team owner it is more complicated but any mention of the tax man usually results in a screech of soft leather as his handmade Italian shoes come to a sudden stop. He returns in a hurry. I hear you have a deal with Subaru, you say.

You cannot honestly expect me to answer that question, he says, trying to dodge the issue. Why not? It is an easy question. Do you have a deal with Subaru? No, he says, I do not. And there you have it. A novice F1 journalist will at this point rush off to the press room and file a “Blue Wombat Racing chief denies Subaru deal” story. But what did Mr. Talking Head really say? I-DO-NOT. When you think about it, why would HE have a deal with Subaru? The question should have been: “Does the team have a deal with Subaru?” The answer would, of course, have been “No”. But is that the truth? What is Subaru? It is a brand. A brand owned by a big anonymous company called Fuji Heavy Industries. Any deal would be between Blue Wombat Racing and Fuji Heavy Industries. So you ask the question differently. Have you spoken to Fuji Heavy Industries? No, he replies. What does that mean? You could argue that it is impossible to talk to an organization. One can talk to members of an organization but not to the company itself. And so one has to ask a different question. Have you talked to any person employed by Fuji Heavy Industries? No, he replies (just for a change).

So that is that. Or is it? Teams have agents, lawyers, acquisition managers and other assorted fixers to do all that rubbish. It is quite possible that Mr. Talking Head has not spoken directly with anyone from Fuji Heavy Industries. Do you have a contract with Fuji Heavy Industries? You might try. No (…well not on me. It is in my briefcase). Does Blue Wombat Racing have a deal with Fuji Heavy Industries? No (… the contract is between Blue Wombat Racing Cayman Islands Inc. and Fuji Heavy Industries). If you ask whether there is a contract between Blue Wombat Racing Cayman Islands Inc. and Fuji Heavy Industries, you will run into all kinds of trouble. No, will come the answer. (…what is a contract? Is it not merely a document which is the basis for a future negotiation rather than a binding legal entity?) Or worse than that. Don’t you trust my word?

This is an old trick in the F1 paddock. Most journalists are far too polite to admit that they do not trust the person with whom they are speaking. It’s rude to suggest such a thing and Mr. Talking Head is bargaining that the journalist will not be as uncouth as to accuse him of being untrustworthy. And so, you have to mumble that it is not a question of trust or a discussion about honesty. It is simply a question which requires an answer. Well, he will say, as far as I know there is no deal with Fuji Heavy Industries at the moment. That seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? But what did he really say? “As far as I know” means that he can deny knowing the information if later challenged on the subject. In American politics they call this concept “deniability”. Just to make sure he has added “at the moment” so that he can later claim that when he denied the deal it had not been done…

You can go on all day. Dreaming up questions and then thinking of ways in which the slippery fish of the paddock will slide out of them. And, of course, you cannot really accuse them of lying later on because technically-speaking no lies have been told. The questions have been avoided or there is sufficient vagueness to render the answer deniable at a later date. Either that or the meaning of the words is being debated. It is a bit like having sex in the White House… I didn’t have sex with her, said the President, but she had sex with me…

What this means is that in the end asking questions is a pointless exercise – unless one knows the answer already and so you can challenge the target at the right moment and get the truth as they scramble to get out of trouble. If you catch them out, they often break down – and then the truth is out… and they cannot do anything to stop it. One leaves with a sense of victory. The information itself may not be that exciting but it is game and as everyone in F1 will tell you, winning is everything.

So denials mean very little. Logic is usually the best way to work out what is happening, but logic does not always work. Lewis Hamilton’s move to Mercedes was not logical, except for Lewis Hamilton…

So what is right for James Allison? His kids have finished school so he could take off to Italy. He loves flying and has an aerodrome at the end of his garden. Why would he leave that? But he loved his time in Italy when he previously worked for Ferrari. Perhaps there is a house with an aerodrome next door near Maranello…

However… Ferrari has a technical director who is still settling into his chair. The chief designer has been round the block a few times, but does Allison want to be reporting to someone after having ruled the roost at Lotus?

Money is obviously an element but then so too is winning and James wants to win. Any man who has a plane of his own does not NEED money. Money is just a measure of his success.

Mercedes will soon get a new team principal in Paddy Lowe and there is no reason why he might not want a new TD. But Mercedes says “No, it is not us.” One can argue that McLaren and Williams need new technical leadership given the results, but both say “No it is not us.” Red Bull does not really need a new TD. Adrian Newey is doing a fairly decent job. Caterham says “No it is not us” and it makes little sense for James to be going anywhere else because he would not have the tools to win.

It is a real whodunnit. Or perhaps a real whosabouttidoit…

The power of technology

I spent the day getting home from Barcelona. This year I decided to try the new high-speed train service from Paris to Barcelona, after a very successful recent high speed rail trip across China. High speed trains are fabulous. They are quick. They normally go from city centre to city centre. You have space. You can work, walk, sleep and eat (although in China the food looked pretty dodgy). OK, you don’t get movies and the Internet is still to come, and the railway hostesses these days are more Richard Branson than Elle Macpherson (a frightening thought), but high speed train technology provides a much better “office” for a working person than a departure lounge or a plane… and it so much faster than a car. In a couple of years when they finish the “base tunnels” currently being dug under the Alps, one will be able to go to Zurich or Milan for lunch and get home without drama in the same day. Oh joy!

As much as I like driving, it is illogical when a really fast train takes the strain for you.

I feel much the same way the technology involved in F1 publications these days. OK, I’m entirely biased, but you can get a bunch of stuff for nothing on the Internet. Most of it is written by people who know less about Formula 1 than you do. To get the real insider opinions you need to invest, but the GP+ electronic magazine gives you the same kind of content as paper magazines about F1, but it does it DAYS before the conventional old magazines hit the news stands – and only hours after a race. In this day and age, most people have forgotten what happened at a Grand Prix by the time the magazines appear.

People argue that they like to have the magazines on their shelves at home, but e-magazines give you the same possibility, without the need for expensive shelving.

As to the price, we charge you £29.99 a season. You get one magazine for each race, plus a season preview and a season review. You get last year’s magazines for free. That is more than 40 magazines. How many Autosports will that buy you? These days you have to pay £3.50 a week. For a year it will cost you £149.99. Is it worth it?

What do you get these days for £29.99? Four packs of cigarettes? Ten pints of lager? Three cinema tickets? Half a ticket to go to a theme park? About a third of what it will cost you to buy a ticket to ONE Grand Prix (forgetting all the other costs involved).

There are about 35,000 people who care enough about F1 to be reading this blog every day. If you all bought a subscription to GP+ each year, we would have so much more time to do a better job because we’d be able to dump all the dull stuff we have to do to pay the bills. I’d be able to spent entire days on the blog, writing stuff and replying to comments!

Just a thought…

Choices

Barcelona has never been a racing circuit where there have been great Formula 1 battles. The design of the track is such that it usually shows the attributes of a car rather more than the skill of the driver. In the old days, one got used to seeing grids that were team by team by team. It is a good place for testing, but the races were not often spectacular. Overtaking was not impossible, but you needed a big car advantage to get ahead of a rival.

Eighteen years ago I wrote a race report from Montmelo which ended with the following sentence: “But for all the celebration at Benetton – this was only the team’s second ever 1-2 finish, after Japan 1990 – the race was eminently forgettable and very dull to watch. “Who won the race?” said a fellow pressman 90 minutes after the race had ended, as he tried to focus on writing a report. It had been that kind of an event.”

Nine years later, in a report called “The train in Spain”, I concluded the following: “If the Spanish GP did anything, it alerted the F1 world to the fact that even at a track where overtaking is usually possible, there wasn’t any.”

One year I recall all the red top newspapers in the UK decided that Formula 1 must be boring after one of the Barcelona races. Today they are all squawking about tyres. It is this week’s squawk. Lewis Hamilton did not do very well and so they have all got together and decided that “the story” is the tyres. And, believe me, this I how they do it. They work together so that no-one can be accused of missing the story. It is like the wagon trains forming circles when the Indians attacked. It is self-preservation.

The point that they are all missing is that we had action all the way through the race and while they may have found it all rather too confusing, it does not mean that Pirelli does not know how to make tyres. It is quite the opposite in fact. The Italian tyre company deliberately builds tyres that fade because they want to show their expertise. The F1 teams asked for better racing, after the boring Bridgestone “concrete tyre” era, and this is exactly what Pirelli has delivered. Designing tyres that fade at the right point is not an exact science, as we know some cars are harder on tyres than others. But teams that complain only complain because their cars don’t work on the tyres. So today we have lots of whingeing from Red Bull and Mercedes. Hmmm… I wonder why? This is how F1 teams operate and one should ignore them. We did not hear Red Bull whingeing about the tyres after Bahrain, did we? The reality is that the team does not really appear to understand how to make them work. This is presumably why they have recently taken on a Sauber engineer called Pierre Waché, who they seem to think was the reason that the Swiss team was so good on its tyres last year. Waché is a former Michelin engineer who was in charge of vehicle dynamics at Hinwil.

I truly believe that whatever the rules of the competition the same teams will be at the front, whether they are building soap box racers or Formula 1 cars. This has actually been proved a few years ago at the French Grand Prix when a “Pinewood Derby” was organized in the Paddock Club. The Pinewood Derby is a competition developed by the Boy Scouts of America to teach youngsters basic carpentry skills and to promote father-son relationships. Each year around two million cars are built from regulation blocks of wood, four plastic wheels and four nails, which act as axles. In the F1 version there were a total of 15 entries, eight from Formula 1 teams and seven from the Boy Scouts. The FIA’s Charlie Whiting was the official starter. The urge to compete was such that the Ferrari team produced some spectacular cars using the latest technology, including CAD-CAM design and manufacture, heavy-metal ballast and carbon composite fins. Not surprisingly one of the Ferraris won (just!) but to show just how much they cared, even the then Technical Director Ross Brawn turned up to help out. The three Ferrari “Pinewood” cars (there was a T car as well) are worth an absolute fortune now. They are almost unique.

The top teams win because they are cleverer than the opposition and have the resources that they need. The battles between them ebb and flow, but the same organisations are always there or thereabouts. Occasionally one will fade or a new challenger emerge.

There are some who think that the tyre rules today are a little too much. I disagree. I think that Pirelli deserves a huge pat on the back for producing tyres that make for interesting races. We have had five races this year and each has its own very distinct story and this is the kind of uncertainty that makes for great sport. Those who say it is too artificial should take note of the fact that the top four in the World Championship standings are all former World Champions, proving that it is the best drivers who emerge, no matter what the circumstances. I would question the tyre compounds a little more if there were winners so unlikely that the races had become contrived, but I do not believe that is the case.

Yes, it is a balancing act and it is hard to get it perfect, but Pirelli has done a great job.

Better still, the company is staying alert. After the race in Spain Paul Hembery tweeted the following: “A popular winner. Nando in Spain. Not our best race, we aim for 2 or 3 stops, never 4. Been too aggressive, so will need to have a rethink for the rest of the season, certainly in time for Silverstone, maybe Canada.”

This is exactly the kind of tyre manufacturer a modern racing series needs.

Four hours 40 minutes after the race…

The fastest e-magazine in Formula 1 hits the streets direct from the paddock in Barcelona. This week we bring you all the stories about Fernando Alonso’s fabulous victory in Barcelona, plus…

We look closely at the Gribkowsky Affair…

We deconstruct Dr Helmut Marko…

We remember motor racing’s original coeur de lion…

And we examine how F1 is looking to host races in New Jersey AND Long Beach

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For more information, go to www.grandprixplus.com

Mercedes’s flying stars

Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton qualified 1-2 for the Spanish GP in their Mercedes, under the watchful eye of company boss Dieter Zetsche, who turned up in Spain to see how the company’s money is being spent. The two Silver Arrows drivers beat Sebastian Vettel, while Kimi Raikkonen was fourth and looks to be a strong challenger for the race. Fernando Alonso was fifth, ahead of Felipe Massa, Romain Grosjean, Mark Webber, Sergio Perez and Paul di Resta.

Lewis stays ahead

Lewis Hamilton set the fastest time of the Q2 session in Spain on Saturday, beating the Red Bull of Sebastian Vettel, the Ferrari of Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen’s Lotus. Completing the top 10 were Mark Webber, Nico Rosberg, Sergio Perez, Felipe Massa, Romain Grosjean and Paul di Resta.

Knocked out were Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne in their Toro Rossos, Adrian Sutil’s Force India, the McLaren of Jenson Button and two Saubers: Nico Hulkenberg beating Esteban Gutierrez.

Silver service

Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg set the pace in the Q1 sessions in Spain in their Mercedes-Benzes, beating Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull, Kimi Raikkonen’s Lotus, Fernando Alonso’s Ferrari and Mark Webber, Felipe Massa, Romain Grosjean, Paul di Resta and Jean-Eric Vergne.

Dan Ricciardo was next ahead of a disappointing Adrian Sutil, Nico Hulkenberg, the disappointing McLarens of Sergio Perez and Jenson Button, Esteban Gutierrez and Valtteri Bottas. Last year’s winning Pastor Maldonado was knocked out in the session as were the two Caterhams and two Marussias.