Ayrton Senna's Lotus years, by Ibrar Malik

As we mark the upcoming 26th anniversary of Ayrton Senna's passing, most will undoubtedly dwell upon the more celebrated cornerstones of his extraordinary career. His obliteration of the opposition during qualifying at Monaco '88, or the race at Donington Park '93. His compelling personality which shone through during interviews. Or what might have been with Williams had he not tragically met his untimely death at the '94 San Marino Grand Prix. This blog aims to be slightly different, by briefly looking at Senna's formative years at Lotus.

Coming into 1985, the Norfolk-based team had not won a race since the sudden death of its charismatic founder, Colin Chapman, in December 1982. Lotus had endured a turbulent '83 season. But it bounced back superbly to become a regular frontrunner again during '84, enjoying its most successful season since 1978. The newly-released book, Team Lotus: Beyond the Colin Chapman Era, details precisely how the team achieved this. But by the end of '84, it seemed a key ingredient to elevate Lotus back to the winner's circle was missing. Enter, Ayrton Senna – Lotus's new signing for 1985. 

Senna was widely touted as a future world champion following his stellar performances within the unfancied Toleman during 1984

Review of Maurice Hamilton's new book 'Formula One: The Champions'

Formula 1 world champions are indeed an exclusive bunch. Only 33 have reached the status from over 600 to compete in F1 across 70 years, not to mention the innumerable additional group who have not even made it that far. Few therefore would dispute long-serving F1 correspondent Maurice Hamilton describing F1's title as "the ultimate accolade in motorsport".

And Hamilton's latest book, Formula One: The Champions, is a fitting tribute to them. Released tomorrow on March 3 and published by White Lion, it is a stylishly-presented and sizeable 240-page hardback made up of written and photographic portrayals of every one of those 33, from Giuseppe Farina through to Nico Rosberg, stopping off at legends such as Juan Manuel Fangio and Michael Schumacher, among several others, along the way.

Hamilton for this has allied his words with the photography of Bernard Cahier and his son Paul-Henri of The Cahier Archive photographic collection, reuniting the same trio that brought us 2016's The Pursuit of Speed title.

The task of portraying all the title winners going back to 1950, who as Hamilton notes at the outset are a diverse band in an ever-changing category, is a sizeable one. Yet these authors are well-placed to take it on, with Hamilton offering 40 years on the F1 front line as well as a keen eye for its history, and The Cahier Archive stretching back to the F1's beginnings and, uniquely, remaining throughout that time in its original hands.

Win a Team Lotus Audio Book by Ibrar Malik

On Talking about F1 we have been very pleased to feature blogs previewing the books of Ibrar Malik.

Ibrar's debut work delved into the controversial 1994 Formula 1 season, and he has just released his second book: Team Lotus, Struggling Beyond The Post Colin Chapman Era.

And we have five copies of the audio book to give away to Talking about F1 readers.

All you have to do is answer the very simple question below.

Addendum 19/01/2020: Apologies, something I forgot to mention when initially publishing this is that the audio book codes we have to give away only work in the US, Canada and Australia, so the competition is only open to those based there.

We will pick five winners at random from the correct answers and will be in touch if you're one of the lucky quintet. Good luck!

THE COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED

Team Lotus, Struggling Beyond The Post Colin Chapman Era, is now available to purchase in E Book format here (a free sample is contained within that link) or Audio Book format here.

You can also read more detail about the book here: http://www.1994f1.com/lotusbook/

Pedro Lamy's 1994 Silverstone Testing Accident, by Ibrar Malik and Ben Green

This is a special blog to celebrate the launch of the audiobook: Team Lotus, Struggling Beyond The Post Colin Chapman Era.

This blog has been co-written by Ben Green, who is the proud owner of the Lotus Formula 1 car Pedro Lamy crashed during that Silverstone test in May 1994, just prior to that year's Spanish Grand Prix. If you have read the book: 1994 The Untold Story of a Tragic and Controversial F1 Season, you'll know Lamy's crash and its subsequent fallout, was hugely significant to F1 that year. Ben's Lotus chassis is the 107C (chassis no 1).

This is the (restored) Lotus 107C that Lamy almost was killed in during that fateful day at Silverstone in May 1994. Ben purchased the chassis from Team Lotus during 1995, along with a heap of spares.
     
1994 Lotus 107C
At the end of the 1993 season, Team Lotus's finances were in a bad way. The newly released book: Team Lotus, Struggling Beyond The Post Colin Chapman Era details how and why Team Lotus got there by the early 1990s.

Its Chris Murphy-designed 107B was fast but unreliable, while its complex active suspension and customer Cosworth HB engines had drained resources. Along came Honda with the Mugen brand and an updated 1989 ZA5 V10 engine, a no-cost factory option.

The Arrows A2, and why it's in my F1 Dream Team

For how long did we all bemoan that F1 - as in the sport centrally - simply didn't get the new media? Or 'didn't get' it as in it almost totally ignored it? But in recent months it seems that F1, even F1, has learned, with it partaking in much greater activity on Twitter and the like.

And that isn't a dream. Although, in a certain particular recent sense, it is. With considerable novelty the F1 official Twitter account asked a few of the sport's luminaries, along with the rest of us, to name their own 'F1 Dream Team'. That is their dream car, team principal and driver pairing combination from the sport's history. And no, I couldn't resist it either. Dutifully I rattled the team of my dreams off. And whatever else you might think of it surely it gets something for originality.

The striking Arrows A2
"Arrows A2 1" by MPW57 - Own work. Licensed under CC
BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Arrows_A2_1.jpg#/media/File:Arrows_A2_1.jpg

For me the starting point, the car for my dream team, was the Arrows A2. Now if you have a blank expression at this I can offer you the reassurance that you probably wouldn't be the only one. It's not a car that can be described as a classic by any of the standard measures. Not on the grounds of results - it only scored two points ever from two rather distant sixth place finishes. Nor on the grounds of longevity - it only was around for half a season, and in almost all of that period was merely serving time in a sort of F1 purgatory as the team, who'd long since lost faith, worked on its replacement. But is a car that has always fascinated me.

Mainly on the grounds of its striking looks. I think it first got my attention when watching the footage of that famous last-race scrap between Gilles Villeneuve and Rene Arnoux in the 1979 French GP at Dijon. Of course it takes rather a lot to crowbar your attention away from that frenzied battle but on the final lap two cars can be seen up the track from them. As all head downhill to Dijon's first turn our viewpoint is of them at their full width, looking scarcely like any F1 machine as we know it. Indeed they may bring to mind instead some kind of unknown sea creature descending upon us. Really, even in an era known for its distinctive designs the Arrows A2 cannot be mistaken for anything else seen at the time, prior or since.

Why F1 shouldn't beat itself up over Newey

F1 is a sport that rather likes to beat itself up; to look inwardly with a degree of disgust; to self-recriminate. At least certain factions within it do. We've seen it rather a lot this season especially.

Adrian Newey's announced side step
from F1 caused some recrimination
Photo: Octane Photography

And there's been a bit more of it about since last Sunday in Montreal, following the news that Adrian Newey plans to side step F1 in order to do other things. 'What does this say about modern F1?' was the gist. It's a terrible indictment of the sport, of the regulations, that the design standard bearer should chose to go off and pen boats or whatever it is to be. It was all given a bit of encouragement by Newey earlier in the year having made some critical comments about the 2014 spec of rules.

Perhaps though - without meaning any disrespect to Newey - such criticism from him has a touch of Mandy Rice-Davies's 'he would say that wouldn't he?' about it. After all, Newey was and is the aerodynamicist supreme, so is unlikely to be too keen on anything that dilutes the importance of aero, and the increased (and probably temporary) variation of power unit performance has indeed done that this season. And plenty of others expressed the view that the balance of importance had been tilted rather too far in favour of aero in 2013 and previously.

But also one way in which F1 history can be helpful is that in many matters it provides some oil of perspective to pour on the troubled waters of the moment; demonstrate that a lot of things aren't as peculiar to the here and now as you might think. And it does in this case, both for Newey's personal tale and those for F1's technical stars more generally.

Further thoughts on the Brazilian Grand Prix

Bull or Troll?
Prior to Sunday's race, running at Interlagos was pretty much a wash-out, the surface being to varying degrees wet throughout. And Pirelli had more cause than most to regret this, as it'd specially brought some 2014 spec slick tyres for the teams to try out. The Italian company - that seems to have offended the Goddess Fortune at some point in the recent past - thus was deprived of running and data on its developing product, and we know by now that it rather craves that sort of thing.

Pirelli - not having much luck right now
Photo: Octane Photography

Well, almost totally deprived of data anyway. As one team did do a lap on the new tyres (albeit a slow one) even in the streaming conditions, equipped with data gathering appendages and then telling its driver in a rather sinister tone that the required data had been got. Yes, this was Red Bull and Sebastian Vettel.

A few watching on interpreted this as just the latest evidence of Red Bull being a step ahead; leaving no stone unturned in the purist of an advantage. Ross Brawn - one ordinarily you have to get up early in the morning to catch out - didn't think so however: 'We always work on the principle that bad information is worse than no information' said Brawn subsequently. 'With all due to respect, Red Bull may well have found something out that we don’t anticipate but we couldn't understand what you could learn in those conditions, even though it looked like they were trying to take profiles of the tyres and so on, it was difficult to see how it could be useful...'

1 - Film Review: Not just another F1 film

Yet another F1 film release? Right in the wheel tracks of the blockbuster successes of Senna and Rush, a documentary and a theatrical film respectively? Just like them based on the sport's past? What on earth can it offer over and above these? Well, in the case of 1, rather a lot as it turns out.

Even above and beyond the challenges outlined in the opening paragraph, the film-makers of 1 - a new film about the history of F1 - hardly could have asked for a more daunting set of objectives. Max Mosley told the film's director Paul Crowder at the project's outset that if he could 'capture why he's devoted 40 years of his life to F1 then he'll have succeeded'. In essence, the makers felt that their mission was to capture the essence of this the pinnacle of motor sport. Its glamour, its pace, its danger, and everything else besides. No mean feat.

Despite what it says on the tin though 1 isn't really a history of F1. Not exactly anyway. But nevertheless it can be said to have gone a long way to meeting its haughty mission statement.

Martin Brundle starts
 and ends the story
Credit: greenmashup / CC

The film starts not in the beginning, but on the starting grid of the 1996 Australian Grand Prix. Perhaps not the most obvious choice, but its reasoning soon becomes clear. The animated buzz of the assembled crowd, the rich colours resultant of the full-beam Melbourne sunshine, as well as the mass of team members and assorted hangers on crawling over the assembled cars - all in eager anticipation of the race, and season, start - are familiar. As is the gradual, aching build up of tension, eventually to be released as the cars are unleashed like feral beasts when the red light goes out.

But then...not long after we had a spectacular accident: Martin Brundle got his braking wrong and cartwheeled over several cars, his machine disintegrating as it did so. The car, by now a heap of wreckage, came to rest upside down in a gravel bed, and the seconds of time wherein there is no movement from the cockpit seem to stretch on like hours. All of the harrowing accidents, some fatal, that took place within the previous 24 months suddenly seem scarily redolent. Yet, before you know it Brundle emerges, in his own words 'without a bruise on his body' and then can be seen - accompanied by the roar of the crowd - hot-footing it down the pit lane to find Sid Watkins in order to get the OK to take the restart.

Österreichring - a matter of perspective

There is a joke that psychologists like to tell. Two psychologists, who are old friends, happen upon each other in the street. Psychologist one asks psychologist two: 'How's your wife?' Psychologist two replies: 'Compared to what?'

I won't give up the day job.

But there is a reason that psychologists like to tell this joke. In psychology, as in everything, all is a matter of perspective, a matter of relativity. Nothing can be judged in a vacuum; everything must be judged in comparison with what is around it.

And so it is with the A1-Ring (or the Red Bull Ring to give its latest moniker), which the Red Bull company announced recently is to return to the F1 calendar next year. In itself, the A1/Red Bull Ring is a perfectly acceptable motor racing venue of the modern sort. It's set in fine, scenic surroundings; there is plenty of welcome (and perhaps increasingly rare) use of gradient. The Austrian Grands Prix it hosted between 1997 and 2003 tended to give us diverting races, with rather a lot of overtaking, in an age which usually didn't give us much of either. And set as it is in central Europe it is within relatively easy reach of large numbers of much of the sport's latent following - a following that's had the sport turn its back on it to a rather absurd extent in recent times, in preference for venues wherein local interest can be meagre. To be a little more brutal however, while the A1-Ring wasn't a grand feast of a track perhaps if you're used to a diet of workhouse gruel something a bit more appetising than that will always be welcome.

The A1/Red Bull Ring is back by the looks of things,
but I'm not too excited

And judging by the views of F1 fans that I've spoken to as well as those discerned from reading internet comments the track's return is a welcome one, I'd imagine for the reasons outlined above. But I've never been at ease with the A1-Ring entirely. I'd much rather, if it had to exist, that they'd built it somewhere else. Because when it was created it trampled on something really rather wonderful, about as grand a feast as the sport has offered in its long history. This was a track known as the Österreichring, which itself had been an F1 stop-off between 1970 and 1987.

Sadly, the creation of the new-fangled Austrian circuit meant the magnificent Österreichring was consigned to the history books and film reels forever. And, rather like the new Nurburgring and very much unlike the new Spa, the new layout - mainly straights separated by second and third gear corners - didn't begin to capture the spirit of the old (though at least they didn't commit the same act of heresy as the Nurburgring and give the Ersatz version the same blimming name).

Famous five: F1's most inspired career moves

When Lewis Hamilton announced that he was leaving McLaren to throw his lot in with perennial underachievers Mercedes for 2013, many recoiled almost like a car crash was about to unfold before their eyes.

There indeed seemed many historical precedents of a talented driver committing career suicide, with a bad team selection heralding a downward slide they could never reverse, such as Emerson Fittipaldi joining his brother's Copersucar team from McLaren and Jacques Villeneuve leaving Williams for BAR.

But the early evidence - as McLaren struggles and Mercedes performs ahead of expectations - is that Lewis might, just might, have played a blinder with his audacious move. And as well as bad moves F1 also has a few precedents of inspired team switches, which confounded the doom-laden expectations in place at the time they were made. I list five of the best ones below.

Graham Hill: Lotus to BRM, 1960
Let's start with a slow burner. Leaving Colin Chapman's Lotus team as it stood before its triumphant 1960s decade sounds a little like F1's equivalent of the guy from Decca Records who turned down signing The Beatles. Yet that is what Graham Hill did.

Hill got together with Chapman after a chance meeting, and recruited initially in a factory role Hill managed before long to blag his way into the driver's seat. And in 1958 driver and team together made their F1 debuts. But Chapman's cars were almost always known for being fast yet fragile; in the early days the latter was especially so as the cars would almost never last a race, and indeed the former was not always the case. Two years of meagre results led to frustration, and the clash of an exasperated Hill and a strong-willed Chapman (including Hill questioning Chapman's commitment to the job) was never going to end well.

Graham Hill - on the way to his first championship, in a BRM
Credit: Lothar Spurzem / CC

And thus Hill chose to join BRM for 1960. This raised many-an-eyebrow, as it was a team that had, despite periodic fanfare, persistently flattered to deceive. As Hill himself noted: 'I remember everyone saying "that's a mistake, you're joining a losing team"...it was being thoroughly trounced'. But as luck would have it the outstanding Tony Rudd was already there, and he and Hill well and truly clicked and thus began one of the sport's most iconic and effective driver-engineer partnerships. Results remained fallow for the first couple of years, but by the start of the 1962 year things had fallen into place (and at exactly the right moment as Sir Alfred Owen was threatening to cut off the team's life support). For one thing Rudd was given full executive authority for the team. For another BRM also managed to produce a V8 engine for the 1.5 litre formula that would match those of Ferrari and Coventry Climax.

A message to you, Schumi

The F1 cars of 2011 hit the track for the first time on Tuesday next week, at Valencia, with the Mercedes, like many cars, being launched that morning. It's very easy to forget in the passage of time that, winding back 12 months, the Merc squad were the centre of attention, and not just because they were a new team or (effectively) the defending world champion constructor. No, the attention was because Michael Schumacher, returning from a three-year 'retirement', was to be one of their pilots.

Such talk now seems a million miles away given how the year panned out, but the return of the seven-time champion was the talk of last year's season previews. As an example, Motor Sport magazine, with the front cover headline 'Return of the King', commented in their preview that: 'The big news, of course, is that he is back...Double World Champion Fernando Alonso moves to Ferrari, the two most recent champions are paired at the same team and still Michael sweeps the headlines just by turning up again'.

Furthermore, expectations (including mine) were high - how could they not be? Sure, he was 41, and had been away for three years, but we'd long since learned to write the guy off at your peril, such was his frightening competitiveness, supreme ability and aggression, and ability to overcome just about any obstacle in his way first time around. He always had and clearly continued to have super-human levels of fitness. Further, as Motor Sport outlined: 'In prospect it is a package that could, perhaps should, dominate: the mighty Michael, back in harness with the unassailable Ross Brawn, Mercedes cash and power, a tech team that (Honda-funded) produced last year's double-world-title-winning Brawn BGP001....Nico Rosberg, almost inevitably, will be expected to play wingman' (I don't quote this to criticise or embarrass Motor Sport, most others were talking the same way).

Two teams in the Lotus position

As I'm sure you're aware by now, this forthcoming F1 season will most probably have two separate Lotus-branded teams on the grid. One will be Team Lotus, with Renault engines, (Lotus Racing from last season), and the other, somewhat confusingly, will be Lotus Renault (nee Renault).

The Lotus naming row has been one of the the most persistent F1 stories of the off-season, and demonstrates F1's ability to shoot itself in the foot, just when you were thinking that the sport was getting to be refreshingly free of embarrassing internal politics, and gratuitously confusing its customers. Up until now I'd been keen to ignore the case, hoping against hope that it would go away by itself. Neither side seems to want to blink though, and the latest leg of this is a summary judgment into the rights surrounding the use of the Team Lotus name due to be heard in the High Court on Monday. I'm not a lawyer, but the smart money is on the stand-off rumbling on beyond that.

Lotus Racing from 2010, now Team Lotus

The reason this situation has come about is not straightforward, and I'll do my best not to detain (or bore) us with the details. Historically Team Lotus (the F1 team) and Group Lotus (who built the road cars) are separate entities, and have been ever since Colin Chapman (Lotus godfather) decided to split the two in 1958. When Team Lotus (that's the F1 team, do keep up) went belly-up at the end of 1994, it was acquired by a gentleman called David Hunt (James Hunt's brother, if you're interested). After Chapman's death in 1982 Group Lotus had several owners, before Proton bought them in 1996. Last year, the Lotus Racing F1 team used the Lotus name under licence from Group Lotus.

Looking back: 1981 - F1's strangest season

The recently ended 2010 season is commonly accepted as a great one. When thinking of great F1 seasons some readily spring to mind, such as the dramatic championship finishes of 1964, 1986 and 2008, or the competitiveness of 1974, 1997 and 2003, or even the drama and controversy of 1976 and 1989. The season of 1982 however tends to rise above others in such debates. It after all can boast no fewer than 11 different winners (for seven different constructors) in 16 races, no individual winning more than two of them. This all was alongside multiple acts of drama on and off the track, conducted in an atmosphere of extreme acrimony. Such is the myth that surrounds 1982 that it even had a specialist book about it written and published a quarter of a century later, by the sadly recently-departed Christopher Hilton.

However I feel that the season which preceded 1982, 1981, is somewhat forgotten about, and has a strong claim as a memorable and dramatic season. It can certainly match 1982 for controversy and acidity. Indeed, much of the 1982 politics were simply a continuation of those in 1981! The 1981 championship battle was tighter and went to the wire to a much greater extent than 1982's did. Plus the on track racing action (easy to forget in all of this) was generally much more diverting in 1981. It seems to have been lost in time somewhat that most of the races in 1982, i.e. the hour and a half on a Sunday, were soporific spectacles. And 1981 isn't far off 1982 in terms of variation of winners, no driver won more more than three races, the world champion totalled but 50 points, and in the final drivers' table no fewer than five drivers were within seven points of the top of the table. Eat your heart out 2010.

Even if one maintains that 1981 was not among the sport's greatest seasons, it certainly has a claim to being one the sport's strangest. It started with a race that never was in South Africa, attended by only 19 cars, the races were participated in by a field of cars, for the most part, in flagrant breach of the rule makers' flagship regulations, and it ended in a car park in Las Vegas, wherein the three contenders stumbled disastrously over the line, and Nelson Piquet claimed his first World Championship by a point, almost in spite of himself.

Thoughts on Peter Warr

Like many people, I was very sad to hear of the passing of Peter Warr earlier this week.

Bernie was absolutely right to say that 'When Peter was in Formula One he helped me to build it to what it is today'. Peter Warr's F1 team management career ran from 1969, when he was asked by Colin Chapman to take the team manager role at Team Lotus, all the way through to 1989, taking in spells at Wolf, Fittipaldi and back again to Lotus along the way. His career encompassed the transformation of the sport from something of a gentlemanly pastime to the professional event recognised around the world that we're all so familiar with today.

Further, in this time Warr was not just another team boss, he distinguished himself as one of the most effective team managers in the sport, often in difficult circumstances.

I personally became aware of Peter Warr when I first followed the sport in the mid 1980s. I was an Ayrton Senna fan (and not one of the posthumous converts that seem to be so numerous!), so Warr therefore was a key figure in my F1 initiation, as Senna's team manager at Lotus. While Lotus's decline throughout the 1980s is well documented, it should be recorded that Warr's team did astonishingly well with the resources available to them in this time.