Monza 1994 - Team Lotus's Last Hurrah, by Ibrar Malik

One of the victims from a turbulent 1994 F1 season was Team Lotus, which finally succumbed to its financial struggles during the year. Like Brabham two years earlier, a once-great name would vanish from F1. Lotus was Jim Clark, Jochen Rindt, Emerson Fittipaldi as well as Ayrton Senna's first top team in F1. The upcoming 1983-'89 Lotus book (http://www.1994f1.com/lotusprintbook/) charts how Team Lotus went from being regular a frontrunner during the mid-1980s to a midfielder only a few years later.

After its release on May 1 2020, we then intend to write a follow-up print book covering the team's final years of 1990-'95. This follow-up book explains how Lotus then changed ownership at the end of '90 and went from merely surviving that winter to finishing an incredible fifth in the '92 constructors' championship. It seemed the former seven-time world champion team was on a clear upward trajectory having re-establishing itself as a regular point scorer. More good news came in the form of its leading driver, Johnny Herbert, re-signing within the team for another five years by the end of 1992. Unfortunately this revival under Peter Collins proved short lived because behind the scenes debts were still piling up. The team only survived two more seasons in F1 after '92.

Win a copy of Formula One: The Champions, Maurice Hamilton's new book

The latest book by the noted Formula 1 writer Maurice Hamilton, Formula One: The Champions, is released today, published by White Lion.

The book is made up of individual portraits in pictures and words of every one of F1's 33 world champions going back to the championship's inception in 1950. So it's from Giuseppe Farina through to Nico Rosberg, stopping off along the way at Jim Clark, Ayrton Senna and Lewis Hamilton among many other legendary figures.

For this weighty 240-page book, just as in his 2016 title The Pursuit of Speed, Hamilton has teamed up with father-and-son Bernard and Paul-Henri Cahier of The Cahier Archive photographic collection. And it contains some never-seen-before photographs. There is a foreword by Bernie Ecclestone.

And we have a copy of this fine book to give away to Talking about F1 readers.

All you have to do is answer the very simple question below. We will pick one winner at random from the correct answers and will be in touch if you're the lucky recipient. Good luck!

THE COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED

You can also buy the book, as well as find out more detail on it, via this link.

You also can read my thoughts on the book here.

New Motorsport Week article: When Jim Clark took part in the RAC Rally

Leo A Capaldi [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

Fernando Alonso has been keeping us entertained recently, by having a go at the Dakar Rally. This is the latest leg of his outlier path of being a Formula 1 star trying his hand at other motorsport disciplines.

But it's also a throwback path, as such an existence used to be common. And even making the large shift from F1 all the way to rallying is not entirely new.

For Motorsport Week I look back to 1966 and Jim Clark taking on the RAC Rally, the Rally GB of its day. And he performed sensationally.

You can have a read of the tale here: https://www.motorsportweek.com/news/id/25827

New Motorsport Week article: 1962 - December F1 and the changing of the guard

Bilsen, Joop van / Anefo / neg. stroken, 1945-1989,
2.24.01.05, item number 913-9470 [CC BY-SA 3.0 nl
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en)]

As we creep towards Christmas, imagine that in the here and now the Formula 1 season still had a race to do. Imagine too that the F1 championship had yet to be decided, and it would be resolved in that lingering final round.

And imagine too that the race is to take place between Christmas Day and New Year.

Well in 1962, uniquely, all of this came together. And that was far from the only thing striking about the season, which was one of remarkable change.

For Motorsport Week I look back at the seismic season. You can have a read here: https://www.motorsportweek.com/news/id/25625

1965 British Grand Prix review for Motor Sport Magazine

By Eric Koch / Anefo - http://proxy.handle.net/10648/
aab4ce4c-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84, CC0, https:/
/commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66004918

My latest classic F1 race retro review for Motor Sport's website is here. And ahead of the British Grand Prix this weekend I look at the unparalleled Jim Clark winning the 1965 British Grand Prix.

Clark won the British race five times in his career, plus he bestrode the 1965 calendar year more generally. With these, you might assume his Silverstone win was a cruise. But like the man himself, there was much more to this one.

You can have a read of this extraordinary tale here: https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/history/f1/jim-clarks-feat-unparalleled-brilliance-1965-british-grand-prix

And as a bonus I also for Motor Sport explored five memorable races from the British Grand Prix's long history. You can check that out here: https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/history/f1/glory-guts-and-rain-magic-moments-british-grand-prix

New AutoClassics article - Why there was so much more to Jim Clark than statistics

By Rtsanderson - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5724658

The numbers are towering - 25 Grand Prix wins from 72 starts, an Indianapolis 500 victory and much else won besides. But not even that gets at what it was about Jim Clark that was inimitable. Not even close in fact.

To mark the 50th anniversary of his passing, for AutoClassics I spoke to many of those who knew Jim Clark best, to find out that what made him great was about much more than mere statistics.

You can have a read here: https://www.autoclassics.com/posts/reviews/more-to-jim-clark-than-statistics

British GP Report - Home run

Some fates seem set in advance. That, like Oedipus, no matter what you try to avert things you end still with the preordained outcome. Lewis Hamilton in the British Grand Prix benefited from just that, claiming his fourth home win in a row.

Lewis Hamilton cruised to victory
in a near-inevitable outcome
Photo: Octane Photography

Around Silverstone the Mercedes driver was as usual on another level. In advance we realised only the unusual could deny him, and nothing of that ilk materialised.

A poor start? It wasn't brilliant yet he held Kimi Raikkonen's Ferrari off to lead. Rain? No - that stayed away (though as if to show how things smiled upon him, it arrived in a big way shortly after the chequered flag). You can guess the rest.

He simply moved clear. After the solitary stops he was more than 10 seconds away from the next guy. He won by 14. It was a Grand Chelem also - pole, fastest lap, win and led every lap. All appropriate. It was in more than one sense quite the home run.

And of course he was delighted. "That was amazing, oh my God, greatest day," Lewis beamed.

Why the mystery of F1's greatest ever hasn't been answered - not even by science

So, that's that settled then. The sport's biggest and most ubiquitous bone of contention. Done. That one of who is the best driver ever, over and above the equipment they had access to. That one we thought near unsolvable given everything. All by a team of academics from the Universities of Sheffield and Bristol, and using statistical analysis.

According to the statistical study,
Juan Manuel Fangio's 
F1's best of all time
By Unknown - Museo Juan Manuel
 Fangio, reimpreso en "La fotografía
en la historia argentina", Tomo I,
Clarín, ISBN 950-782-643-2,
Public Domain, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/w/index.php?
curid=3934090

And when its news release announcing this was published just over a week ago it caused quite the stir. All seemed rather monumental indeed. Underlining the view even the (not necessarily always science-loving) Daily Mail proclaimed in its headline that what we had revealed before us was "the best Formula One driver of all time according to SCIENCE". Yes it actually capitalised the word. It was as if we were getting something irrefutable.

The first few on the study's all-time driver ranking - Juan Manuel Fangio top, followed by Alain Prost, Fernando Alonso, Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart - are hardly hideous. Michael Schumacher appeared low in ninth but when he was considered from before his first retirement in 2006 only he shot up to third, which again looked fair enough (as an aside, a curiosity about the reporting of this study is that there is more than one list floating about, in addition to the pre/post Schumi lists the one presented in the academic paper has Alonso sixth rather than his widely-reported placing of third, and it's not explained by the Schumi shift apparently as the Daily Mail article at least shows Alonso fourth when Schumi from 2006 and before only is considered).

But then it gets patchy. Stirling Moss is but 35th in the ranking (some 12 places behind Marc Surer) while the likes of Niki Lauda, Nigel Mansell, Alberto Ascari, Jochen Rindt and Gilles Villeneuve are simply nowhere to be seen in the top 50. It all gets, um, a little more interesting too as Christian Fittipaldi is in the elevated position of 12th best driver ever while the luminary that is Louis Rosier is placed 19th. And unless this pair were against just about all assessments in fact secret F1 geniuses never given their break in a good car - in addition to the drivers listed above being actually vastly over-rated, again contrary most assessments - it would seem the study has some shortcomings.

Non-championship F1 races - time to bring them back?

Recently for Grand Prix Times I wrote an article looking at the 1965 year of the late and very great Jim Clark (you can have a read of it here). Why that year in particular? Well, partly it was because we're now exactly 50 years on from it, but especially because without hyperbole it was likely the most astonishing calendar year of motorsport success undertaken by anyone ever.

To the modern eye his achievements read like something from fantasy - in addition to winning the F1 title in record time he also within those 12 months bagged the Indianapolis 500, two F2 championships as well as took a couple of race victories each in sports cars and in saloons.

Jim Clark's 1965 included as many as
12 non-championship F1 races.
"ClarkJim1965mitMechaniker".
Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 de via
Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ClarkJim1965mit
Mechaniker.jpg#mediaviewer/
File:ClarkJim1965mitMechaniker.jpg

Of course your initial response to hearing this might be to point out that back then the F1 championship calendar was much more sparse, which left far greater time for other things, and that is true. In 1965 the offical itinerary consisted of ten races, around half of what we have in the modern era. But factor in that on the other hand travel and logistics is much easier now than it was then. More pointedly factor in too that in addition to his championship schedule Clark - as many of his contemporaries did and in every year - took part in a number of non-championship F1 races.

You may be wondering at this point what the heck I'm on about - but time was that the F1 annual schedule on top of the points-paying stuff had a handful, and sometimes a big handful, of Grands Prix that didn't count towards the title scoring. The non-championship races that I mentioned.

Britain was especially well-served by them, with the International Trophy at Silverstone taking place as an F1 event almost every year between 1949 and 1978, the Race of Champions (not to be confused with its current namesake) at Brands Hatch which was first held in 1965 and last happened in 1983, and the Oulton Park Gold Cup which existed as an F1 race on and off from 1954 to 1972. Therefore British fans of a certain vintage could have seen F1 cars racing on three separate occasions - and not one of them the British Grand Prix - before even the spring was out.

New Grand Prix Times article: Jim Clark and motorsport’s most astonishing year - 50 years on

"Jim Clark 1965" by NL-HaNA, ANEFO /
neg. stroken, 1945-1989, 2.24.01.05, item number
918-4009 - http://www.gahetna.nl/collectie/
afbeeldingen/fotocollectie/zoeken/weergave/
detail/q/id/aacbd150-d0b4-102d-bcf8-
003048976d84. Licensed under CC BY-SA
3.0 nl via Wikimedia Commons -
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Jim_Clark_1965.jpg#mediaviewer/
File:Jim_Clark_1965.jpg

Imagine if someone in a single calendar year won the F1 world title and in record time, as well as few other F1 races not counting towards the championship. And that he also within those 12 months won the Indianapolis 500, the GP2 title as well as took a couple of wins each in the British Touring Car and the World Endurance Championships.

Sounds like something from outlandish fantasy, doesn't it? Well it's actually sane motorsport history. It's sort of what Jim Clark did in 1965.

In my latest Grand Prix Times (you'll notice the subtle website name change) article now that we've hit the fiftieth anniversary of Jim Clark's 1965 I look back on the most astonishing motorsport year ever.

You can have a read here: http://www.grandprixtimes.com/news/display/09777

Ten of the Greatest Drivers in F1 - a guest post by Maria Mcquire

Formula One is probably the most well-known and popular car race in the entire world. This series started in 1950; it is an international car race from the category of single seaters where 22 drivers and 11 teams compete for the fabulous trophies. There have been many great and fantastic F1 drivers since the start, but only a few can be the best. Here are a few details of some of the best F1 car drivers ever…

Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost (and Thierry Boutsen)
after the 1988 Canadian Grand Prix
Credit: Angelo Orsi / CC

Ayrton Senna: He was a brilliant, ruthless, determined, fast and fascinating racer that Formula One has never seen the like of before or since. He himself accompanied a more professional approach to fitness and dedication to the sport. He was unquestionably the best driver ever in wet weather conditions. One only has to remember Donington in 1993 where Ayrton went from fifth to first before the end of the first lap!

Michael Schumacher: The unfashionable driver of F1, Michael Schumacher, considered as one the best F1 drivers by his constant wins, you either like or dislike. He won five titles with Ferrari during his time, in a seven-time world champion career.

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.

Criminal records? Why just about all F1 records are problematic

The Japanese Grand Prix of 2013 was an important one. Or at least it was for the statisticians, as an all-time F1 record dropped. One that for much of history has been considered a highly valued mark.

Fernando Alonso, as has been anticipated for a while, beat the haughty Michael Schumacher's record for most points scored in F1 ever, now having a total of 1,571 compared with Schumi's 1,566. And yet with it has come a conspicuous round of guffawing. The points total doesn't mean anything, they said; the systems have changed so much over time so as to make comparisons meaningless. Alonso himself however - albeit with something of a glint in his eye - declared it 'great' to set the new mark.

Fernando Alonso claimed F1's
all-time points record in Japan
Photo: Octane Photography

But really, is it so unreasonable for Alonso to be pleased with this one? Or, to flip the question around, could such charges of non-comparability be laid before just about any F1 record? Don't they all at least somewhere involve imperfect comparisons? Is it not the case that they all require qualification?

All sports evolve over time of course, so just about any sporting record necessarily involves an element of imperfect comparison. But I struggle to think of another activity that has changed as much as F1 has from generation to generation, and therefore is so apt for the numbers and historical marks to be taken with not so much a pinch of salt but rather a trailer-load of it.

Bloggers' British Grand Prix Heroes with MoneySupermarket.com

In advance of the forthcoming British Grand Prix, MoneySupermarket.com asked several F1 bloggers, including yours truly, to vote for who in their view are the best British F1 drivers from history.

Britain isn't short of great drivers, and as such picking out the very best isn't a straightforward task. The result of ranking the bloggers' ratings of the top three are below in the infographic. You'll also see there's a lovely quote from little old me:


Image source: MoneySupermarket Car Insurance

The vote found a worthy winner: Jim Clark is also by my reckoning Britain's best ever, possibly the best ever full stop. Jackie Stewart was a close second in the rankings, and the people's champion Nigel Mansell completed the podium. Personally, I'd have liked to see Stirling Moss a bit higher (I placed him second behind Clark), and given all of his recent focus including via the Rush film I'm a little surprised that James Hunt is only tenth. But in my view the top ten is a pretty credible one. Maybe it shows that there is collective wisdom among F1 bloggers after all(!)

There are more details on it all here: http://www.moneysupermarket.com/car-insurance/infographics/british-gp-heroes-results/

Montreal Qualifying: Seb takes pole without any holes

Must be nice to feel vindicated. The Red Bull team has had a tough time of it in Montreal. Not only has the Montreal track, with no fast corner worthy of the name, never really been happy country for the Bulls, it has this weekend been faced with open season on the details of the RB8. First off, the FIA had asked Red Bull to remove the holes in the car's floor in front of the rear wheels, and today it transpired that it'd been asked to make modifications to the wheel hub due to getting aerodynamic advantage from holes there as well. Some were even muttering about the validity of the team's results since Bahrain.

Well, holes or no holes, the team is still right there and Sebastian Vettel underlined this fact by taking an unexpectedly comfortable pole position for tomorrow's Canadian Grand Prix.

Sebastian Vettel took a clear pole position -
the 32nd of his career
Credit: Ryan Bayona / CC

As expected, lap times were tight in qualifying. McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari were at the sharp end, and with this the likes of Mercedes, Lotus, even Force India, Sauber and Williams, were within their ballpark. All of this added up to the top 16 cars' best times being within a second of each other in the second qualifying session.

Even within this though Vettel, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso seemed the most likely pole candidates. But as we've seen so often in the past Seb is one blessed with an intangible ability to pull out extra crucial tenths of a second on a single flying lap and never to compromise his own chances. And this, it seemed, was enough to tilt things in his favour - he topped the first two sessions and in the end he took the quickest time in Q3 by the surprisingly large margin of three tenths of second over Lewis in second and Nando in third.

The Jim Clark Trail in the Scottish Borders

The Jim Clark Room in Duns

He started 72 Grands Prix, won 25 of them, claiming 33 pole positions, and won the World Championship twice. And this in an age where F1 mechanical reliability wasn't anything like it is now. Indeed, he only finished second in a Grand Prix once. In other words, when everything held together he tended to win. He also won an Indianapolis 500 (and was probably swindled out of two more) in just five attempts. He won the British Saloon Car championship (the forerunner of BTCC), and his skills in driving saloons were comparable with his F1 abilities. Indeed, he could put virtually anything with wheels under his magical spell, he was an accomplished F2 driver, sports car driver, once finishing third at Le Mans, and once genuinely looked like winning the RAC Rally, before crashing out. He even did NASCAR on occasion. And he died, tragically, too young at just 32. His international motor racing career in its entirety didn't even last ten years.

I'm not making this up. This guy existed. And his name was Jim Clark.

I was visiting family in Scotland recently and took the opportunity, for the first time in too long, to visit the Jim Clark Room in Duns, a small town around 30 miles south of Edinburgh. While Clark was born in Fife, he and his family moved to Edington Mains Farm, near to Duns, when Clark was six, where he was to farm in adulthood, and he remains synonymous with the area.

Looking back: 1968 - Chris Amon's unluckiest year

Chris Amon. Mention of his name to a historically-minded F1 fan invariably brings up the association of 'the best F1 driver never to win a Grand Prix'. His ill-luck was legendary, and was only equalled by his astonishing natural talent and artistry behind the wheel.

Chris Amon in 1973
Credit: Lothar Spurzem / CC

Many argue that Amon didn't help himself in many ways: he was guilty of a number of bad career moves, had a far from disciplined life off the track and his relative lack of selfishness didn't serve him well in the warped world of F1. But it was also the case that time and again Amon would dominate F1 races with considerable elan and flair (summed up by one of the most iconic photographs in the history of the sport, of Amon attacking Oulton Park in his Ferrari 312 in 1968), only to crawl to a halt through no fault of his own. 183 laps, and 851 km, led in 95 F1 starts didn't add up to a single victory. Mario Andretti once commented that had Amon become an undertaker people would have stopped dying!

The tag of 'best F1 driver never to win a Grand Prix' sells Amon short however. This is partly because his talent is such that he should be remembered as being among the best of all time, regardless of the lack of wins. Ferrari designer Mauro Forghieri rated Amon as highly as they come: 'it's a fact that we never gave him a car worthy of him. As far as I'm concerned he was as good as Clark', while Jochen Rindt considered Jackie Stewart and Amon as his only true rivals. But the tag also sells him short because there was one season that the drivers' world championship should have been his. This year was 1968.

F1's Spa Treatment: the history of the Spa-Francorchamps circuit

It really is genius when you think about it. Construct a fast and challenging motor racing circuit that racing drivers can race and overtake on in a naturally beautiful and undulating part of the world. What's more, ensure that part of the world is in a notorious mini-clime, meaning it rains often and with little notice. Most of us therefore look forward to races there like no other.

Credit: Nathanael Majoros / CC

You've probably worked out by now that this circuit is Spa-Francorchamps. It's for these reasons and more that it remains resolutely the favourite of many F1 drivers and fans alike. I'm sure there have been dull races at Spa, but somehow it's genuinely hard to imagine one taking place. And it's next up on this year's F1 calendar, once the fraternity return from their summer holidays at the end of August.

In an age of gleaming and expensive new facilities and high circuit standards, Spa remains a circuit apart in modern F1. Yes, the track has had to adapt to the demands of the present day, it's no longer made up of roads open to the public, it has plenty of generous run off areas where there was previously very little room for drivers to get it wrong, has a billiard table smooth surface, and the efficiency of current F1 machines ensures that some of the demands of its sweeps are not what they once were. But Spa is still very special.

Looking back: The original Drag Reduction Systems

Of all of the regulation changes for the 2011 F1 season the Drag Reduction System, or movable rear wings, has perhaps caused the most controversy. This is a system wherein a driver, operating the system from their cockpit, can flatten their rear wing plates, thus reducing aerodynamic drag and increasing speed where the downforce from the rear wing is not required, such as on the straights. The system can be used to the driver's heart's content in practice and qualifying, and only when within a second of the car infront, and at a certain point of the track, in the races, the aim being to create more overtaking. The system in action on the Sauber can be seen in the film below:



The criticisms have been widespread, and have included claims that the system is potentially dangerous due to the increased speed differential of cars it creates, as well as that operating the system could distract the driver. More substantial criticisms have been made by those seeing the system as somewhat false and 'gimmicky' (Mark Webber said it belongs more on a PlayStation), and not in keeping with F1's heritage.

Such claims aren't entirely true though, as movable rear wings in fact have a previous in F1. To find them and their previous creation one has to go back to 1968.