Reflections in the rain in Monte Carlo
Reflections in the
rain .in Monte Carlo
ON LAP 66 rain spots appeared, on lap 7S
there ‘was’ a distinct drizzle and on lap 78 the
race finished. Formula One had beaten the
weather gods; except for the unfortunate
team members who -had to pack everything
up after the. performance. By the time
darkness feU it was awful, the town was
nearly empty, there was little movement,
the rain was falling continously and the filth
and rubbish that the human being seems to
generate and discard, was floating down the
gutters. The Travel Agents should have seen
it, they would have gone into another
. business at once!
When I am at home in Hampshire we
have days a bit like that on which the
Monaco GP was run, when the weather is
sombre and grey, and if I meet my farmer
friend acro~s , the fields he’ll say “mornin’
– ‘ers a funny ole day, ‘ernt er? Cows didn’t
milk like they should ‘er this moroin’ –
funny ole day ‘er is.” As I walked back from
the Casino Square after the race in the
increasing drizzle I could not help
remarking to a colleague, “Funny ole day
‘er’s bin ‘nt ‘er?” Bgth Ligier-Renaults had
finished the race, and both WilliamsHondas;
Senna had it made and his Renault
engine let him down, Alboreto deserved to
win, yet the smooth, calm and unruffled Mr.
Prost had won. “Funny. ole day. Don’t
reckon cows’U milk well int’ momin.”
It had been a good Monaco GP meeting,
one of those where you meet old
acquaintances, meet new ones both young
and old, and all are imbued with enthusiasm
for Grand Prix racing. One young
. Frenchman had seen me racing motorcycles
at Avignon when he was eight years old, and
that was way back before many of today’s
Grand Prix drivers were born. That
youthful visit to the races at Avignon had
fired his enthusiasm for racing and he had
followed it ever since. Another fellow told
me he was born in 1948, the year I first raced
our of England, and he had been reading the
history books and could not believe I was
the same D.S.J. who had ridden on the
World Championship winning sidecar in
1949, when he was one year old. It made his
day when I assured him I was the same
D.S.J. and not a “rel’lica” or “fake”. Made
my day too! A German BMW dealer, and
fellow 328 BMW owner, was forced to come
over and say hello in a restaurant, as he had
been clQse to racing in Germany before he
went to America in 1958, and had enjoyed
happy times at the Niirburgring, Solitude,
Hamburg and the Freiburg hilIclimb. Two
enthusiasts from Jersey engaged me in a
long and pleasant chat in the sunshine of
practice day, about racing, motoring,
motorcycling, in fact the whole gamut of
what enthusiasm is all about. All this I enjoy
enormously, because these are the people
who believe in Grand Prix racing as I do, whose enthusiasm is unbounded, who keep
the continuous thread going through all the
vicissicudes of FISA, FOCA, Sponsors, the
Media, the Big Business, the Engineering,
the Professional Approach, the good and the
bad. Without the enthusiasm and belief
generated by normal people, motor racing
would die. Even our Formula One
“supremo” Mr. B. C. Ecclestone started out
like you and me, with a schoolboy passion
for racing that grew and has never left him.
He was in a Cooper 500 before he was
20 years old, as A.H. tells us in his latest
book “Brabham – The Grand Prix cars”.
Some enthusiasts are content to watch,
others get ambitious and want to organise,
all of which makes the whole thing
continuous, which is essential for survival,
and basically that is why the Monaco GP
took place this year in spite of the gloomy
prognostications of the media last winter.
When you watch Grand Prix racing on
television and listen to Murray Walker, you
may not agree with what he says, but you
cannot deny his enthusiasm for racing, and
he’ll tell you that it came from his “old
man”, Graham Walker. If you don’t know
who Graham Walker was, ask any
motorcycle racing enthusiast. Graham
Walker was one of the enthusiasts who set
me on the right path in my youth .
Apart from watching 750 bhp projectiles
weighing about as much as a Mini, charging
up the hill to the Casino Square, or down the
hill to Mirabeau corner, there are things to
see all around, and for me one of the nicest
was to see “Clay” Regazzoni standing by the
barriers during practice. Since his horrific
accident at Long Beach in 1980 he has been
in a very bad way, and only in the last year
has he begun to appear in public again.
Everywhere I go enthusiasts always ask me
about “Regga”, for though they never knew
him personally, spectators took him to their
hearts when he was racing and have been
concerned ever since. He is still confined to
a wheel chair for moving about, but it was
great to see him standing up watching
practice. I have always raked to “Regga” in
French, but on race morning he told me in
very good English all about a driving-school
he has opened at the Vallelunga circuit near
Rome, where he is teaching handicapped
people not only to drive cirs, but to enjoy
doing it. He has a hand-controlled Ferrari of
his own, but for the school he uses GTV
Alfa Romeos, and before the Grand Prix the
Monaco organisers gave goocf old “Regga” a
15 min parade of cars and drivers to publicise
this new interest that he had “developed.
There are a few bad things in
motor racing, but what a lot of really good
things there are. .
A good thing that came iIto Formula One
a year or two ago and. was quickly and universally
accepted, was the Longines-Olivetti
automatic timing system. Each car has an
individual transmitter mounted in the nose
and as it crosses the timing line ir sets off an
impulse which is recorded by the timing mechanism and this is all coupled in to a vast
and complicated system whereby the time
and speed are displayed on any VDU that is
plugged into the system. At me same time a
printed read-out can be produced and by
this means every lap by every car is logged
down chronologically. After each practice
session Olivetti produce these read-out
sheets, and after the race they produce a
complete run-down listing every car’s lap
time. While this is most useful to people
writing about the race, or making a detailed
study of it, it is a bad thing for drivers. The
top half of the field all think they should
have won the race, and you can hear them
making long-winded explanations to the
media as to why they did not win. If you
have an accurate lap-chart with you, and a
copy of the Longines-Olivetti race-times you
can soon see whether it is worth going on
listening to the non-winners. You will hear
one driver saying “When I was lapping him,
he held me up for three whole laps. Three
whole laps, I was stuck behind him”. A
glance at the lap chart will indicate this particular
moment, for you remember X
coming up to lap Y. You then cross-check to
the Longines-Olivetti time sheets and look
up the lap times for X and find that they
differ by less than one second. Alright, so he
was held up and lost one second on two of
those three laps; but he lost the race by 25
sec! A further study of the times will reveal a
difference of as much as two or three
seconds a lap, when there was no one in
front of him. It wasn’t Y who lost him the
race, X just didn’t win it.
Look at the times of someone like
Alboreto or Prost and you will see an uncanny
consistency that has to be admired.
Variations of six or eight lOths of a second
over 20 or 30 laps. You recall Prost catching
.. a slow car in a twisty part of the circuit and find that the difference in his lap time was
hardly noticeable. If he loses some fractions
on a couple of slow comers, he makes it up
by going that little bit harder on the next
three, and his lap time remains hardly
altered. I don’t suppose he does this consciously,
it is a reflex action that is the hallmark
of a real winner.
Brakes were clearly of paramount imPQrtance
:at ‘Monte Carlo, especially if you
watched the cars down into Mirabeau
corner, or into the harbour-front chicane. A
number of drivers were heard to say that
their brakes disal1peared after only a few
laps, half distance; . or near the end of the
, race, but a study of their lap times does not
…. . reflect this, and if you look at the lap on
< ~_ which they made their fastest lap in the race,
. as shown on our starting grid, it is surprising how fast they went “. . . with no brakes
. . .” . Another interesting thing is revealed
on the time-sheets, and that is how quickly
some drivers recover from a spin or trip up
an escape road. Television viewers will have
seen part of Alboreto’s excursion on the oil
from the PatreselPiquet accident. He reversed
out but seemed to waste an age getting
the Ferrari engine to pick-up and run
cleanly again, before he stormed off. His lap
times are interesting. Lap 17 – 1 min
26.025 sec; lap 18 – I min 40.276 sec; lap
19 – I min 27.402 sec; lap 20 – I min
26.868 sec. He lost 14 seconds having his
“moment” and that included getting back
up to full speed up the hill to the Casino. His
next lap was 1 Y2 seconds slower than he
had been doing, while he gO! back into his
pace and passed Ste Devote comer with
caution, and on the next lap he was back on
his pace, and went even faster on the next
three laps.
For a model of consistency I quote a few
of Prost’s lap times later in the race. Lap 51
– I min 24.625 sec; lap 52 – I min 24.563
sec; lap 53 – I min 24.745 sec; lap 54 – I
min 24.383 sec. A variation of less than half
a second round the streets of Monaco, and
you and I can barely visualise one second,
let alone half a second. People tell me Alain
Prost is very good, and I think they are right.
While the Monaco GP is not the best one
during a season, it is good that we should
have it every year, for it keeps one’s sense of
proportion intact. You have got to have a
sense of proportion to unleash 750 bhp up
the hill from Ste Devote, and even more so
to unleash it down the hill from the Casino
Square; or perhaps it is that you have to
have a sense of disproportion! Anyway, the
Monte Carlo circuit makes a change from
clinical autodromes, for with its changing
cambers, changing surfaces, bumps,
ripples, manhole covers, minimal run-off
areas, fast comers and tight hairpins, there
is never a dull moment. Clinical, in the sense
of over-exaggerated safety, cannot apply to
Monte Carlo, and clinical cannot apply to
the sight of the rubbish floating down the
gu”ers in the rain on Sunday night after the
race was over. -D.S.J.