Formula One Features

Last year was a dramatic season for Formula 1 racing - but for all the wrong reasons: fatal accidents, cheating, fire and politics snatched the headlines, while out on the circuits the racing was anything but exciting. Michael Schumacher dominated, winning nine of the 12 races he took part in (although one was taken away from him afterwards). The season ended with two storming races in Suzuka and Adelaide and so - because F1 has such a short memory - the tedium of the midseason has been forgotten. This year has been much the same - with little in the way of excitement up front.

The opening Grand Prix in Brazil will see, for the first time in many years (ever?), a complete grid of brand new Formula 1 cars. The reason for this is simple: no design used last year can be modified to meet the FIA 1995 Formula 1 Technical Regulations.

When the Larrousse F1 team unveiled its 1994 package a year ago, things seemed to be going well for Gerard Larrousse's team. There was a big sponsorship deal from the BSN Group (now called Danone), which was the third biggest consumer company in Europe. It's Kronenberg offshoot, by itself, was the third largest brewing company in the world behind Kirin and Heineken. The team also announced that former F1 driver Patrick Tambay and his partner Michel Golay had taken a share of the team through their Fast Group SA sponsorship agency.

Jean Alesi has startling eyes. After one of his famously wild qualifying laps, Jean's eyes are wide open. If he was a cartoon character they would be standing out on stalks. But the most startling thing is that they are a piercing blue, like tiny bright swimming pools. And that is a surprise because Alesi is dark-skinned - even swarthy - and the chilling blue eyes sit beneath bushy dark eyebrows.

Formula 1 racing is full of macho imagery: throbbing engines, handsome devil-may-care racers and glamorous pretty girls. Novelists would have you believe that the glitzy world of Grand Prix racing is full of sexual adventures. But is it really? Are the drivers as hungry for sex as they are for success? And are they constantly pestered by drooling pitlane popsies begging for a sound seeing-to? Or have the F1 heroes of today discovered AIDS and monogamy?

Formula 1 is not a very enlightened business when it comes to sexual equality. It is a macho sport in which, traditionally, women have looked pretty, made sandwiches or, in the old days before computer timing, used stopwatches. Today things are changing. There are still plenty of bimbos hanging out, but increasingly girls are winning important jobs.

There will be a radical change in F1 design next year, but most of the design parameters will not be changing. The 1995 rules demand that the underside of the car - which is currently flat - has to be 'stepped' so that on either side of the central section of the car, the bottom of the car must be raised by 2.5cm. This may not seem much but it will have a dramatic effect, removing as much as 50% of the downforce generated by the current flat bottom.

When Frank Williams announced that he had hired David Coulthard, he was asked why he was hiring an unknown 23-year-old Scotsman to replace the late Ayrton Senna.

Formula 1 has a language all of their own which cane be rather difficult to understand. Here we offer you a few of the more common phrases which one hears in a Grand Prix paddock.

If you talk to the engine builders in the Formula 1 paddock most will tell you that the new 3-litre regulations will not make a huge difference when they are introduced next year. After the accident at Imola the FIA demanded that Formula 1 horsepower levels be reduced to around 600 horsepower next year and proposed a fuel-flow valve to achieve this. None of the engine men wanted such restrictions and, after a meeting at Ferrari's headquarters in Maranello, Italy, they agreed unanimously to come up with the idea of a return to a 3-litre formula, just as Formula 1 had between 1966 to 1985.

There's been a lot of talking in Grand Prix racing in 1994 about cheating. But how easy is it to hoodwink the Formula 1 authorities. Cheating is not something which Formula 1 racing is used to seeing. The sport has long been dominated by a clique of self-made team bosses, who operate with what might best be described as the morals of secondhand car dealers. They have always had a code of honor. Deliberate cheating was taboo because stability is the best environment in which to make money.

Rubens Barrichello doesn't look like a racing driver. He is short and rather tubby. He has sleepy eyes, a big nose and a huge lop-sided grin. Like most 22-year-old men his favorite film star is Julia Roberts and his ideal dinner date is Cindy Crawford.

Just before the 1989 French Grand Prix Ken Tyrrell signed a sponsorship deal with Camel cigarettes. He needed the sponsorship money to run his underfunded Formula 1 team and if that meant he was unable to continue with his Marlboro-backed lead driver Michele Alboreto, it was a decision he had to take. Ken Tyrrell is a hard man.

When there are big accidents everyone wants to find someone to blame and the governing body of the sport is an easy target.

Patrick Head, Frank Williams's partner at Williams Grand Prix Engineering and the team's technical director, is not a man who likes the politics in F1. Patrick is a racer, a man who gets his satisfaction from beating his opposition on the race track, by designing a better car, finding a technological advantage and doing a better job.

Johnny Herbert hasn't achieved a hell of a lot in his Grand Prix career - but no-one in Formula 1 has any doubt that the man from Romford has what it takes to be a Grand Prix winner. And that is Herbert's big problem. Everybody wants him. Two of the top Grand Prix teams - Williams and McLaren - have both shown interest in him but now he is stuck with a bulletproof contract with Team Lotus and team boss Peter Collins is not planning to let him walk away.

At the Italian Grand Prix in Monza in 1992 Damon was at a low ebb. He had taken over Giovanna Amati's drive with the struggling Brabham team and had managed to qualify just twice before the team collapsed after the Hungarian Grand Prix. And so Damon went to Monza out of work, to look around and talk and see if he could sort something out for 1993. He didn't have any sponsorship money to promise and prospects did not look good.

This year Frank Williams and his Formula 1 team - Williams Grand Prix Engineering - are trying to win a third consecutive double World Championship victory - aiming for both the Formula 1 Drivers' and Constructors' titles to follow up those won in 1992 with Nigel Mansell and last year with Alain Prost.

Peugeot will enter Formula 1 with McLaren in 1994, having long resisted the challenge. For years Peugeot Talbot Sport, under its own little Napoleon - Jean Todt - had collected Trophies and titles in World Championship rallying, on rally raids like the daunting Paris-Dakar, at Pikes Peak hillclimbs in the United States and more recently in the World Sportscar Championship and at the Le Mans 24 Hours. In June last year Peugeot achieved an historic 1-2-3 at Le Mans. Todt had wanted to go to F1 with a complete Peugeot team, building chassis and engines. It was a dream and when the board of Automobiles Peugeot told Jean that they could not pay for his plan, he took up an offer to join Ferrari. Peugeot named former Grand Prix driver Jean-Pierre Jabouille as Todt's replacement.

The Formula 1 silly season is now virtually over as the driver market has moved along quite quickly in the last few weeks.

The 1994 season may well be remembered as the year Peugeot finally came to Formula 1, having long resisted the challenge to battle it out with other manufacturers where it really matters. For years Peugeot Talbot Sport, under its own little Napoleon - Jean Todt - had collected Trophies and titles in World Championship rallying, on rally raids like the daunting Paris-Dakar, at Pikes Peak hillclimb in the United States and more recently in the World Sportscar Championship and at the Le Mans 24 Hours. In June last year Peugeot achieved an historic 1-2-3 at Le Mans.

Mercedes-Benz is one of the great names of motor sport, the Stuttgart company's involvement in racing going back to 1900 when the Austro-Hungarian consul in Nice Emil Jellinek asked Gottlieb Daimler to build his a run of 36 new racing cars. Daimler agreed that these could be called after Jellinek's daughter Mercedes. Success was immediate and at regular intervals the company has appeared in Grand Prix racing, won and then disappeared again.

"I came to Adelaide to try as hard as usual and try to win the race. In fact I was probably trying harder than usual in qualifying so as to have the best car possible for the race on Sunday.

Jean-Pierre Jabouille is back in Formula 1. In the late 1970s he was one of the stars of the sport but after a huge accident in Canada in 1980 which left him with two badly broken legs he drifted away from Grand Prix racing, unable to drive F1 cars competitively. He did a bit of racing in France and ran a restaurant in Paris.