I will be in front of my TV on Friday morning to watch the first real F1 action in 2020.
The Red Bull ring (as it is now known) brings back a lot of mixed emotions and a place I’ve been going to for almost 40 years.
One of the lighter memories was coming out of a country restaurant to find a rival team manager’s rental car in an ‘elevated’ position on four stout beerhall tables……
In 1983 I was there with a pair of F3 cars supporting the GP. Martin Brundle and Allen Berg qualified and finished first and second beating local hero Gerhard Berger by a country mile.
Eddie pumps up Allen Berg whilst I check Martin is all good to go from pole position.
Jackie Stewart was overheard saying to Ken Tyrell that ‘that Brundle boy looks really good in a car to me’
Martin would be in a Tyrell in F1 car the following year.
Eddie Jordan, Martin and myself flew back on the Sunday evening with the rest of the team following by road on the Monday. However, as we got to work on Monday morning, we heard that our Mercedes transporter had run out of brakes on one of the mountain passes and plunged down a ravine. Martin’s number one mechanic Rob had been killed and two other crew members were in hospital. By lunchtime I was back at Heathrow and on my way to pick up the pieces…as it turned out, quite literally.
It was like an air crash. Just pieces. After the hospital visits, were worked in torrential rain to load any salvageable parts back on to a truck and return them to Silverstone. Our simple task then was to rebuild a team, a number of lives and 2 cars in 10 days to take on Ayrton Senna at the next British F3 round. We didn't win that one, but came second and stayed in the tile hunt. We were sure that is what Rob would have wanted.
In 1985 I was running a F3000 car, again supporting the GP. I looked up from my work in the paddock behind the pits to see Andrea De Crasheris cartwheeling his Ligier over the wet grass. He landed the right way up, got out the car and walked down past me, helmet in hand, to the F1 paddock. There was mud down the back of his overalls to the waist.
Five years previous to this, on my very first motor racing test session, I’d helped get him out of his F3 car on the wrong side of a spectator bank at Goodwood. He had ‘previous’ and would continue to have many more incidents, miraculously without major injury.
In 1997 I was doing a private test with Dr Thomas Becher in a McLaren GT. He would go on the be Chairman of Bugatti.
We had just concluded a good test when I had a phone call to say my 17 year old son had sustained serious leg injuries in a road motorcycle incident. I couldn’t get back until the following day so that became a very anxious night.
After a few operations and 8 weeks in plaster he made a recovery good enough to have a 20 year career in motorcycle racing. His worst injury on circuit was a trip to out patients to dress a grazed knuckle after getting it caught under the handle bars after a little ‘lowside’
So my experience is that it is safer to have incidents on the circuit than on the road.
I’m sure this weekend will not be incident free, lets just hope they are all safe ones.
www.planetf1.com
it'll be an interesting one and we'll soon know if Ferrari were sand bagging and are genuinely useless at having a massive budget and producing a cr4p car. Personally, I'm looking forward to see how both Williams and McClaren will do.
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