With apologies to The Eagles, this is something that has eluded me for nearly fifty years. I’ve been a fan of open-wheel autoracing since the 1970s. I’ve seen a few doofs and I’ve seen a few greats, in that time.
But they don’t start out great. And this is where the problem begins, for me. A kid comes up from what they call the lesser formulae and makes his F1 debut. Maybe he’s been driving Formula 3 or -2. Maybe he’s been in go-karts and gotten on with a sports car team. However it happens, he gets the call to join an F1 outfit. And when he (they’re almost all men, sorry) does, the odds are huge that he’s not going to be in a top car.
The history of F1 is filled with guys with championships—championships—who got their start in machines like Tyrell or Toleman, Jordan or Arrows, lately Haas and Williams. And this is both good and bad. They’re here, now. They’re at The Show. They get to demonstrate to team bosses and agents and managers and all of the rest just how good they are… but they’re in, I’m sorry, crap cars.
So they drive around for a season or so and in a field of twenty they never place higher than seventeenth, and that was probably owing to retirements from mechanical failures or crashes.
Now, not everyone who gets the job is a future champion. A few years ago, a young Russian with his dad’s money for sponsorship essentially bought a job with a backmarker team. They were a new team and everyone involved was learning the routine as they went along, including our young squire in the fire suit and helmet. Maybe he was intimidated but everyone else. Maybe he was afraid of the cars. At any rate he crashed out of his first race on the first lap. The rest of his career was no better with no points-paying finishes his celebration as basically a rolling chicane on most tracks.
But his teammate did little better. So obviously the car was crap. But how do you measure a man and his results in a crap car? If we could somehow discern that this car was capable of no better than eighteenth and our driver gets into seventeenth or sixteenth somehow, then clearly he is overdriving his car. He is getting the absolute most out of machinery he’s been given. But how do we know it’s a car only capable of umpteenth? Put a world champion in it and maybe it could get into the points, huh? Or… not.
The stars get to the front of the field and they get most of the TV time and that’s as it should be. These are the guys who are doing their best and getting the most out of the best cars. But how do you ever know how good a guy in the back really is?
Tires are sticky. They bear little resemblance to the shoes on your car, which can last for 100,000 miles these days. Racing tires may be worn completely down to the cords after 35-45 laps. At that rate of degradation, they are different every lap. Your job as a racing driver to take your car around the track faster than anyone else’s. Last lap, you could go through the upcoming corner at 87.325 miles per hour. This lap, your car is some ways lighter as you’ve burned off some fuel and maybe turned some oil and water into vapor. A lighter car will be faster. But you’re driving on tires one lap older than last time around these corners. So how do you determine the fastest you can go through this section of the track this time around? You do it by feel.
The guys with the best sense of feel, the most-sensitive middle ears or hineys or whatever it is, will get the most out of their cars. The best a car can do is maybe not something achievable on this lap. Maybe you’ll find the front of the car sliding if you try 87.325 again. Maybe it’ll be the rear tires that start to slide. When you sense this, how will you compensate? Will you dial-in more steering or will you lift off of the throttle? Maybe you can get through here faster by drifting out farther toward the edge of the track. Maybe… not.
But every few years somebody takes one of these guys and puts them in a Real Car and put in an historic effort. Not long ago, seven-time world driving champion Lewis Hamilton came down with COVID. And the folks at Mercedes-Benz called upon a young man named George Russell who had been warming a seat in one of those back-row cars. On that day, with literally only hours of experience in what a good F1 car could be like, Russell qualified second that day and ran as high as second for much of the race. George Russell won his first F1 race, as a full-time Mercedes driver, last weekend.
Did he do it with the best car for the day? Maybe. Probably. Certainly. Was he the best driver? I have no idea. If I had been able to drive that car, I would have qualified on the back row and hung it in a tree in the race. But how do you know? How do you really know how much of a result is due to the skills of the driver and how much is due to excellence of the car he drives?
I don’t know.
