Green Races Red. Maurice Hamilton

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СКАЧАТЬ Kuwait at the time of the Gulf War. We would wait until the wind was blowing away from the neighbouring clothes lines, and up she would go. Sometimes the wind would turn. But once tyres start burning, you can’t put them out. The neighbours would be up in arms.

      Then my job would be to crush what was left – but I had to be careful. Grandad would rip all the copper wire out of the cars once they had been burned, but he made a habit of not saying when he was coming in to work! I was up in the crane one day when I caught sight of Grandad’s dog running round the outside of a car I was about to crush with a three-ton weight. He was inside, doing his bit by removing the copper wire...

      There was a very good market for the bits and pieces we removed but, even so, we didn’t have enough spare cash to go motor racing properly. The most we ever spent in a year was £7,000. Mondiale put forward a deal for me to race in England with Murray Taylor, a New Zealander and former journalist who ran a team. Mondiale asked for £7,000 on the understanding that they would pay the rest. My father and I thought this was the way to go.

      Dad arranged an overdraft and paid the money. I finished third in my first event and everything was fine for about three or four races. But then I started slipping back. Reflecting on it now, the Mondiale just wasn’t good enough and the engines were poor. The chassis probably wasn’t stiff enough and that affected the engine. I’m pretty sure that’s what caused the drop-off in performance; the chassis loads up the engine, which means the engine can’t work.

      It is a terrible feeling knowing that you are going to a race and the car isn’t going to be competitive, no matter what you do. It doesn’t matter if it is a Formula Ford or a Ferrari. I was to be reminded of that struggle when I went to Argentina for the third round of the 1996 World Championship.

      The only way to remember the weekend in Buenos Aires is to talk about the two points I collected for finishing fifth. Everything else was a bit of a disaster – starting with qualifying. The car was awful. It was badly affected by the bumps on the track and wouldn’t turn in to the corners. I didn’t know what the F310 was going to do next because it depended on whether I hit the bump with the front or the rear of the car. It was on a knife-edge all the time. I was to discover that such problems do not seem to affect Michael Schumacher as much as everyone else, and that didn’t make me feel any better.

      I had been really looking forward to racing in Buenos Aires. I like the city; it’s a brilliant place, really beautiful. The girls are perhaps not as pretty as everyone claims, but they definitely have a certain something. They’re very attractive, and they add to the warmth generated by a city which is very cosmopolitan; ‘Italians who speak Spanish and think they’re British’ was one interesting interpretation which is probably quite close to the truth.

      On the Wednesday evening, a few of us were invited to President Menem’s residence. He had some lovely paintings from artists no one had heard of, but they were very nice works of art. I thought Carlos Menem was a bit of a cool dude. His daughter is a ‘babe’, very warm and happy, quite laid back. We had pizza and Coke, which was a nice way to do it; very informal and relaxed. President Menem is a motor racing nut. He’s been there and done it; he knows what he is talking about. His daughter is the same, and they’ve both got a sense of humour, unlike most politicians and dignitaries you meet.

      Michael was there, as were people from Shell and Marlboro who support the Ferrari team. There were a number of Argentinian businessmen present and one of them was the country’s biggest wine exporter. He said he had an agent in Oxford and promised to send me samples of their best wine. I said I would be only too pleased to do my bit for Argentinian exports. In fact, by the time practice and qualifying had finished three days later, I was ready for a bottle of something pretty potent.

      The Buenos Aires autodrome is a circuit I like; I had qualified fourth for the previous year’s Grand Prix. But now, because of all the problems associated with the Ferrari, I was afraid of the car. I was almost scared to turn the wheel.

      That’s the difference between a good car and a bad car, it doesn’t matter what Formula we are talking about. When you can arrive at a corner and just turn in without any worries, that’s when the car is good. That’s when you do respectable lap times. If you can’t do that, then you haven’t got a good car. End of story. I could see the difference between myself and Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve in the Williams-Renaults. They could turn into the corners with confidence because the Williams was very predictable. It has a roll-on effect because that sort of thing makes you think you are on top of the job and driving well.

      It’s amazing the difference it can make. For example, you could be driving all day during a test at somewhere like Snetterton in Norfolk and the car isn’t as you like it. You think you are driving like a plonker and you wonder if it’s you or the car. Then you make one change to the setup and go half a second faster almost immediately. All of a sudden you are driving well. You think you are good again, and the car is doing all the work.

      The only positive thing to be said was that Argentina was the sort of circuit where you could probably get away, to a lesser degree, with having such difficulties because there were no high speed corners which would really highlight the problem. Even so, it was so difficult to drive that I couldn’t see where I could pick up any more time; I just couldn’t go quicker.

      I qualified in tenth place. I was a bit annoyed because I had been held up during my fast lap and we could tell from the read-out that my predicted time for that lap would have been worth sixth or seventh place. I had Coulthard ahead of me and he pulled out of the way to let me through. Damon, who was immediately in front of David, didn’t see me and he was slowing in order to try and get a clear piece of road ready for a quick lap. I was briefly trapped between the two cars and that was enough to screw up the lap. It was a bit of a shame, but these things happen.

      Michael had qualified alongside Hill on the front row. You could understand why he gets paid so much money. He’s on the pace every time, whether the car is good, bad or indifferent. He has the ‘Senna Factor’; in other words, even if the car is bad, he can drag it onto the front of the grid. They can make changes to the car and, okay, Michael may say it feels better as a result. But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the car is like, he will simply find the lap time from within himself. That was very evident in Buenos Aires.

      From my point of view, things seemed to go from bad to worse during the warm up on race morning. I did a lap and then the car broke down. It was an engine-related problem and I had no option but to park by the side of the track and watch everyone do their thing. We had made some changes to the set-up: softer on the rear springs to try and make the car more forgiving on the entry to a corner; more front wing in order to try and help the front of the car turn in to the corner.

      Not having had an opportunity to try the changes during the warm-up, I managed a couple of laps before going to the starting grid. The car suddenly felt much better. It was the first time such a thing had happened at this stage in a race weekend. Usually, the car felt at its best with less fuel on board. This time, it actually felt better with more fuel. I approached the race feeling a lot more confident than I had before.

      I made a good start. At the second corner, I was trying to go round the outside of Villeneuve when he moved me wide and put me onto the grass. To be honest, I would have done exactly the same thing had I been Jacques! Heinz-Harald Frentzen passed me as a result; then I got back in front of the Sauber again. And that was it. Stalemate. I was stuck there.

      Barrichello, running in seventh place, was holding everyone up and it became clear that the only way positions were going to change was through different refuelling strategies and faster pit stops.

      For instance, I was holding ninth place and running right behind Mika Hakkinen when he pulled into the pits to refuel. Since I was not due to stop for another eight laps, he had been running with СКАЧАТЬ