Vol. 16 No. 11 · 9 June 1994
page 29 | 1972 words
Diary
Geoffrey Hawthorn
Skill had been killing Formula One. In the early Nineties, Frank Williams and Renault had together been producing cars that were superior to the rest. The superior drivers wanted to be in them. Williams made more money, and their cars got better. The result was increasingly predictable processions round the circuits. Nigel Mansell won the championship in a Williams-Renault in 1992, Alain Prost in 1993. The interest in the past thirty races or more had been reduced to seeing whether McLaren or Ferrari or Benetton could change their tyres more quickly, and how many of those jostling in inferior vehicles at the back hit each other, ran off or broke down. The television audiences, which had risen to extraordinary heights by the mid-Eighties, were falling. Bernie Ecclestone, vice-president of the controlling Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, was said to be determined to stem the loss of income. Last year, Max Mosley, the FIA’s president, announced some changes. Williams’s advantages, which only one or two other teams could afford to emulate, would go. There was to be no more electronically controlled suspension to keep the cars level over bumpy tracks, no more traction control to stop their wheels spinning at the start or in the wet, no more automatic boosts to the throttle during gear changes, no more anti-lock brakes, and no more telemetry to allow technicians to adjust running cars from the pit. The top teams were furious. The rest were delighted. Competition, it seemed, might return to the track.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 14 · 21 July 1994
From Max Mosley
Geoffrey Hawthorn’s interesting piece on Ayrton Senna’s death (LRB, 9 June) suggests that recent rule changes in Formula One may have contributed to his accident. No one who works in Formula One would agree. To say of the banned electronic devices, ‘without them, even in the most skilled hands, the cars can easily go out of control,’ is quite simply wrong. Before the devices were invented, the difficulty of controlling a car was determined by its design and set-up. The same remained true with the devices in place and is still true now they have gone. The devices just added another dimension.
It is not true to suggest that cars without active suspension, traction control etc are intrinsically difficult to control. There was no sudden drop in incidents when the electronics came in. All that happened was the cars went faster, which is why the devices were fitted in the first place. Ayrton Senna won three world championships without electronic devices. To attribute his accident to their removal is a bit of post hoc, propter hoc.
The rule changes were not introduced to stop Williams’s domination – in fact most informed opinion believed the changes would help Williams by increasing the importance of engine power. The new rules were intended to stop the evolution of cars which would largely drive themselves. Such cars will be available in the next thirty or so years for road use, but would have been with us much sooner in Formula One. They would, we thought, destroy Formula One as a sporting contest. It was best to stop them at a very early stage.
On the roads, the more driver aids a car has and the better it holds the road, the safer it will be – provided it is driven responsibly. In competition, the reverse is true. Success depends on driving at the limits of performance of both car and driver. Electronic driver aids and better road-holding raise these limits. Higher limits mean higher speeds so that when the car crashes (which it will, sooner or later, as a result of driver error or mechanical failure), it does so at higher speed. In racing, driver aids do not help the driver avoid errors, they merely raise his personal limit and thus the stakes.
Max Mosley
President, Fédération Internationale
