As the Japanese Grand Prix looms, two teams will be aching to celebrate victory -in their own separate ways. Maurice Hamilton reports
If Michael Schumacher brings the world drivers’ championship to Ferrari this weekend, the town of Maranello in northern Italy will go berserk – even in the early hours of Sunday when the results of the Japanese Grand Prix become known.
Chapel bells will ring and motorists will rush, horns blaring, to and from the Ferrari factory in joyful celebration. If the home team fails yet again, the locals will act as if attending a wake.
In Woking in Surrey, there will be no obvious reaction, win or lose. The grey external sun-blinds protecting the windows of the McLaren facility (“factory” is not a word McLaren cares to use) will continue to present a forbidding appearance. The only sound will be the rumble of an early-morning train on the nearby line to Waterloo. No one will register that this is the headquarters of one of the slickest and most highly motivated companies in Britain.
No one, that is, except the 750 employees who form part of the TAG- McLaren Group, of which the racing team is a high-profile part.
McLaren does not suffer from an identity crisis as such. There is a section within the company which focuses on brand awareness, but this department’s proud aim is to reflect the image of a professional business rather than, in their words, “a razzmatazz race team”. Which, of course, is precisely what Ferrari is all about. Or, at least, appears to be.
Ferrari is owned by Fiat and therefore operates under big company codes and practices. But only to a certain point. There is nothing whimsical about Ferrari and yet the passion for racing remains a part of the team even though its founder, the irascible Enzo Ferrari, died more than a decade ago at the age of 90. It could hardly be otherwise in a country where grand prix racing comes second only to football and Ferrari is considered to be the national team on four wheels.
In Britain, McLaren is merely one of a number of entrants from those shores taking part in the Formula One championship. There is very little sentiment attached to McLaren, which is scarcely surprising since emotional responses are not encouraged within the team itself.
In Teamwork, published recently by CollinsWillow, McLaren’s managing director, Ron Dennis, explains why he disapproves of “this enthusiastic schoolboy reaction” in the moment of victory. “When you see a doctor delivering a baby you don’t see him jumping up and down,” says Dennis. “He has a professional approach to something that is an emotional moment. That’s the way we want to be. The moment you stop being professional is the moment you start the downward spiral to failure.”
Such a clinical response, apart from demonstrating a questionable understanding of human nature, suggests that a race win has been manufactured by someone else and that the McLaren employees are only there to help it along. That’s not what Dennis meant to say, of course, since he was responsible for instigating the internal structures and production processes which make McLaren such an effective fighting force.
Eighty per cent of equipment valued at 8-million in the machine shop is controlled by computer. The design accuracy is within 0,0004mm. Manual skills also have their place, the team in the fabrication shop crafting more than 70 items for each car. The brake and clutch pedals, for example, are individually designed and hand-built to suit each driver. It takes 40 hours of pattern cutting, bending, welding and assembling to make one upright capable of carrying the enormous forces exerted by a wheel and suspension components when cornering at 270kph.
Each chassis is made up of more than 5E000 parts and Dennis can identify most of them. Indeed, if he put his mind to it, he could make a respectable attempt at producing each one, thanks to having worked as a racing mechanic before moving into management, by running his own company and then taking over the ailing McLaren team in 1980.
It was Dennis’s dirt-under-the- fingernail heritage which prompted a fastidious approach as he put his former occupation behind him, but only in a physical sense, since that experience allows for an empathy between top manager and lowly mechanic which is missing from many teams. Ferrari, for instance.
Luca di Montezemolo, nephew of the Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli, has probably never got his hands grubby in his life. His route to chair of Ferrari came via law school in the United States, the legal department at Fiat, team management at Ferrari, when Nikki Lauda won the championship in 1975 and 1977, Cinzano, organiser of the World Cup in 1990 and a return to rescue a racing team which was in danger of self-destructing. He is, as Lauda puts it, a “fully-fledged protg of the Agnelli dynasty”.
He is also no fool. Di Montezemolo was not afraid to delegate in order to bring method to the Latin chaos as the team pulled in several directions at once, each department blaming the others for three seasons without a win, never mind a championship.
The first move was to install Jean Todt as team manager in 1993. It was a pragmatic decision, not because Todt had masterminded Peugeot’s world championships in rallying and sportscar racing, but because he was French. In some deeply entrenched quarters of the Ferrari establishment, this amounted to heresy.
Then Montezemolo loosened the Fiat purse strings and also talked Marlboro into contributing to the 16- million annual retainer necessary to tempt Michael Schumacher on board for 1996. Eddie Irvine was signed as a useful number two. When Schumacher then persuaded Ross Brawn, the technical director with whom he had won two championships at Benetton, to move from England to Italy, all of the elements were in place.
Ferrari had changed. And yet, in some respects, it had not changed at all. The pedigree and the associated expectation remained. An initial run of failure in 1996 as the Ferraris retired more often than they finished prompted Gazzetta dello Sport, the influential daily sports newspaper, to write: “This mythical car, which has made motor racing history, seems to have become a circus car, exploding in the hands of clowns.”
Such relentless pressure only adds to the emotion which courses through the Ferrari garage. But at least the presence of Todt and Brawn helps keep it under control without denying observers the curious attraction of a team which appears to be on the verge of disorder.
The fact that chaos rarely erupts these days is the latest twist to a myth which was worked so assiduously by Enzo Ferrari, an unscrupulous man who treated each driver as merely another employee and would not hesitate in setting one against the other. They would put up with it because driving one of the bright red cars was – and still is – considered to be a privilege.
Driving for McLaren does not have quite the same cachet. For a start, the cars are grey. They possess the most immaculate and tasteful paint scheme in Formula One. But they are still predominately grey, as are the carefully co-ordinated uniforms handled by a team which keeps a clothing manager and a sewing lady in full-time employment.
At Ferrari, the cars have been disfigured by brash sign-writing and members of the race team appear to have been clad with remaindered items from a fancy dress shop. Yet there is something faintly appealing about these seemingly haphazard methods.
It will be the same next Sunday. If Ferrari win the drivers’ title for the first time since 1979, two decades’ worth of bottled-up passion will explode. If Mika Hakkinen and McLaren take the honours, there will be celebrations – of course there will – but the impression is that they will have been manufactured just as carefully as the car which brought this unwelcome diversion from the serious business of attempting to be perfect.
ENDS