Martin Brundle Interview
October 30th, 2004: No end to the thrills ... even after 22 years
Martin discusses his time in Formula 1, plus a review of his book 'Working the Wheel'
Martin Brundle describes his trademark unscripted, unrehearsed, pre-race grid walkabout, as five minutes of sheer lunacy.
"I'm looking around for people to talk to, with cars shooting into their place, in the middle of crowds of people. It's scary," he says.
"Niki Lauda used to be known as 'the Ghost' because he'd cut the engine and zoom silently into his slot. Everyone has headphones on so they can't hear anyway. How there's not a broken leg in there, I don't know."
You glean some notion of a racing driver's personal thrillometer when Brundle then tells you that the lunacy and fright of live television provides a mere 30 per cent of the adrenalin he became addicted to as a driver. "Which is as high as I've found anywhere after Formula One," he says with the matter-of-fact air of someone who has shopped around.
With the self-avowed mentality of "a driver doing a bit of television" – even after eight acclaimed years in the ITV commentary box – Brundle's verdict on the 2004 season is more to do with the fun in the purity of driving a car and challenging a racetrack than with the ratio of overtaking manoeuvres to viewers switching off when Ferrari add another one-two finish to their collection.
"It's all been about Michael's [Schumacher] excellence rather than high drama and big shunts. Michael somehow upped his game. You could see it in the first race in Melbourne and it buried Rubens [Barrichello]. Rubens got himself pumped up, and Michael only went and moved the goalposts. It's been a season of outstanding performance from him and under-performance from other teams, with the exception of BAR and Jenson [Button].
"But the thing that stands out to me is how mind-blowingly fast the cars have been this year. Every lap record has been smashed if it's been dry.
"Having watched these things for 22 years and driven them, the raw pace, the energy, it still takes my breath away. In Jerez, where they've not changed the circuit so you can make direct comparisons, it's eight seconds a lap faster than they were two years ago and that is despite all the things that are supposed to slow them down, the grooved tyres, the cut-away bodywork and so on.
"Maybe," he muses, "maybe we have witnessed the fastest ever Formula One cars."
Brundle has an appealing turn of phrase. A 'Noah's Ark grid' is what you get on a track where the set-up of the car is everything and cars from the same team end up side by side. 'Bullshit Central' sums up everyone's pre-season stance. 'Hooked up' is how he conveys the sense of a driver and car absolutely in tune.
In Working the Wheel, his first book, written with Radio Five Live F1 commentator Maurice Hamilton, he gives a pithy and entertaining account of motor racing as a professional driver: reliving the on and off-track stresses and problems through 'the letter-box slot of a full-face crash helmet'.
In one anecdote, Brundle tells of arriving in Rio de Janeiro on the verge of becoming an F1 driver, and seeing Danny Sullivan, the American driver whose place he was taking at Tyrrell, fend off pretty Brazilian girls.
"When he started pushing them off, I wondered what on earth was wrong with him. But Danny knew the form only too well: while one girl is smiling at you and another is kissing you, a third is removing the wallet from your back pocket."
Brundle recalls how, after a huge crash during qualifying in Monaco in 1984 when witnesses feared he might have been killed, he ran back to the pit lane, jumped in the spare car and was about to resume racing when he happened to ask Ken Tyrrell which circuit they were at. Cue Ken, reaching into the cockpit to switch off the engine.
"It amazes me how I got back in the car when I was completely concussed. Ralf Schumacher wasn't allowed to drive for 12 weeks because he had concussion in June. There's more knowledge of these things now. I just walked away from that accident, went back to the hotel and had some guy apply magnets to my shoulder to fix the pain, whereas now they're all molly-coddled.
"Two things struck me when I re-read the book. One, that I shouldn't be alive. Two, how much F1 has changed. On my first F1 podium in Detroit in 1984, there were Nelson Piquet and Elio de Angelis and me with a few of our mates, mechanics, wives and girlfriends. It was hilarious. Compare that now to the formally structured, highly sponsored, tight procedure. It's changed out of sight."
Drivers may refer today to evocative corners like Imola's Piratella robotically as Turn 8, but Brundle does not take the 'good-old-days approach'.
The sport, like its technology, evolves quickly. He recognises he can't let it go. "I think the guys who went out the other end with a championship or some race wins and maybe a lot more money, they don't have to do it. Some of us have a love of the sport probably greater than those who had huge success in it. Maybe we still have a burning frustration of what we wanted to do, or didn't quite get done."
Story by The Telegraph
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