Book: 'Working the Wheel'
Martin's first book entitled 'Working the Wheel' was published in 2004
Together with F1's respected journalist, Maurice Hamilton, Brundle brings his infallible humour and insight, his experiences and opinion, to the worlds greatest circuits and its classic races. From the camber at Monaco, which will leave your wheels hanging in the air, to Melbourne and the dynamics behind the most dramatic crash of the decade.
Encompassing such details as neck-snapping acceleration, smashing cars worth a quarter of a million and the amount of sweat a driver will lose in a race, this is a rare F1 book - funny, opinionated, evocative and dramatic.
Here is an extract:
If you took a straw poll among Formula 1 people, I wouldn't mind betting that Melbourne would top the list of favourite races. It's not just that the season opens in a lively, cosmopolitan city - and usually in fine weather at a time when Europe remains in the grip of winter. The fact is that the Albert Park circuit sets the world standard for racetracks in temporary surroundings. I'd even go so far as to say it's better than many of the permanent facilities we visit during the course of the season. But, initially, we didn't think that possible because Melbourne had a very tough act to follow.
The truth was that no one wanted to leave Adelaide, the previous home of the Australian Grand Prix. Melbourne - or wherever you cared to mention - couldn't possibly be better. The final race in South Australia had taken place in November 1995 and it had been a very emotional affair with lots of sad goodbyes. We faced the prospect not only of switching cities, but also appearing first rather than last in the racing calendar. There is, for obvious reasons, a major difference between the opening race of the season and the one that closes it. The first is tense and full of anticipation, the other more laid-back and relaxed. So in Adelaide in 1995 we were contemplating the fact that, in less than four months, we would be back in Australia, but in a completely different venue. We all felt that Melbourne would have to go some to match Adelaide, never mind beat it.
That mood was not helped by arriving in Melbourne in March 1996 to find it was a much bigger city and the Grand Prix was viewed as just another event threatening to clog the streets. In fact, the track was nothing like Adelaide or any other street circuit. Laid out within Albert Park in the city's suburbs, the track had none of the sharp angles around buildings and the street furniture of everyday life. It was a parkland circuit, with long straights and many similar corners. A further contradiction was that, even though these roads were used all year round, they were not subjected to the heavy traffic, and resulting oil and diesel that you would normally associate with a street circuit.
We soon discovered that the circuit was challenging. Because the long, fast corners were so similar, finding a lap time was difficult. If the car was poor in one corner, it was slow everywhere. But there were also lots of idiosyncrasies. A couple of the corners were unsighted and under a canopy of trees. There was not much grip and the corners had difficult turn-ins and quite high-speed exits. But, because grip was low, drivers would regularly slide off the road. It really was quite tricky and, of course, in that first year, we did not have the benefit of testing there beforehand. All in all, it was quite an adventure and we soon forgot about comparisons with Adelaide. In any case, my first association with Melbourne was to be pretty dramatic from beginning to end.
I had joined Jordan for 1996 and got off on the wrong foot when my Peugeot engine blew up on the first day, followed by another engine failure the day after. That meant a loss of vital track time and I then had to play catch-up all weekend. The level of grip was changing all the time, which made setting up the car problematic. Whenever something strange or different happens to the handling, whatever the circuit, you need to know whether it is because of the set-up changes you've made to the car or simply because the track is changing as more tyre rubber is laid down.
There was also a slight element of panic. I was with a new team and I wanted to go well. Rubens Barrichello in the other Jordan-Peugeot was hooked up and there is always pressure when your team-mate is producing the lap times and you are not. It was a sign of clutching at straws when I took the set-up that Rubens had chosen for his car and copied it onto mine. It didn't help; I qualified nineteenth of twenty-two starters. Just to rub it in, Rubens was eighth.
But things seemed to be on the up - they couldn't get much worse - on race morning. The car felt good during the thirty-minute warm-up. I was really charged and determined to make a lot of places in a hurry. I had a tremendous start and passed many cars going towards Turn 3. There was a nice big gap opening up, as the drivers further ahead were following each other towards the right-hander. There is no doubt that I was fired up and ready to brake very late and deep into the corner.
This may have been a parkland track but the cars were reaching 190 mph on the approach to Turn 3 and I was partially unsighted while following another car. It's just like driving in fog. You are familiar with the road ahead but it never seems to arrive quite the way you remember it. Your sense of judgement becomes impaired. It's like that in an F1 car. Your mind is momentarily on something else, you can't fully see and you've travelled quite a distance when the track suddenly narrows on the approach to a corner and you realise you are carrying too much speed. It's the start of the race, your brakes and tyres are not up to temperature and you've got a lot of fuel on board. It is going to be tricky.
Nonetheless, I was doing nicely when, all of a sudden, David Coulthard and Johnny Herbert ran into each other and their cars twisted across the track at point-blank range to fill the space I needed to slow down my car. Doing the wrong side of 170 mph, I hit the back of David's McLaren and that launched me into the sky.
Video of the accident in Melborne, 1996
I can picture it now, frame by frame. Seeing everything in slow motion is an ability you have as a racing driver when something happens in front of you. You will see a car spin and, even though you are travelling at warp speed, you work out that he is going to spin to the left, so you calmly decide to go to the right. The whole thing slows down. I don't know how that happens. I've heard other sportsmen say the same about this ability to go into slow motion. I had it happen on the road fairly recently. A driver in front of me suddenly stopped for a pheasant on a country road and came to a complete halt without any warning. It was my racing experience that slowed the whole thing down in my mind and prevented me from going into the back of that car. But I didn't have time for any of that in Melbourne on 10 March 1996.
Normally, you would ride up the back of the car in front and then crash back onto the track. But the Jordan kept climbing. My first thought was: 'This is going to be a big accident.' The second thought was: 'Please don't let me go into the trees.' I remember the car rolling over and, at the time, it seemed to be happening very slowly. My next thought was: 'Don't let me land upside down in the gravel run-off area. If I do that, the roll-over bar behind my helmet will dig in, my head will take the impact - and I'm dead.'
Still upside down, I passed Jean Alesi - who was sixth or seventh; that's how far I had travelled - as he came into the corner. As luck would have it, I landed on the final piece of Tarmac before the start of the gravel. So that was OK - until the car started to barrel roll.
Photographs taken at the time show that I was still trying to steer the car. That was an instinctive reaction because, in quite a few big accidents, you can still do something with the car to the bitter end, a tactic which had already saved my life in an accident two years earlier. You work the steering or the brake pedal in order to help minimise the impact. The pictures show that I was applying steering lock even though there was only one wheel left on the car and the nose was about to be buried in the wall. I was hanging on!
The car landed upside down and there was not a single mark on me - which is more than can be said for what was left of the Jordan-Peugeot. Then I felt fluid begin to run all over me. I thought it was fuel and I started to panic. I had a big fear of burning to death in a racing car: it must be the most terrible way to go. I realised later that it was actually water from my drink bottle, but I could smell fuel because, although I didn't know it, the car was broken in half. Regardless, I wasn't going to hang around and work out the exact nature of this fluid. My priority was to get out - and fast. There was a gap no bigger than a briefcase between the top of the rollover bar behind my head and the front of the cockpit. Still upside down, I undid my seat belts and more or less fell through the hole.
Because of the violence of the accident, most people thought I was dead. But I did not have a single bruise on my body. Like jumping off a tall building, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. The same applies in a racing car when it crashes. All the violence and bits flying off are actually dissipating energy. The trouble comes for the driver when the car comes to a sudden stop against something solid.
I got out of the car and thought: 'Would you believe it? They've stopped the race. That's a bit of luck! I'll run back and get in the spare car.' It didn't occur to me that they had stopped the race because of my accident. I honestly thought there had been a major incident elsewhere on the circuit. It simply did not register just how big a crash I'd had. Or, at least, not until I thought to look at what was left of my car.
I took a walk around the wreck and I remember thinking: 'What have I done? My first racing lap for Jordan in F1 - and the car's a write-off.' It was broken like an egg. I was more embarrassed than anything else. When you have smashed a car badly, you just want to get away from it, pretend this didn't happen, that it wasn't you. I focused on getting back to the pits for the spare car.
The marshals were panicking. So often in this situation, drivers shrug off well-meaning officials. You are out of the car, you are hot, bothered, fed-up and hyper. People start getting hold of your overalls and your first reaction is to push them away and say you're fine. Of course, they are only trying to do their job and they need to make sure you're not concussed. All I thought about was getting a lift back to the pits and the spare car because it was too far to walk and I knew there would be a restart thanks to the race being only one lap old. In this situation the marshals were really good and quickly understood that I was OK. They produced a minibus, I jumped in and the driver went for it. It was a heavy old vehicle with medical kit rolling round in the rear, he was on the wrong line into every corner and I really thought we were going to crash.
We managed to reach the Jordan garage, which was buzzing. There were all sorts of emotions running wild, not least because at one point they had thought I must be dead. Not only was I alive, I was standing there asking for the spare car. I reassured everyone that I was fine and it seemed to me, perhaps wrongly, that I was the calmest person in the garage - followed by my wife, Liz. I had given her a wink when I walked in and she knew straight away that everything was OK.
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