Thierry Boutsen: On a different plane

When compiling a list of famous Belgians, I think instantly of Georges Prosper Remi, better known as Hergé, whose Tintin stories have long been favourites of mine. Then there’s Eddy Merckx, five times winner of the Tour de France. Or the surrealist painter René Magritte. As motor racing fans, we would surely include Jacky Ickx, six times winner of the Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans.

More recently, a quiet man from Brussels came along, raced for five Grand Prix teams, won three races, and impressed a great many people with his speed and skill in the rain. His Formula 1 career began, and ended, on home turf at Spa-Francorchamps. In 1983 his Arrows suspension broke after four laps and, 10 years later, the gearbox on his Jordan-Hart gave up before he could complete a single lap.

In 1997 he put his mind to running what has become a successful business. Thierry Boutsen is president of Boutsen Aviation, purveyor of private jets, and based in Monte Carlo’s Rue Grimaldi. Mounted on the wall of the president’s office is the Williams in which he won the Canadian Grand Prix in 1989, but more of that later.

Despite the woes of the global economy, Boutsen Aviation goes from strength to strength, selling more than 220 aircraft thus far. He still has an interest in motor sport through Ginion Boutsen Racing, which is about to take him back to Le Mans, as a team owner, for the first time since the crash that ended his driving career – and almost so much more – in 1999. But private jets are the day job these days.

Thierry is a busy man, constantly on the move. I finally pin him down, but not for long.

“I did the suspension development on the Williams FW14. Unfortunately I was not the one to take advantage of it…”

I first speak to him on the phone. He is in America. Too far to go. Now he’s back in Monaco. Too many meetings. Azerbaijan is in the diary. Hamburg is next. Then he’s off to London. Getting warmer. So I head for Heathrow where we will relax with coffee. Wrong. The plane is late. Now we’re off to Paddington. So we talk as we take our subterranean journey into the capital.

“I must tell you,” he leans back in his seat, resigned to the train journey, “I went racing because I liked the sport. I liked driving race cars – I hate driving road cars – but most of all I liked the technical part. I was educated as a technical engineer, so I had a lot of input in setting up my car. I knew exactly what I wanted from the car, and always I had long talks with my engineers.” The English is perfect, the accent slips between Brussels and Boston.

“I was lucky, I worked with many great engineers. Sometimes the cars I was given did not work very well – but between us we managed to make them much better. I liked the engineering side of it.

“I never had any doubts about my ability as a driver because, by the time I went to F1, I had been successful in Formula Ford, F3 and F2.

I knew I could be fast. But I didn’t have money. For my first Grand Prix at Spa in ’83 I had to find a great many sponsors and somehow I had to look after them all. I was busy. I never found one big sponsor so I took many smaller ones with me to Arrows, and they came to Spa.

I think there were 22 different sponsors… I needed half a million dollars for the year, and Spa was the best place to start for the publicity I needed. That was the last time I ever paid to drive an F1 car, and in the future I would play musical chairs, five teams in 10 years, never one big backer to keep me in a top team.

“That first race was a big weekend for me, to be in front of my home crowd, and of course I was aware of the history – Willy Mairesse, Olivier Gendebien, the Pilettes, Patrick Nève and most of all Jacky Ickx of course. Remember, we came from a very small country.”

“Ayrton Senna was my best friend in F1, in my life”

As we talk, engineering is a subject Thierry returns to. In that 10-year period he raced for Arrows, Benetton, Williams, Ligier and Jordan, none of whose cars were at their peak when he was there. He was rarely in the right place at the right time.

“My first engineer, at Arrows, was Dave Wass, a very good man, but he had… shall we say, limited access to funds… so it was hard for us to produce anything really competitive. Then it was Rory Byrne and Pat Symonds at Benetton, they were absolutely great people, wonderful to work with on the car. At Williams I worked with Patrick Head, a totally different character, and this was at a time when the cars were not working well and we were always searching for the answer. They’d been overtaken in speed by McLaren and Benetton and it took them time to recover. Adrian Newey arrived too late for me but I did the suspension development on the FW14 that Nigel [Mansell] used to win the championship in 1992. I was very proud of my work as a test driver there but unfortunately I was not the one to take advantage of it…” He smiles, a little ruefully.

“Ligier was not a good time, we had many different engineers, then at Jordan the car was very good, lots of potential, but I could never use it because of my physique, my physical proportions. I was never comfortable in the cockpit, I was too tall, and they never did anything about it because I was only there for a year. In my last race for them at Spa the gearbox broke before I could even do one lap – Eddie knew I was leaving and the gearbox was… well, not a very new one.” He chuckles in the way that Jordan drivers sometimes do.

Two of Thierry’s three Grand Prix victories, Montréal and Adelaide in 1989, came in very wet conditions. Like Ickx before him, he excelled in the rain, racing as if the track was dry, barely putting a wheel off the asphalt while others wiped his spray from their visors.

So what was it about the rain?

“In Belgium you can practice every day in the rain,” he laughs, but he means it. “It rains every day in Belgium – no, I mean I had raced a lot in the wet, and it was never a big problem for me. I was good in wet conditions because it’s all a matter of concentration and attitude. Also, I like driving in the rain very much, because it’s difficult, because it’s a challenge. If you make a mistake, you spin and you are off the track. There is no room for a mistake, and the limits are much more difficult to reach. And then to stay on the limit, lap after lap, is much more demanding than in the dry. It’s a big challenge. You have to know the limits of the car and you have to know your own limits, while staying as close as possible to these limits. You must never let your concentration fade away, you have to be focused and not pay attention to anything else, not the fog on your visor, not the water in your overalls, nothing. It must be total focus.

“You must follow the evolution of the track, you pass the same place every 90 seconds or so, and conditions can change. You have to adapt to how much faster, or slower, you can go. This is a very complex exercise over 70 or 80 laps, and not many people are able to do that. You must accept that driving in the rain can be a nice thing and that it can give you advantages over those who don’t like it. Then you get good at it. This is not instinct, this is like a neck exercise, something you have to do and have to accept. Then you are more at ease with it.

“The wet races helped to prove I was good enough to be in F1 – because most of the time I was driving cars that were not the most competitive – so the rain gave me an opportunity to show what I could do with a car. This was how I could win in Canada and in Australia, I could set the car up for the wet with my engineer, and I knew…,” he smiles broadly, “…I knew I had the ability.”

Rightly or wrongly Boutsen is best known for his victory in the Hungarian Grand Prix on a hot – and dry – day in August 1990. Starting from pole in the Williams-Renault FW13B he led the entire race, inch-perfect over 77 laps and nearly two hours of racing. What made this special was that he kept none other than Ayrton Senna behind him, winning by a mere 0.288 seconds. Nelson Piquet in the Benetton and Riccardo Patrese in the other Williams were half a minute up the road in third and fourth.