The Editor: “Toto Wolff asked if she would have done the same thing in his position”
The best part of the summer holidays is getting to grips with the various books I have not had time to read in the previous six months, and this year I alighted on the engaging and witty new book from Bernie Collins, the former race strategist at Aston Martin and subsequently a Sky F1 analyst. In a nod to Adrian Newey’s peerless book How to Build a Car, it is titled How to Win a Grand Prix and it proved a convivial companion to the olives and rosé of France in August.
Full disclosure, the book was written with the aid of Maurice Hamilton, our esteemed contributor and author of our wonderful Flashback… series, which you can read on p49 of this month’s magazine. Maurice, like Bernie, hails from Northern Ireland and the writing has a conversational tone that belies some of the intricacies of the concepts it conveys regarding cumulative degradation curves, fuel-consumption modelling and the like.
It is written for a broader audience rather than a purist one but contains some lovely asides: the battles that she must go through to get the drivers to lay down some rubber in FP2 in the pits to aid a quicker getaway during the race; the frustrations of working out a code for the radio to issue instructions to the driver only for the reply to come, “Yeah, box this lap”; how, when her team (then Racing Point) took victory after Sergio Pérez’s brilliant drive at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix, Toto Wolff came up to her and asked if in his position, would she have made the final (bungled) pit stop that cost Mercedes the race (“It was nice to be asked”). And I didn’t know that most of the teams use the same software – called RaceWatch – to analyse data from past performances, which was created by a company founded by James Vowles.
Despite an all-round pleasant demeanour, you can’t help sensing small doses of payback. Talking about the 2021 Russian Grand Prix when the track went from dry to wet, and where famously those drivers who swapped early from slicks to intermediates benefited while those like Lando Norris, who surrendered a 50sec lead, suffered, she writes: “We told both drivers [Sebastian Vettel and Lance Stroll] to pit because we knew the start of the lap was wet and we needed intermediates. They heard the call but ignored it because the pit entry was dry. They thought we had got it wrong, only to realise a few corners later just why the call had been made. Too late of course.” Nicely done.
The Editor: “Toto Wolff asked if she would have done the same thing in his position”
Reading the book it occurred to me that this is a lesser-reported phenomenon of the recent uptick in interest in F1 from new fans. Those fresh supporters, many of them women and girls and of a younger demographic, are amply catered for with online videos plus of course Netflix’s Drive to Survive juggernaut and indeed from F1’s commendable push into the digital space via social media. But it is also noticeable how the more traditional publishing world has embraced the sport.
And it’s strikingly clear that many of these books are not dry histories or technical overviews but lively insights that take the reader behind the velvet rope explaining what really happens in F1.
To take just the last few months, we have seen two (not counting Collins’) excellent ‘insider’ books published. The best-known is probably the entertaining – if ultimately a little wearing – memoir by former Haas principal Guenther Steiner which wore its target audience (literally) on its sleeve with the none-too-subtle title Surviving to Drive. But I can also recommend F1 Racing Confidential by Giles Richards.
Both tomes’ strongest suit was revealing the details of life on the road and focusing on lesser-known team members rather than the headline-grabbing names and incidents. By doing that they both reveal the true multidimensional nature of the sport that will keep new fans hooked. And like Collins’ How to Win a Grand Prix, by featuring many female protagonists, Richards offers a rare glimpse of the female perspective on the sport by featuring people such as Marianne Hinson, an aerodynamicist at McLaren, the former Sauber head of race strategy Ruth Buscombe, and Mercedes’ marketing director Victoria Johnson.
There is more to come too: later this year Karun Chandhok, our superb Formula 1 columnist, will be taking the target age demographic lower still when he publishes a children’s book about F1, Drive to Victory, which will introduce a whole new generation of fans to the likes of Lando, Lewis, Charles and George. Watch this space for more on this exciting project.
Like F1 itself, coverage of the sport is always at the cutting edge of technology. But it is good to see that some of the old-school ways of following and learning more about it, like books (and magazines!), are in rude health too.
Plus next year on our summer holidays my daughters can join me on the beach with F1 book in hand.
News reaches me of a meeting of minds at Motor Sport’s 100th anniversary dinner in July… My spies report seeing Jonathan Wheatley deep in conversation with Allan McNish. They seemed to be getting on very well. A few weeks later… Wheatley is the new Audi F1 team boss!
Joe Dunn, editor
Follow Joe on Twitter @joedunn90
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