The Ligier JS11's invisible advantage
Gerard Ducarouge, exhausted by months of off-season toil and the heat of an Argentinian afternoon, was only vaguely aware of the two Lotus engineers looking at his car as the…
Ferrari team-mates they were, and always on the best of terms, professionally and personally. Forty years on, Mario Andretti and Jacky Ickx came to London for Motor Sport’s inaugural Hall…
Through most of 1958, ‘Big Bill’ France worked flat-out to build his long-planned dream of a race track called the Daytona International Speedway. France spent more than five years trying…
This is it, probably his last chance. Michael Schumacher has been staring at the rear wing of the McLaren for the first 37 laps of the Japanese Grand Prix. His…
There are racing drivers who do not look like racing drivers – for example, Bobby Rahal, bless his fireproof socks – and there are those who do. I cannot cite…
You might think the man who gave Ferrari their first GP win, humbled Nuvolari, won Le Mans twice, and upset Alfa Romeo's seemingly invincible apple-cart in both its pre- and…
Colin Chapman’s privileged access to the Ford-Cosworth DFV ended at the close of the Formula 1 race season in 1967. What followed we now regard as the DFV era, but…
The image is clear in my mind's eye: a ball of first-lap spray containing two Williams-Renaults, Karl Wendlinger's Sauber, Michael Schumacher's Benetton and Ayrton Senna's trim McLaren MP4/8 tagging on…
The parallels are obvious: Al Unser Jnr and Michael Andretti, sons of IndyCar legends and born within a year of each other, each take the CART title and a great…
Why are we drawn to this sport? Through my 20-odd years as a Grand Prix journalist, I have been repeatedly surprised by the drivers’ lack of childhood enthusiasm for motor…
Few of Formula 1’s host nations are as dependably capricious as Japan. The ground rules were laid at Fuji in 1976, when James Hunt tiptoed through the best part of…
F1 has moved on since early 2011 and the crash that robbed Robert Kubica of his F1 career. But Nigel Roebuck can't help thinking what might have been
It was at Monza in 1981 that I asked Chris Pook how ticket sales were going for the inaugural Formula 1 race in Las Vegas. “Terrible,” he muttered, and I…
During my time at Williams I have been privileged to compete against a number of designers whose work I have respected but tried to beat on track. Outstanding among these…
It is fair to say history has not been kind to the Aston Martin DB3. Relative to expectations then, and seen now in the light of what was to follow…
There’s fact, and then there’s opinion. Rarely are the two the same. By means of a wholly inadequate segue, take the Porsche 914. When it was new, motoring hacks couldn’t…
Being up against a superstar is tough. Many drivers must have thought that, with a shift of history's timescale, they could have been top dog – if only they weren't on…