The Mechanic’s Tale

by Steve Matchett

  Dave, however, insisted that we were riding in the perfect thermal current now and that to go any higher would alter our intended course. ‘Bugger the intended course!’ laughed the first old lady, but Dave was the ship’s captain and the ship’s captain wouldn’t be moved. We left the green of the forest behind us and glided over immense flat fields. Dave radioed Phil on the balloon’s radio that all was well; we looked down to see the old van chasing us along the dirt roads below, a great cloud of billowing dust behind.

  A lone farmhouse appeared in the distance, and Jorg asked if that was our landing site. It wasn’t. Dave explained that he and Phil didn’t really get on with the owner. They had landed on his fields from time to time and the farmer had accused them of damaging his crops. Big arguments had broken out; Dave had tried to explain to the farmer that it wasn’t always easy to land his balloon exactly where he chose. The farmer wouldn’t have any of it and had threatened to shoot the balloon down if it flew over his house or landed in his fields again. The balloonists now kept as high as possible above the farmer’s house and fields and tried to land a few miles on the other side of his boundary. The CB crackled into life. ‘Yeah Dave, it’s Phil here, mate; it looks like you’re pretty low over Taylor’s farm there.’

  ‘You’re right mate, I’ll lift her up a little,’ answered the balloon’s captain. The farm was growing much bigger now. Dave fired the gas burner to put a diplomatic height between the balloon and the farmer’s house. The farm grew bigger still, the burners were full on, yet we really didn’t seem to be getting any higher. The radio sparked into life again. ‘Dave, I would lift it up a bit there, mate,’ suggested the pilot’s friend, and I thought I noticed the merest hint of concern in the tones which were normally so laid back.

  ‘I’m trying, mate, but she isn’t really lifting up quick enough,’ countered Dave. ‘I think we might be in for a slightly premature landing again,’ Dave added down the CB.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell, mate, not again! Well good luck, I’ll try and get to you before Taylor does!’

  The balloon had dropped a little lower now, though still clear of the approaching farm roof by a good 150 feet. The door of the farmhouse burst open to reveal a big man pointing something at the balloon. Our two ladies whooped with delight. ‘Gun!’ exclaimed one. ‘He’s got a gun!’ Taylor then jumped into his pickup, sped out of his gate and set off down the road towards our direction. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dave, ‘he won’t do you no harm, he’s just a little pissed at us that’s all, but all the same I’d appreciate a little help getting the balloon packed away and loaded into the van before he reaches us.’ We had dropped to one hundred feet now, and Dave pointed at two approaching dust clouds. ‘The one on the left is the farmer’s pickup, the one on the right is Phil.’ The race was on.

  The balloon was losing height very quickly now, making it easier to see just how fast we were actually travelling. ‘Assume crash positions!’ shouted Dave. Bill and I looked at each other, while Jorg laughed so hard that he was clearly having trouble breathing. The two old ladies applauded loudly, telling Dave what a fantastic morning they were having. The balloon finally came back to earth in a tilled field, the basket hit the ground and tipped on its side as the deflating balloon pulled us along. The lip of the basket acted as a plough, digging into the soft ground and filling the inside with soil, pebbles, straw and grass. Our ageing pioneers were in the two compartments nearest the ground and took the full brunt of the inbound debris. We bumped and scraped our way across the field until we came to a grinding halt. One by one we rolled ourselves from the basket; how no one was injured I’ll never know; even the two pioneers survived the landing without receiving so much as a scratch. They jumped up and down with the thrill of it all and gave Dave another spontaneous round of applause. ‘Thank you ladies,’ he said, returning their great praise by removing his hat and giving a low gracious courtly bow.

  The two plumes of dust were getting nearer and we rushed to help wrap the balloon inside the basket. Phil’s van shot into the field and we heaved and shoved the basket roughly inside and quickly loaded ourselves too. ‘Go, go, go,’ enthused Dave, slamming the door of the van as we roared back down the road heading for the sanctuary of the rain-forest. ‘Right,’ asked Phil, with a big, broad grin on his face, ‘everybody worked up enough appetite for breakfast?’

  Back in England after our winter holidays were over, I was asked to join one of the three car crews. Nigel had been pleased with how I had taken control and run the brake department, and he’d been impressed with my confidence and commitment to the job. And when, on occasion, I had been forced to stand my ground with Giorgio Ascanelli, the team’s chief engineer, about whether a brake disc was cracked or not, or how many miles a certain set of calipers had been used in between servicing, Nigel was pleased that I had refused to be dictatorially managed. I always enjoyed working with Giorgio (another ex-Ferrari man who came with Barnard), and any disagreements we had were always conducted with great civility, but I wasn’t going to be pressured into agreeing with him merely because of his superior status within the team. The chief mechanic agreed: ‘If you know you’re right, then you must stick to your guns, otherwise there’s no point in having you doing the work; we may as well just let the engineers get on with everything – and what a total catastrophe that would be.’

  A vacancy for a mechanic on the spare car had arisen and would I like to join Bill Harris and Jorg Russ, the other two mechanics running the car? Throughout 1990 I had got to know Bill and Jorg quite well, and after surviving the Dundees’ ballooning trip we had formed a good friendship. I would be more than happy to work with them. The job would be another promotion with a little more money, and with a little more job security too. I accepted Nigel’s offer and on 8 January a letter from the accounts department informed me that my new salary would be £19,500. I would work primarily on the front of the car – the chassis, front suspension, pedals and steering rack and wiring loom. Jorg would be at the rear, taking care of the gearbox and rear suspension. Bill, the car’s number-one mechanic, would look after the fuel tank, engine installation, make any executive decisions, drink the champagne, all that sort of thing.

  In my new role I would have to give up my race-day pit-board job too; as a race mechanic I would become a member of the pit-stop crew. Nigel assigned me to the left-rear corner of the car, with responsibility for taking off the old wheel during the stop. To be honest it wasn’t an aspect of the job I relished either. For the past fourteen races I had stood on the pit-wall and watched the action of the pit-stops as the inbound cars screamed down the pit-lane towards the waiting mechanics. It looked bloody terrifying.

  Unfortunately, the medium of TV belies the truth of the cars’ real speed and video footage of the races portray the cars looking deceptively slow (as you watch the cars flash past the screen this seems hard to believe, I know, but from first-hand experience I know it to be so). Pit-lane speed limits weren’t introduced until after the tragedies of that hideous Imola race of 1994. Before that horrible accident, cars would hurtle past one pit-crew and towards their own at something approaching 150 feet per second. One tiny error of judgement and lives could be lost. Now, some may think that what I have just said is a gross over-exaggeration, but those who disagree with me have never stood in front of a ferociously hot, eight hundred horsepower race car which is ear-splittingly loud, spitting fire and careering straight for them at a hundred miles an hour.

  The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

  Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

  And burbled as it came!

  In any event, Nigel had offered me the job of working directly on a car, and part of that job was to carry out the work of the pit-stops. I had accepted the job and so I had accepted the inevitable role of being a pit-stop mechanic too. My choice.

  As for our driver line up, Nelson would remain, but because of Alessandro Nannini’s awful accident with his new helicopter (he had only just taken delivery of it, a t
reat to himself because of his recent race successes) his seat was taken by Roberto Moreno. We had a totally new car too: the John Barnard-designed B191. It looked nothing like anything else that Benetton had ever produced but this wasn’t surprising. Barnard had started the design work of the B191 with a completely clean sheet; it was intended that nothing should be carried over from previous Benetton creations. The only way to move forward is to innovate, I suppose. It must be said that what he came up with was a beautiful-looking car, endowed with some very sleek body lines. In essence it looked much more like a Ferrari than a Benetton; the shape could have been a perfect successor to Ferrari’s 1990 car, the 641. The reason for this was that John Barnard and his design team had drawn the 639, the 640 and the 641, and their new design seemed a natural evolution of that series of cars. If the B191 had been painted red and fitted with a V12 instead of a Cosworth V8 it could easily have carried a 642 chassis plate too.

  John Barnard is a perfectionist, his attention to detail is legendary, and there were some fine details to the design of the B191. It is usual that the radiator side-pods of a Grand Prix car are secured to the chassis with a number of individual bolt fixings around the edges of the pod. However, as the side-pods are removed two or three times each day of a race weekend this becomes a tedious and time-consuming matter – plus one always runs the risk of ‘rounding’ an over-tight bolt in the process of trying to remove it. In an ingenious way of improving this situation, Barnard’s team had developed a flush-fitting quick-release catch. Operated by a special two-pronged key, this simple though brilliant design feature enabled both side-pods to be removed from the chassis in a matter of seconds. I have never understood the real reasons why, but those catches were never carried over to any other Benetton designs since the ‘91. I don’t know if it was just a matter of pride (‘I can’t use that idea because I didn’t think of it first’) or what it was, but it was a superb idea that has since been wasted.

  However, one feature of John’s car which has remained on every Benetton car since, and has now, in fact, been copied on to every Formula One car in the pit-lane is his quick-release catch for the nose and front wing assembly. This was another brilliant piece of ingenuity, and one which should have won his team a trophy for Formula One design excellence. The idea wasn’t new, since it was based on the plastic snail-cam fasteners found in quick-build kitchen units in the big DIY warehouses. Push a dowelled peg into the body of the snail-cam and an Allen key turns the cam through 180 degrees, locking the two parts together. Job finished. Brilliant!

  On the other hand, the nose of the B190 was secured by four small pins, retained in the chassis by internal spring clips. The idea was to grip the head of the pin with a pair of pliers, pulling them out of the nose in order to detach it. They were terrible. The pins would either stick in the nose, resulting in the pliers constantly slipping on the tiny removal flange or, occasionally, the pins would work loose and disappear out on the circuit somewhere. Other teams were using bolts to hold their car’s nose to the chassis, though most soon relented once they noticed a possible alternative, but Williams continued to use this method until relatively recently. Although bolting the nose in place was a very secure method of retention, in an emergency pit-stop following a front wing shunt, the mechanics would take far too long trying to replace the damaged nose. I remember that at one time, in an attempt to speed things up, Williams had a couple of small air-guns in the pit-lane, set and reserved just in case of a possible nose change; to me this was a case of treating the symptoms instead of curing the illness. Nevertheless, in the end, even the great strength of Williams Grand Prix Engineering couldn’t hold back the tide any longer and they too fitted a version of the Barnard nose catch.

  The year 1991 turned into a strange season for us, a time of mixed fortunes and sadly, despite his great technical skills, the first major upheaval was with our illustrious technical director, John Barnard. The B191 was supposed to take the world by storm, the car to catapult Benetton amongst the dogfights of McLaren, Ferrari and Williams for race victories. Maybe it was not the car to clinch the Constructors’ Championship in its first year, but the next evolution of it, the B192, should have been in a position to have the bounties of glory heaped upon it. A contract had been signed with Pirelli, and they had agreed to help Benetton develop a tyre for the B191 which should challenge the dominance of Goodyear, and in 1991 a shot at second place in the Championship should have been a distinct possibility.

  However, it wasn’t long into the season before one could sense that things weren’t going as smoothly as we had all hoped, and the relationship with Barnard and Benetton was becoming increasingly strained. Benetton had shovelled huge amounts of money into structuring its revamped race team and it was – quite rightly – expecting to see some pretty impressive results from this vast financial investment.

  Right from the beginning John had no desire to move to Witney and had wanted to relocate the entire team further south, to Godalming, next door to where he lived. That Benetton was even considering relocating its entire operation, notwithstanding the huge inconvenience it would cause to over a hundred other people, has always struck me as being quite incredible. However, the mere fact that Benetton were prepared to do this shows the extent to which the Benetton management valued the merits of their new technical director. Temporary buildings had already been leased in Godalming; a test team and a research and development department had been established; and the hunt was on to find a suitable building site for the team’s brand-new headquarters.

  Meanwhile the entire staff of the old Witney factory was invited to Godalming so they could observe the temporary facility, witness for themselves the picturesque beauty of the Surrey landscape, and see what an irresistible, golden opportunity they were about to be offered by having their place of employment shifted two hours’ drive away. If the staff didn’t relish such a long trip, ten or fourteen times a week – and we knew one chap who didn’t – then they could always look to relocate. That generations of their families have lived in Oxfordshire; that their children were happily settled at school; that their grandchildren lived just two minutes round the corner; that their husbands and wives were in full-time jobs; that their lifelong friends and cricket clubs and gardening societies were all within a short stroll away; surely all of these things were just minor irritations? ‘Earth calling Planet Formula One, we’re losing contact with you, can you still read me?’

  It was a similar story when Barnard worked with Ferrari. He is a happily settled family man and had no wish to relocate to Italy. And, surely, it was unthinkable speculation that Ferrari would uproot from Maranello and relocate to sunny Surrey? (I wonder if they were asked?) Despite this stand-off, both parties could see obvious advantages in working together, and an agreement was reached whereby John would open a drawing office and research facility in England, called the Guildford Technical Office, known as the Ferrari GTO. Unfortunately, trying to run a successful Grand Prix team from two different headquarters was never going to be easy and their remoteness provided both parties with all sorts of logistical problems. With Barnard’s appointment to Benetton it was agreed that the only way forward was to house everything under one roof. Again, I think this is good sound policy, but trying to move everyone and everything down to Surrey, that bit never really gelled with me. However, the Benetton group is a very professional organization, with brilliant financial tacticians, and they must have gone through the figures and the pros and cons of such a move in great detail and found that it was both possible and feasible.

  A few months later, as the solid stone of history proves, debating the pros and cons of a proposed move to Godalming became purely hypothetical. It never happened. The temporary buildings were closed and the quest for a suitable building site in Surrey was cancelled. Of course, as a mere mechanic I was never privy to the reasons why the business relationship between Flavio Briatore and John Barnard collapsed; I guessed it was because we weren’t achieving the race results
quickly enough, but there may have been many other considerations too. Whatever the reasons, I feel the details are private and between the parties concerned. I’ve never claimed to be a journalist (in fact, I’ve always claimed not to be) and I had no need or desire to delve further; it was the net result of the situation that was of concern to me. Just after the Monaco Grand Prix it became apparent that John would be leaving and, sure enough, he didn’t attend the Canadian race. And in Mexico, the second race of the North American double-header, we were all introduced to a Mr Gordon Kimball, the team’s new technical director. He seemed a pleasant enough chap. I had never heard of him before, although that didn’t count for much, but it was as if the team’s management had decided that they just needed someone (anyone?) to carry the mantle of technical director until they had more time to reorganize. Poor Gordon Kimball was replaced by the end of the year.

  The most poignant aspect of losing John at that moment was that in Canada, the very race he didn’t attend, Nelson Piquet won the Grand Prix for Benetton! It was rather an odd victory; in the closing stages of the race Nelson was in second position trailing behind Mansell, who had rejoined Williams for his push to become World Champion, and they stayed in this order until the final corner of the last lap. Suddenly, as Mansell prematurely waved to the crowd, his Williams ground to an undignified stop, with Piquet nipping past to take the chequered flag. Very bizarre! Afterwards, Mansell absolutely, categorically and unconditionally denied that he had flicked the ignition switch by accident as he lifted his hand from the cockpit. Well, we’re all only human and we all make mistakes from time to time. After carefully inspecting the car, I understand the Williams mechanics never found fault with it. Conclude from that what you will.