The Mechanic’s Tale

by Steve Matchett

  Of course, we too had suffered a retrograde step, a problem undoubtedly caused by internal wranglings and too much coming and going. No consistency to the mix, that was the problem, though nowhere near as catastrophic a situation as Ferrari’s. On the bright side, however, a new and very special ingredient had recently been added to Benetton’s simmering pot, a rare and precious spice that would gradually impart its improving qualities over the next couple of years. All of a sudden its perfection would suddenly explode, transforming the Benetton recipe out of all recognition. I didn’t know it then, of course, but the Constructors’ Championship was coming, it would just take a few more years! But for Ferrari there would be little or no improvement in their fortunes until the start of 1996.

  All that was years away in the future, and back in Australia in 1991, standing in the rain-soaked pits of Adelaide, it was time to dry off, pack everything away and head off on holiday for a couple of weeks. Back at the factory, it was time to calm everything down too. Time to take careful stock of things and begin detailed planning for next year’s campaign. Holiday time. That seemed to have come back round jolly quickly.

  Another year done!

  1992 – Chapter Five

  Another promotion thanks to Nelson – Joan Villadelprat –

  Appreciating Fl racing for what it is – Tom Walkinshaw –

  New factory site – Brawn arrives – Brundle arrives –

  The B192 – Michael’s maiden win

  The first year I joined the race team I looked after the brake department. The second year I was promoted to the spare car. In 1992 I was promoted to work on one of the two race cars; little difference, but a promotion nevertheless. Actually, the whole of the spare car crew was promoted with me, and we swapped roles with what was Nelson’s race car crew. Not surprisingly, this produced some rather unhappy looks and comments from a couple of the chaps who had effectively been demoted, but the decision was out of my hands.

  Of course, I can’t deny that I was pleased by the news – everyone likes to be thought of favourably – and I was looking forward to working with the team’s new driver brought in to replace Nelson Piquet. Actually, the reason for the change of crews was really down to Nelson. Throughout much of 1991 he had always favoured using the spare car. I don’t want to go into the details of why and it would be most immodest of me to make any suppositions. Nevertheless, the line was that during the Sunday pre-race meetings, Nelson would normally insist on racing the spare car. In fact, come the end of 1991, I think there were only two or three races during the season where Nelson had consented to use his designated race car, one of which was for the Canadian Grand Prix, so at least his race car crew had the satisfaction of claiming his final victory. Perhaps a personality clash with some of the other mechanics sparked the situation off, I don’t know and I didn’t care. If Nelson felt happier with me strapping him into the car, as opposed to mechanic X, then so be it. It is difficult to imagine for a moment that one car felt in any way consistently different from another car, and to eliminate the possibility of a flexing chassis we had even interchanged the two chassis between the crews without informing the driver of the switch (twice, I seem to remember), but still Nelson maintained his preference for using the spare car. Anyway, whatever his reasons, it was undoubtedly Nelson who forced the internal reshuffle at the start of 1992, and I have him to thank for my promotion on to a race car.

  Another year, another promotion and another pay rise too; things were going well! ‘I am pleased to advise you,’ wrote Joan Villadelprat (pronounced Joe-ann), our new operations manager, ‘that with effect from 1 January 1992, your salary will be increased to £22,790 per annum. Where relevant this review takes into account a number of factors including your performance during 1991.’ A touch enigmatic that last line? I was longing to ask him what he meant by ‘where relevant’ but I was too scared and settled with being happy just to accept the rise.

  Catch his expression in the right mood and Joan’s features – his dark hair, dark watchful eyes and his thick dark moustache – remind me of the posters of Big Brother from the old black and white adaptation of Orwell’s 1984. I always fancied the idea of hanging a huge poster in the race-bay, showing an enlarged photo of Joan’s head and shoulders, his deep, thoughtful eyes seeming to follow every move, carefully observing what everyone was doing; the words ‘big brother is watching you’ written underneath. But, again, I was always too scared to go through with it; some people said his bark was much worse than his bite. Others didn’t. As the years went on, Joan and I formed a strong mutual appreciation of each other. I hesitate to use the word friendship, as this may be overstating things. I mean, we never phone each other to chat about how well Tiger Woods is playing at the moment; we never exchange birthday cards; nor do we meet up on our free weekends for a beer at the Chequers (though, at several Benetton parties, we’ve both ordered far more drinks for each other than was particularly wise). However, we are certainly friendly towards each other; he was genuinely thrilled when I had my first book published, telling me that it was a great achievement for me to persevere with writing the text and negotiating the contract with the publishers, while still forging ahead with the 1994 season. He told me that it was something that he too would love to do, but that he knew it would never happen. He has always been supportive of my writing, and in return I am genuinely impressed with what he has achieved with his career too. Maybe writing books is something that Joan doesn’t see himself doing, but, by the same token, running a Formula One team is certainly something that I don’t ever envisage doing.

  Joan is Catalonian, married, with a family and, in common with all people from northern Spain, he is also a very proud man, proud of his heritage, his land, his origins. He has worked incredibly hard for his success, and like Nigel Stepney, he has dedicated much of his life to Formula One. He spent years with McLaren working as a mechanic, then went to Italy and Ferrari, working as their chief mechanic (the last chief mechanic to work directly for Enzo Ferrari before his death in 1988. In fact, Joan was the Ferrari chief mechanic in Monza at the time of that historic one-two finish). After his stint with Ferrari it was back to England, employed by Ken Tyrrell as his team manager, and to Benetton to work alongside Gordon Message.

  In 1991, when Stepney resigned from Benetton, Joan also deputized as replacement chief mechanic for a while. There are few roles he hasn’t played at one time or another. A tight bond soon formed between him and Flavio, helped enormously by the fact that Joan speaks fluent Italian (as well as Spanish, English and French), and before long he was given the title of operations manager, with responsibility for overseeing the day-to-day running of the factory, the production department and the organization of the test and race teams too. A year or so later Joan had risen to the rank of operations director.

  Flavio would be the first to admit that he knows little of mechanical engineering, and having Joan in the team was a great help to him. Unlike McLaren, or Williams, where Ron and Frank are capable of overseeing the running of their own teams, Flavio could pass all of those day-to-day chores over to Joan, allowing him, in his position as commercial director, to concentrate with the team’s marketing department. This is where Flavio’s skills lay, and to improve the marketing and sponsorship of the team is precisely what Luciano Benetton had brought him in to do.

  In this respect, Flavio was one of the best bosses one could hope to have. For example, during the lunch hour I could be working away, repairing the carburettor from my road car, or making a bookshelf bracket in the fabrication department, and if Flavio walked past he would have no interest whatsoever in what I, or anyone else, was up to. As far as he was concerned, perhaps the selection of air-correction jets, diaphragms and throttle-pump springs were from somewhere underneath the bodywork of the B192. He didn’t know what the bits were, he didn’t need to know and he didn’t want to know either. Flavio is a marketing man, not a mechanic. As long as the cars were polished and the correct sponsors’ stickers were on
the right bit of the bodywork Flavio was a happy man. Organizing the mechanics and the preparation of the cars he could leave to Joan. However, if Joan was on one of his lunch-time prowls round the factory and found parts of a carburettor being cleaned and rebuilt on his beautifully clean, white work surfaces it was impossible to explain the situation away.

  He was my boss and I was his charge, and if he told me that we had no choice but to work all night, then that was that. I might not like the idea (most certainly didn’t like the idea) but it was part of the job and he knew that I would always do as I was asked. And, by the same token, if there were only five minutes to go before the pit-lane closed and I shouted over to him that I needed a helping hand in order to get the car to the grid before the deadline, I knew that he would do whatever he could to help. ‘Hold this! Pass me that! Get me one of those from Paul Howard!’ When we were really struggling to finish the cars, with tears of sweat stinging the eyes, and the engineers all conspiring to do everything they could to thwart us by constantly producing ever-growing and ever-changing job lists, when the clock was truly against us and it was proving near impossible to even see the car due to the masses of corporate guests milling about the garage, when it was genuinely Now-Or-Never time, I knew that I could depend on him, and he knew he could rely on me.

  Joan is also quite aware of my perception of exactly what Grand Prix racing is. Being inside Formula One is a very demanding and dedicated life, full of highs and lows, a life full of tears and heated emotions. At times it can seem like it’s one of the most important things in the world. However, for some of the more impressionable souls it does become the only important thing in the world, the true reality of their situation is lost to them. The reality is this: Formula One, for all its associated passions, is a job of work, another way of earning a living. The fact that a newly designed suspension ‘upright’ has no intention whatsoever of fitting the wishbone may cause all sorts of arm-waving and general gnashing of teeth and result in a vast stream of faxes, phone calls and e-mails back and forth between the circuit and the factory as people try to pin the blame on one another, and some of those people may well refuse to speak to each other for weeks, or even months, afterwards as tempers continue to brew and simmer, but take just one step outside of Formula One’s micro-universe and nobody living in the real world gives a damn about the upright. In the real world the only concerns are that the cat needs feeding, the puncture on Gran’s bike still wants looking at and that the video must be unplugged to stop it desperately trying to record the Dad’s Army repeat over what remains of the Monza highlights, half of which have already been lost due to the kids taping the Mr Blobby weekend special on top of it. Real life in the real world, where Grand Prix racing is something to be enjoyed as a distraction, a weekend hobby.

  Formula One is just another job, but treated properly it can also be terrific fun, and as the teams stump up about 99.9 percent of the costs, it’s a wonderfully cheap way to see the world too! It’s also a colossal stepping stone if you wish to move on to other things and are prepared to take full advantage of it. My first book is an example: it would have been infinitely more difficult to have persuaded a publisher to have taken me seriously if it weren’t for the huge lever that working for Formula One gave me. If you work for a Grand Prix team and have written something of merit about them, then people in the book world are immediately interested in taking a closer look at your efforts. If, on the other hand, you work for a Vauxhall dealership and have written a truly revealing and scintillating account of your experiences, then there is every likelihood that your manuscript will stay firmly at the bottom of the slush pile, gathering dust, remaining unopened and unread.

  You have to be professional, of course, to work in Formula One and you have to work to the world’s highest standards, but the key is to get Formula One to work for you, not letting Formula One use you until you’re no more than a burnt-out wreck. There are many examples of people who have worked in Formula One for year after year, just because it is F1, once young men who have given too many of their best years to Grand Prix racing. But come the first race for which they feel unable to continue, they will, inevitably, be immediately replaced by somebody younger, stronger, more enthusiastic and fitter. Replaced and forgotten in the blinking of an eye. Twenty-five years here, gone tomorrow. The way of the sport. No one (with the possible exception of Bernie Ecclestone himself) is indispensable to Grand Prix racing. No one.

  Along with other high-profile activities, such as art, opera, music, film and fashion, the realization that Formula One is just another commercial industry is rarely discussed in such base, businesslike terms amongst the people who actually produce the finished work. For such people to talk openly of their work in simplistic financial terms would be thought of as giving the game away. To an extent it is the same in Grand Prix racing; it is a passionate business, but a business all the same. Some people know this, some people will never understand it, even if you sat them down and patiently explained it twice a day for the rest of their lives. In 1992, when I told a long-serving Benetton mechanic how much I enjoyed the chance, provided courtesy of Formula One, to see and explore a little bit of the world, he snapped at me, saying that the job wasn’t about travelling and looking at things and writing diaries and talking to people and taking notes. He said the job was about making sure that the cars were polished and ready to go, each and every time the drivers wanted to jump into them. At first I felt a little sorry for him, thinking how sad it was that he should miss such golden opportunities, but after the first couple of years I just gave up on him; he was incurable, too set in his ways. He must have swallowed a Formula One conditioning pill with his morning coffee every day for the past fifteen years. The perfect employee, I guess! However, I wonder how keen on Formula One he would have been if a Grand Prix season consisted of sixteen races, all run only in the freezing Thruxton sleet, being paid half as much and receiving no media coverage whatsoever. ‘It’s not about travelling, it’s about being totally pissed off and wanting to top yourself.’

  Joan knew my thoughts on all of this, even though we never openly discussed such things. The odd passed comment and the occasional wry smile made it clear that we both understood the rules of the game. Perhaps in me he saw a little bit of himself although we are very different people. Joan has always been terribly ambitious, very career-orientated, always searching for more responsibility and more authority within the sport – mechanic, team manager, operations manager, operations director and on and on, no doubt. Me, all I wanted out of Formula One was to win the Constructors’ Championship and have my photograph taken holding the trophy just to prove it had actually happened. I didn’t know how long that would take, but I knew that whenever it did happen I could then wrap up my mechanical career and start planning for the next challenge.

  Just like Joan, Tom Walkinshaw is also very much a hands-on sort of a chap and I’m quite sure that he could have spotted a ‘homer’ going down from a range of a thousand paces. However, despite his title of engineering director, I never saw much of him at the Witney factory, and I didn’t see an awful lot more of him at the new Enstone factory either. I suppose he carried out most of his duties from his TWR base at Broadstone Manor which was just outside Chipping Norton. Looking back, it is now much easier to gauge Tom’s impact on Benetton’s success, but at the time it was not clear at all. His arrival was viewed with mixed feelings by many of the Benetton staff. Of course, everyone knew of TWR and they knew that Walkinshaw was very successful in all the categories in which he entered his racing teams. Therefore, it was safe to assume that his involvement with us could be extremely beneficial from an engineering point of view. But TWR is a huge conglomerate and we were apprehensive about what might become of us and of our individuality. We didn’t relish the prospect of a TWR buyout and to wake up one morning to discover that Benetton had been incorporated as the gem-stone in Walkinshaw’s motor-racing crown. If we were taken over we would cease to be Benetton Formula
, our identity would pale and our four bright primary colours would have to fade in order to blend and comply with the rest of the TWR empire. I didn’t want that and the same feelings were echoed by many of my colleagues as well.

  The TWR buyout never happened, and on reflection an awful lot of good resulted from Walkinshaw’s involvement with Benetton. Furthermore, I don’t think that Tom ever really received the thanks or appreciation which he rightly deserved for his input. I may be wrong here, and I can only speak from my own feelings on the matter, but the entire duration of the working relationship between Walkinshaw and Flavio Briatore seemed permanently unsettled. As a mechanic it was difficult for me to pinpoint exactly why that should be, but I always got the impression that things were never as comfortable as they should have been.

  As far as we were concerned, one of the main problems of the linkup between TWR and Benetton was one of communication and clear understanding of exactly what was supposed to be happening to us, the mechanics, and indeed to the rest of the Benetton staff. Was TWR buying Benetton Formula from the Benetton family? Was the Benetton family buying TWR? There was some suggestion that each had bought half of the other’s business. No one was certain which stories were exciting, exaggerated rumour and which were no more than boring fact.

  At the conclusion of the 1991 season, just a few months after this partnership began, the entire Benetton staff was invited to attend the TWR Christmas party, held at Tom’s Broadstone Manor headquarters. But few people seemed interested in going; it was nothing personal, nor was any offence intended against Tom or any of his employees; it was just the fact that it wasn’t a Benetton party, it was a TWR affair. What had happened to our end-of-year celebration? People felt slighted (silly, perhaps, but some can be easily offended). When word reached the Benetton management that the majority of its staff seemed uninterested in attending what was primarily somebody else’s celebration, it all became a rather political affair. Apparently, Benetton’s staff was supposed to be engaging in a session of affable entente cordiale with our new friends; at this point, I suspect, some people felt they were being toyed with. Finally we were more or less ordered to go, and if we couldn’t make the party then we had to have a damn good excuse why we wouldn’t be there. All a bit daft really, but I can understand the reservations about producing such forced gaiety. If people wanted to go, then fine, but if they didn’t, then that was, surely, their own prerogative? In the end, come the night of the party, quite a few Benetton people did attend, and as soon as the petty politics of the event had been brushed aside it turned into a bloody good night out too. I’m all for a good bottle of wine, a Christmas kiss and a chicken vol-au-vent.