The Mechanic’s Tale

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The Mechanic’s Tale Page 18

by Steve Matchett


  I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but the decision to write that book would alter my life as much as my decision to join Benetton had five years earlier.

  On 13 January I received a letter from our commercial director, Flavio Briatore, in which he said:

  Dear Team Member

  Your managers and I have reviewed the options for increasing your remuneration in 1994. We were very fortunate in successfully negotiating the Mild Seven sponsorship to replace Camel at such an early stage. However, as you are aware, the world is in recession and finding the additional sponsorship to do all the things we would like to do, both on and off the track, is not easy.

  I look forward to 1994 being our most successful season yet and wish you well with your particular endeavours in this respect.

  On 19 January, I received another letter, this time from our operations manager, Joan Villadelprat.

  Dear Steve

  I am pleased to advise you that with effect from 1 January 1994, your salary will be increased to £24,061 per annum. Where relevant this review takes into account a number of factors including your performance during 1993.

  I enjoy reading George Orwell: his works such as Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four are among my best-loved books; the latter, despite its unrelenting pessimism, has been a long-term favourite since reading it as part of my English exams at school. I always find Orwell’s detailed descriptions, both imaginary and of everyday events, to be incredibly vivid. From time to time completely abstract situations make me think of scenes from Nineteen Eighty-four, and Flavio’s circular letter provided another instance of just that. It didn’t make his correspondence appear very personal, but I thought his ‘Dear Team Member’ was great fun; the odd form of address and the letter’s news content made it seem like the start of a Party bulletin crackling out from Winston Smith’s telescreen. I could easily imagine a series of similar telescreens dotted around the Enstone factory, the clipped, steely voice of the female announcer giving out a constant stream of tedious production figures before being interrupted and handed the latest news.

  ‘Team Members, the world is in recession, yet we are able and pleased to announce that as from today we have increased the range of soft drinks in the canteen vending machine to three, instead of just two (“but I seem to remember we had five varieties in there only yesterday”). The Team wishes you well with your own particular endeavours in securing a resounding victory against the opposition. Oh, and here is a message for operative Matchett: put that carburettor away and get on with something useful!’

  The year 1994 brought Michael Schumacher his first Formula One crown and it very nearly concluded with Benetton securing their maiden Constructors’ World Championship too, but it wasn’t to be. Williams finally held on to it by a margin of fifteen points. But we were close: at one point during the year we were thirty-six points clear of Williams. Not that it mattered much, since the actual racing took a very low priority throughout the course of the season.

  That year turned out to be one of the most turbulent and tragic years in the history of the sport. At Imola, both Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were killed in separate accidents, and several Ferrari and Lotus mechanics were injured by an out-of-control car and its detached, airborne rear wheel (Nigel Stepney was with Ferrari at this point and I remember seeing him hit by the erratic Minardi in the pit-lane); at Monaco – the very next race – another driver, Karl Wendlinger, was seriously injured too. His life hung in the balance for a long while, but he finally pulled through although his Formula One career was finished. At Hockenheim a few weeks later, the Benetton pit-crew, myself amongst them, was engulfed by fire when Verstappen’s B194 exploded during a refuelling accident. This tragic incident saw six of my colleagues rushed to hospital by the circuit helicopter.

  At the same time as these appalling deaths and serious injuries were happening, Michael Schumacher and Benetton seemed to be permanently embroiled in argument and accusation with both the FIA and the circuit officials. At Silverstone, Michael was given a time-penalty for some slight misdemeanour; then he was black-flagged; then the flag was rescinded and we were allowed to continue; then the team was fined $25,000; then Michael was disqualified from the results and we were given an enormous fine of $500,000; and then Michael was banned for two more races. All of this at just one Grand Prix!

  At Spa, five hours after winning the race, we were once again disqualified from the race results. At various times during the year the team was also suspected of having illegal driver-aid software on the car. And then, to top it all, notwithstanding the fact we had been seriously burnt, we were also accused of causing the Hockenheim fire ourselves and deliberately cheating by illegally tampering with the refuelling-rig. Disqualifications, fines, arguments, counter-arguments, on and on it went. It was truly a most bizarre year, and while the events of 1994 were slowly unfurling I was in the process of writing Just Another Day at the Office. I’d no sooner finished commenting on the unprecedented happenings at one race, before the next Grand Prix was upon us, bringing with it a fresh bout of accidents, disagreements and finger pointing.

  Of course, the fact that I’d chosen the 1994 season in which to write my book was complete coincidence; in January, when I sat down in front of the fire and began to write page one, I had no idea that Fate was about to give me such a story. At the conclusion of 1993 Michael had won only two races in his Formula One career; at that point who would ever have guessed that by the end of the following year he would be crowned World Champion? It was incredible compared with the rest of the team’s victories after Michael joined us: 1991, one win; 1992, one win; 1993, one win; 1994, eight wins and the Driver’s Championship.

  In the middle of May, shortly after the Monaco Grand Prix, I contacted Hazleton Publishing, the company who produce Autocourse, to see if they were interested in publishing my book at the end of the year, or whether after swiftly scanning the first few pages, they’d advise me that I was, most assuredly, writing it purely for my own amusement. I’d thought carefully about the timing of my enquiry. I wanted to leave it sufficiently late in the season to have written something substantial to show them and to convince them of my intent and commitment to finishing the book, but I also wanted to make contact at an early enough stage of writing, in case the publisher could suggest anything which might help me as I plodded along with it.

  ‘Why don’t you send us a sample of what you’ve written; we’d be delighted to take a look,’ they said. A week or so later they rang me in Chipping Norton. They liked it. ‘Would you mind sending us some more of what you’ve written?’ I sent them another two chapters and by all accounts they liked those too. This pleased me greatly.

  I found writing to be a lone, self-absorbing pastime. I often spent many hours entertaining the word-processor, sometimes until two or three in the morning. Eventually, over the course of an evening – and despite many gallant efforts to thwart it – my collection of random thoughts would slowly start to organize themselves into a series of purposeful ideas and finally grow and mature into a page of written text. When this happened the surprise of it would catch me unawares, requiring a stiff drink to settle things down again. I’d read the lines on the page, pause, then reread them, just to check they hadn’t melted back into a garbled mess. Sometimes I was quite pleased with my efforts, but there was always a nagging doubt: I might have been happy with how it looked on the page and how it sounded when I read it aloud (actually just a quiet whisper), but would it make sense to anyone else? Was it generally coherent and, in more simplistic terms, was it any good? So, to be told by Hazleton that they had liked what they had read was a great boost to morale. The next step was to get them interested enough to sign me up and publish the book.

  As the season progressed and it became clear that we were genuinely in contention to win a major prize, I decided to change my book’s title. I’d never really liked Just Another Day at the Office, it
was a stupid name and I have no idea why I chose it in the first place. It became The Mechanics of a Championship – The Work of a Grand Prix Mechanic. I thought that looked much better; a nice little play on words, a touch of ambiguity, perfect.

  By September The Mechanics of a Championship was seventy-five percent finished. It had consumed all my free time. In fact, other than when working late at the factory and travelling away to the races, I’d only been out of the house for two nights all year. Not that I minded; far from it, I was loving it. At last I’d discovered a hobby which didn’t require me to stroll home from the Chequers afterwards – Josh thought I’d skipped the country. I was enjoying this new challenge like nothing else, and now that the book’s structure was really taking shape I was longing to see my work in print. All of which made the call from the publishers telling me they couldn’t find sufficient in-house budget to take my project any further all the more utterly crushing. The girl I had been dealing with for the last five months was most apologetic (and most sympathetic too), but the bottom line was that they had to say ‘thanks but no thanks’.

  To say that I was terribly disappointed by Hazleton’s decision would be a masterstroke of understatement but I hold not the slightest grudge against them. I don’t think they rejected me out of hand; they wanted to help, I’m convinced of that, but if they didn’t have the available budget to produce my book, what could they do? Looking back now, perhaps I was naive not getting them to commit to signing a contract with me much sooner, but the gift of hindsight is always accompanied by perfect twenty-twenty vision. The problem was that I was walking blindfold in completely foreign territory (like being a first-day apprentice again); all I could do was to watch, listen and learn the ropes as I went along.

  Of course, I could and would look for another publisher, but it was now September. I knew little of the book business but I did know I was leaving it terribly late in the year to get anything sorted out. Because the plot of the book was set within a single year it would need to be published in 1995 if the content was still to be current when it went on sale. It was now or never. I couldn’t imagine anyone being prepared to publish the first book of a totally unknown author more than a year after its intended sell-by date. Well, that’s not strictly true, there are always the ‘vanity publishers’, the you-pay-we-print operators, but they weren’t for me, I wasn’t writing for vanity. It’s perfectly possible to star in your own Hollywood film if you’re prepared to fund the project, but even with a hundred reels of film in the can it certainly doesn’t mean that you can act. If an established and recognized publisher does not wish to take the financial risks involved with producing your work, then my advice is this: forget it and try something else.

  Who should I contact now? I had no idea. Another approach then. Let’s start from scratch: Who publishes books?

  Ladybird? Puffin? Eye-spy? All household names I remember from childhood, but I doubted that they would be interested in books about Grand Prix racing. I picked a book at random from my shelf – Hotel Pastis by Peter Mayle – and looked to see who had produced it for him. Inside the back of the jacket revealed that Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London, England, was the publisher. I turned the book over in my hands, for the first time in my life studying its physical construction, its weight, its form. Hotel Pastis seemed a well-presented volume, clear print on good-quality paper and an attractive jacket, rich colours within a lush sheen; all the signs (I guessed) of a serious publisher. Directory Enquiries furnished me with a number.

  I dialled, but a voice claiming to work for Penguin answered my call. ‘Oh, sorry,’ I said, ‘wrong number! I’m trying to get in touch with Hamish Hamilton, Directory Enquiries must have made a mistake.’

  ‘I’ll just put you through,’ she said crisply.

  Now that is impressive, I thought. I phone a wrong number and one publisher can transfer me directly to a rival company. I could never see McLaren redirecting calls to Ferrari, nice though the idea was. I wondered if all the publishing companies in London were in touch with each other by inter-connected switchboards.

  ‘No,’ another, though identical, voice informed me, ‘Hamish Hamilton is part of Penguin Books, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The conversation with Hamish Hamilton was brief and got me nowhere. Who did I wish to speak to, she asked. I didn’t know, but I asked if I could talk to someone regarding an idea for a new book. Who was my agent? I didn’t have an agent. It would be much easier for everyone if you approached the company through an agent. But I haven’t got one, I said. Then you should get one, she advised. I knew nothing of Hamish Hamilton and only a fraction more about its parent company, the Penguin empire, but I got the distinct feeling that my conversation was utterly pointless, quite futile; the voice on the other end of the telephone was as polite as polite can be, yet I sensed, in no uncertain terms, great unspoken waves of PLEASE GO AWAY washing down the line at me. Presumably a similar response also awaited me from any of the other big publishing houses.

  Clearly, my total lack of credibility in the profession was going to be a major stumbling block. I couldn’t really blame Hamish Hamilton for its complete lack of interest, it must receive thousands of manuscripts every month from scores of earnest writers, masses of ardent unknowns scribbling precious first novels with stubs of bingo-hall pencil, filling reams of lined A4 jotter pads, all desperate to have their work published before the next Booker Prize was short-listed. I could understand the publishers’ dilemma, and Hamish Hamilton’s suggestion that I should find myself an agent was sound advice – that way the onus would fall on the agents and not the publishers to thresh the few potentially fertile grains from the vast sheaves of chaff before any approach to a publisher was made, thus making life that little bit easier for the publisher.

  It was a problem. I needed to be patient and think this through; there must be an answer, there is always an answer. I didn’t have an agent – I still haven’t. I suppose I could have tried to contact a literary agency, but I was very much up against the clock, and how long would it have taken to hear back from an agency: six weeks; six months? Sixty years? After reading Tom Sharp’s The Great Pursuit I didn’t hold out much hope of a reply before the coming of the second Ice Age. No, I decided firmly, there simply wasn’t sufficient time to caper about trying to interest an agent in the merits of my work at this stage of the game, I would just have to take over that role myself.

  I knew my book had worth. Hazleton Publishing had convinced me of that, even if they couldn’t do any more for me. The facts were these: I was a current Grand Prix mechanic working with Benetton Formula and Michael Schumacher – the very team and driver currently leading the 1994 Formula One World Championships, one of the most controversial seasons in history, and I was actually working for the team at the centre of all the controversy – the team which had won the majority of races, been black-flagged, disqualified, stripped of points, burst into flames and accused of blatantly cheating. All of that and I’d written a race-by-race, on-the-spot, genuine ‘inside’ story of it. Who could resist that? (Well, Hazleton and Hamish Hamilton, obviously.)

  It was time to go to Banbury. Moreover, it was time to go to Ottakar’s in Banbury, the little town’s leading bookshop, just a short stroll from their famous Cross. I thought I’d go to Ottakar’s and look at their range of Grand Prix books, to see exactly who was currently keen on publishing such things. The book that immediately caught my eye had a large bright yellow cover: it was a tribute to Ayrton Senna published by a company called Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Like Hotel Pastis, I was immediately impressed with the quality of the book: the grade and weight of the paper, the layout and the clarity of the colour photography looked very professional. I scribbled the publisher’s address on an old cinema ticket stub and headed back home. Well, home via the Chequers for a quick sandwich and a beer with Josh, to be more correct. I’d call Weidenfeld & Nicolson a little later, after they’d returned from lunch; they might be feeling more
receptive after a pie and a pint.

  ‘Orion Publishing.’

  ‘Is that Weidenfeld & Nicolson?’

  ‘Who is it exactly you wish to speak to?’

  ‘Err, well, I’m not sure really. Look, the thing is, I don’t know. I haven’t a clue to be honest but I want to talk to someone about a new book. I work for Benetton, one of the Grand Prix teams and I’ve written a book about Formula One and I haven’t got an agent and I haven’t got time to go and find an agent and please don’t hang up on me and could you please just put me through to someone who I could just talk to, please?’

  There was a long pause while the receptionist held my life in her hands; it was as if she was toying with me, she could just cut my line dead and answer the next call. She could do that, or …

  ‘And will your book contain illustrations?’ she asked. I could almost see one of her eyebrows rising in playful curiosity: a qualifying question, get this right and I advance to round two, get it wrong and it would be, ‘Is the wrong answer but thank you for playing and good night!’

  ‘Illustrations, you say? Well, err, when you say illustrations, do you mean like drawings or photographs?’

  ‘Either, drawings or photographs, they’re both illustrations. Will your book contain either of these?’

  I hadn’t envisaged any drawings or photographs but there was no reason why I shouldn’t use photos to compliment the text, I just hadn’t thought about the prospect before. Did she want to hear ‘yes’ or ‘no’? If I said yes, would she say that Weidenfeld & Nicolson didn’t publish illustrated books? If I said no, would she then say that they only published illustrated books? I knew that their Senna tribute had contained photos, but was that book a unique case, a rare concession made for a very exceptional case? Perhaps, perhaps not. I plumped for yes.

 

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