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Bernd
Rosemeyer
A
motorcycle racer with NSU, Rosemeyer’s first experience of any kind
of racing car was a grand prix machine - not just any grand prix car either,
but the awesome Auto-Union: 400 horsepower of V16 slung behind the rear
axle and expressing itself through ski-narrow contact patches.
In his second race - the Eifelrennen in 1935 - he caught and passed the
great Rudolf Caracciola for the lead and was pulling away when a couple
of cylinders went AWOL, leaving him second. He soon won his first grand
prix - three months after his racing debut! - and a year later won the
championship. But these are just statistics. His nonchalant way with a
machine that had scared some of the best was testimony to a talent off
the scale. The bravado with which he used it brought the impossible into
sharp-focus reality.
Gilles Villeneuve
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If
Bernd Rosemeyer was reincarnated, it was almost certainly as Gilles Villeneuve.
Conventions were told to go to hell as he had some bending of the laws
of physics to attend to. He lived in a romantic racing bubble, one where
he believed anything was possible, and not even a truck of a Ferrari was
going to burst it.
A 126C with no downforce should not have been within a country stroll
of the front row at Monaco in ’81, but there he was. A boxer-engined
T5 with nowhere for the venturi air to go should not have been in front
of all but two of the ground-effect cars at Zandvoort in 1980. Even with
the rain’s help it should not have allowed him to be the fastest
man on the track in the closing stages of Monaco that year. When Jody
Scheckter climbed from his car after wet practice at Watkins Glen having
given it his all, he should not have found he was 8.5sec slower than Villeneuve
in the same car. Only Villeneuve’s sublime gift allowed him never
to wake from his parallel world.
Colin McRae
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Repeatedly
in his early days McRae would step from a steaming wreck - a string of
fastest stage times behind him - and insist he hadn’t even been pushing
that hard. The thing is, it was true. When he really extends himself,
the rest of the world falls into slow motion. That’s what happened
in the 1995 Rally of Great Britain, with a world title on offer if he
could overhaul a big deficit to a driver as great as Carlos Sainz in an
identical car. He’s got a megadrive chip in his head and when it’s
tripped, it’s as if the forest tracks themselves move to accommodate
his will.
Tazio Nuvolari
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A
former motorcycle racer like Rosemeyer, Nuvolari was already approaching
middle age when, in the ’30s, he got properly established as a grand
prix star. But what a star, maybe the brightest shining of all.
As soon as he arrived he took speed to another dimension in the skinny-tyred
but powerful motors of the time, using the angle of the car as much as
the brakes to slow for corners, all the while his arms performing a rapid
sequence of tiny miracles in keeping the trajectory smooth, the momentum
up. It soon came to be widely copied but no-one ever did it quite like
him.
This was just a tool in fulfilling as intense a competitive will as has
ever been seen. Like his contemporary Rosemeyer and like Villeneuve after
him, Nuvolari’s speciality was the impossible. But unlike those shooting
stars he was able to perform his feats over two decades.
Ayrton Senna
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Some
say he believed he had a covenant with God. Certainly, when needed, he
had access to some place not entirely of this earth. He was always savagely
fast, of course, but sometimes that’s not enough - like when he was
in an early-’94 Williams with an aerodynamic imbalance against Michael
Schumacher in a near-perfect Benetton. Where he summoned those three poles
from was a secret between him and the Almighty. When Patrick Head says
they were the most remarkable performances he has ever seen anyone perform
in one of his cars, it counts.
They were just the parting shots of his extraordinary career. There were
those days at Monaco, playing nip and tuck with team-mate Prost for pole,
when he’d suddenly summon a lap that made everyone around doubt their
sensors. There was the race there in ’88 trying to go a whole lap
up on his nemesis and looking for a time to be on course to do so before
backing off then crashing out. Some says he was arguing with God. About
the terms of their agreement?
Jim Clark
Like
George Best with a football at his feet, Jim Clark at the wheel operated
at more frames per second than those around him, giving him all the time
in the world.
His old team-mate Trevor Taylor says just thinking about how good Clark
was makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end; it was beyond
mere brilliance, it was virtually shamanistic.
His on-track dominance barely tested the depth of his skill - especially
as Colin Chapman gave him a car advantage. Chapman used to say you only
caught a ghostly glimpse of Clark’s brilliance in real extremis -
the way he recovered mid-spin on a cold test day at Snetterton, say, or
set identical times on his first flying lap on two fundamentally different
set-ups. Look again at what you thought you’d just seen and all would
be normal again. But then your eyes were on normal frames per second.
Parnelli Jones
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A
crew-cut hard man with fists that saw plenty of action, Jones cut rough
in American stock cars before graduating to Champ Cars in the ’60s.
He could drive an oval with oversteer yet keep clear of the wall all day,
and on a road course he could happily play nip and tuck with a team-mate
as great as Jim Clark.
He had talent enough to use the sidewalls of his tyres to catapult him
out of Indy’s man-eating turns, a trick that spat others at the concrete,
and when even such peers as Andretti, the Unsers and Jackie Stewart go
on record as saying he was the best, you’ve got to listen.
Mika Hakkinen
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He
is the serene eye of the hurricane that is the oversteering McLaren, the
high-wire acrobat who does things with a car every time he drives it that
other great drivers might manage once in a season.
In fast corners Hakkinen’s phenomenal balance lets him place his
car millimetre perfect as it attempts to spiral out of control. Schumacher
might be quicker in individual sectors on the circuit, but Hakkinen can
string them together to make a quicker lap overall. These physical skills
are backed by a mind of rare focus that thinks the ultimate lap, then
reproduces it on demand. Michael Schumacher has more wells to draw from,
but for pure undiluted perfection over a single lap Hakkinen’s got
him covered.
Stefan Bellof
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There’s
a legend that shadows the memory of Bellof - that he was quicker than
Ayrton Senna. May be it was true, and certainly he would have been surprised
if it wasn’t, for he feared no-one and his belief was absolute.
Tragically, he felt a constant need to demonstrate the fearlessness that
accompanied the belief and the speed - and his invention of previously
unseen passing places - took the breath away. It was a heady cocktail
but ultimately a lethal one. Why choose Eau Rouge to pass Jacky Ickx?
Why the outside? His penchant for battles that didn’t need to be
fought denied the world the one that would truly have tested him: that
with Senna.
Henri Toivonen
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A
21-year-old leading his first big event, in an untested car; behind him,
the sport’s master in a machine so finely honed it can virtually
find its own way round the forests. Toivonen’s Sunbeam Lotus vs Mikkola’s
Escort RS1800, RAC Rally 1980. Henri had been here the year before, astonishing
those watching with his speed in a production-class car. That was a far
easier task than that facing him now, though. Serenely, he did his stuff
as few have ever been able to do and cantered to victory.
The video In-Car Manx, of Ari Vatanen’s Opel on the Isle of Man,
is 90 minutes of awesome commitment. Then you read the results and see
that he was beaten by team-mate Toivonen and wonder how that’s possible.
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September 2001
