When a racing driver isn't an racing driver but is still a racing driver
Sometimes, just sometimes, nice guys don't always finish last
After Max Verstappen and Lando Norris had come within a few centimetres of danger and silliness; after they had watched the replays of their near crash as they came out of the pits at the same time, almost side by side; after Norris had veered on to the grass and twitched as he avoided hitting the Dutchman, the two found time to joke about it.
“That’s quite an expensive lawnmower,” cracked Verstappen as they watched the replays of their pit stop at the Japanese Grand Prix on Sunday.
Immediately after the incident, one had blamed the other on the radio. After the race, no fuss. Formula One racing, as Ayrton Senna once said, is for racing drivers, for the brave and the hungry, for those who want to win and those who want to finish. Well, not quite.
“If you no longer go for a gap that exists, you're no longer a racing driver,” he told F1 legend Jackie Stewart in an interview. That interview was accompanied by a replay of his coming together with Ferrari’s Alain Prost at the start of the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix. The two were up for the World Championship title and if they both retired then Senna would be crowned champion. It was obvious that Senna had done it on purpose as revenge for Prost doing it to him the year before, leading him to missing the chicane at Suzuka and then being punished.
And, thus, Senna became world champion. Stewart probed Senna on this mythical “gap” and why he came together with some many cars when racing. Senna got a tad miffed with Stewart and after the interview said he would never allow him to interview him again. One-and-a-half years later, Senna called Stewart.
“He said, look, ‘I’m sorry’,” said Stewart. “Because he said then that that he did not do it on purpose. He later admitted that he did do it intentionally to Prost. And when he phoned me back, he said, ‘I apologise, I told you a lie, I’d like you to help me work for safety (in F1) and I’d like you to tell me how I should go about it.”
Senna had been frustrated by the 1989 incident. Suzuka is a circuit that can be a procession. First in to a corner. First out of a corner. He wanted to be second in and first out.
“I said to myself: ‘OK, you try to work cleanly and do the job properly and you get fucked by stupid people. If on Sunday, at the start, because I'm in the wrong place, Prost beats me off the line, at the first corner I will go for it, and he better not turn in because he is not going to make it,’ ” said Senna.
And, lo, Prost didn’t make it.
On Sunday, Norris nearly didn’t make it, but sense and sensibility prevailed. It was a coming together of will, need and responsibility, resulting in a fine, if not memorable Japanese Grand Prix. Norris and McLaren mixed up their sums and tactics, putting their money on Norris when Oscar Piastri looked the best bet.
“The victory came against the odds, given how strong McLaren have been over the opening meetings this season. Verstappen was enormously pleased to claim pole with an exceptional lap in qualifying, but to then convert it into a victory was a major achievement – though McLaren will be left rueing their strategy calls,” wrote Giles Richard in the Guardian.
“McLaren have hedged their bets; two talented drivers, both capable of race wins, but who risk getting in each other’s way to do so. Their greatest strength, therefore, is also their greatest weakness against a ruthless and single-minded Red Bull,” noted Molly Hudson in the Sunday Times of London. “Once the champagne had been sprayed on the podium, the ramifications of Verstappen’s victory began to sink in. Despite the deck seemingly stacked in their favour, McLaren were powerless to stop him. Maybe we could have tried a bit more with strategy… tried something different,’ Norris pondered.”
Ahead of the racing on Sunday, he pondered further: “I feel like there is a very prescribed version of how people say a world champion needs to be – overly aggressive. I want to win a championship. I’d rather just be a good person and try to do well. I’ll do whatever I can to win a championship but maybe I won’t sacrifice in my life as much as some others, in terms of who I am as a person and have the ‘fuck you’ mentality people say you’ve got to have. I still believe I can be a world champion but doing it by being a nice guy.”
That McLaren weren’t more aggressive in their strategy was a flaw. That Norris realised when a gap wasn’t a gap showed he was, despite what Senna may have said, a racing driver and a nice guy. Let us hope for him that this year nice guys don’t finish last.
