Thomas O'Keefe spent the Spanish Grand Prix weekend on assignment for Atlas F1, in the heart of the action, at the paddock of the Montmelo track. He found himself in the Sauber garage for Saturday Morning Practice, in the Michelin motorhome for a light lunch, in the Jordan garage for qualifying, in the FIA suite for Sunday Warm-Up, and in various press conferences throughout the weekend given by Ron Dennis, Frank Williams and the drivers. He also has an update on the whereabouts of Mika Hakkinen...

In the heart of Barcelona is a "see and be seen" thoroughfare called The Ramblas, where all manner of people strut and fret their hour about the stage amidst a picturesque visual feast composed of sidewalk cafes, street performers, flower stands, stylish shops and a wide and broad boulevard, set out under a profusion of trees that overhang the whole ensemble and provide shade to the watchers and the watched alike.

Out at the modern racetrack, which is located a 45 minute taxi ride from center city in an industrial area, the Perfumed Stockade called The Paddock is a perfect parallel to The Ramblas downtown, sans the shade trees. Compliments of the Powers That Be, that is where I spent the weekend of the Spanish Grand Prix, on assignment on behalf of Atlas F1, finding myself at various times in the Sauber garage for Saturday Morning Practice, in the Michelin motorhome for a light lunch, in the Jordan garage for qualifying, in the FIA suite for Sunday Warm-Up, and in various press conferences throughout the weekend given by Ron Dennis, Frank Williams and the drivers.

Along the way there was a wine tasting to take in at McLaren's new Starship Enterprise communications centre, dubbed "Ron's World", where I received a long distance message about Mika Hakkinen's whereabouts and activities to relay to our readers.

Ron Dennis spent some time with Mika on the beach the week before the Spanish Grand Prix - although not talking Formula One, according to Ron. Dennis feared and expected to find (in his words) "a couch potato," but he says Mika has only gained a few pounds during his sabbatical.

Another Finnish source, however, reports that there are 6 kilos more of Mika, but that Mika could still get in and out of a race car fast enough to meet the FIA medical rules. Furthermore, Mika will be in Monaco for the Grand Prix, the first race at which he will appear since Japan 2001.

What has Mika been doing all this time? His son, Hugo, has dominated his and Erja's life and Mika is especially proud that Hugo is already walking at eleven months and making "Vroom Vroom" noises.

A Swiss Miss

Spending Saturday morning practice with Sauber was a crash course in Formula One mechanics and engineering. Agnes Carlier, the team's press officer, stationed me in the Sauber garage right next to Felipe Massa's car and swore me to silence. It is a three-bay garage and relatively spacious. Massa's car is on the right, the spare car in the middle, and Nick Heidfeld's car is on the left. On the wall of the garage, behind each of the main cars, are oval pictures of the drivers looking out at us through their helmets, the only frivolous touch visible in the whole operation.

Although there was no physical partition between the two drivers and their respective group of mechanics, there might just as well have been. To be sure, the same senior "white shirts" Sauber engineers supervise the whole team, but the six to eight mechanics supporting each driver - the "dark blue shirts" - clearly develop kinship and loyalty to the driver they work for directly. These relationships count for a lot; when Michael Schumacher takes pole, for example, the first thing he does when he returns is to shake every hand in the garage and we know that Mrs. Schumacher raised no foolish children.

And speaking of Ferrari, surely an important ingredient in the Sauber team's success is the powerful and reliable Ferrari 2001 spec engine (badged as the Petronas 02A out of respect for the Malaysian oil company that pays the bills). But it would be derogatory of Sauber to place undue emphasis on the Ferrari powerplant to explain the team's success, since the Prost team had the same engine in 2001 and is in Chapteur XI instead of occupying a spacious garage on the pitlane.

But the Ferrari engine is treated like a gem by the Sauber crew, to be admired but not touched. Unlike most teams, there is not a lot of 'blat, blat, blat' revving up of the engine just for the fun of it before an installation lap: when these guys put the starter in and the engine burbles to life, the driver is off and running.

And when the mechanics did take off the engine cowling from time to time, it seemed to me they were inspecting for leaks or outside evidence of a problem; nobody was willy nilly taking off valve covers and messing with Maranello's work. Sadly, the valve covers are not painted red like the famous Ferrari Testarossa sports car but, as compensation, the Sauber/Petronas engine has a complicated but beautiful set of exhaust pipes that knarl around like an old chrome tree trunk, growing out of the V10 engine but come together into one muscular-looking exhaust pipe that comes out flush on the rear body as it did the Ferrari 2001 car.

Interestingly, given all the rumors about Ferrari's experimentation with a unitary engine-cum-transmission design, Sauber is proud of having its own transmission mated to the ex-Ferrari engine, semi-automatic, longitudinally mounted, seven-speed with a carbon clutch by Sachs Race Engineering.

In addition to two hot drivers and the engine that powered Michael Schumacher to last year's World Championship, Sauber was on the right tires for Barcelona - the Bridgestone Potenza that Ferrari runs as well. In a word, Sauber has the whole "package" right, which is why it led Best of the Rest last year and is intent on holding its own against French automotive giant Renault or other challengers this year.

Typically, the Sauber drivers - both of them a compact 59 kilos - arrived for a practice session with just a few minutes to spare and reported to the large tool chest at the rear of the garage, the top of which doubles as a work area on which all the driver's equipment is laid out on two paper towels: his earpiece, balaclava, helmet and gloves. It may not be as simple as in Fangio's days but it is still not much. In Ferrari's garage area, there is a special helmet cubbyhole; in Minardi's garage the helmets are kept in a box. To each his own.

As the driver dons his gear, over at the car, the mechanics are stationed at their positions. There is a rear jack and front jack man and these special tools at Sauber are larger and stronger than they appear on TV. The two jack men work simultaneously, by eye-balling one another. Another mechanic, with one important and elegant motion, mans the electric starter and then replaces it in the holder and moves on to help the other mechanics.

Then there are the tireless tire guys, each of whom have one tire to worry about, who find themselves putting on and taking off tire warmers and heaters with monotonous regularity. It is said that it takes more than an hour to bring the tires to the 90 degrees centigrade optimal operating temperature, so keeping heat on these tires becomes an absolute obsession with the mechanics, underlining the crucial nature of the four contact patches with the road and how to make them and keep them warm and sticky for as long as you can.

This whole atmosphere of the garage area reminds me of a hospital, with the car as a surgical patient. Above the car is a gantry with two long flourescent lights, and electrical cords dangling down from the gantry that are plug-ins to the tire warmers, wheel guns and other devices. When the patient's procedure is completed, in rapid succession, the umbilical cords are unplugged, the tire warmers and heaters are stripped off, the coolers in the radiators come out, the jackmen drop the car, the starter man lights the fire and the drama we have been waiting for begins.

One especially trusted mechanic takes his life in his hands and backpeddles out of the garage looking up the pitlane and signaling Go or No Go to the driver. The driver's visor goes down, the red rain light begins flashing at the back of the car and Massa burns rubber out of the garage, a 21 year-old on his way to doing 200 miles per hour.

When the driver is away, the mechanics play and take over the driver's favorite toy: the TV monitor. In Sauber's case, in typical Swiss/Sauber fashion, no expensive telescoping submariner type device descends from the ceiling so that the driver can watch the session when he is sitting in the car. Instead, the Sauber driver's TV monitor is manually mounted by a mechanic on the scuttle ahead of the cockpit and the driver simply presses the channels to follow what he wants from his seat.

Massa was usually more interested in following the timing and scoring channel and flipped right past a channel showing Michael Schumacher on a hot lap. When Massa goes off on his own flying lap, his crew descends on his TV, puts it on the floor in the garage and congregate all around it, watching their life's work in action.

After a few hot laps, Massa is back in the garage and within minutes, the white shirts are passing him charts with colored lines on them presumably showing telemetry which he pages through awkwardly with his gloved hands. Then the team powwows but not much is said. Crew members talk to each other by the radios they all have and, having made a decision by radio and hand signals, the team scatters and a new wing element is substituted or a new set of tires are fitted or brake adjustments are made. It is all eerily silent and efficient, again like an operating room.

And where is the eponymous Peter Sauber during all this? He is out on the pit wall at the TV monitors most of the time but at a critical point in Saturday practice, when Massa had overdone it and had been going too wide and had been kicking up the dirt on a prior run, Sauber did what a sensitive team manager would do.

The 58 year-old came across from the pit wall and into the garage and spoke face-to-face with Felipe, no earphones, Peter Sauber leaning into the cockpit, and, after imparting his words of wisdom, patted Massa on the helmet and took his leave. It was as if he was saying, 'don't worry, you can't do anything to my car that we can't fix and that J.J. Lehto, Frentzen, Salo, Diniz, Raikkonen and Alesi have not done already before you.'

During a time when many decry the high costs of operating a Formula One team, the Sauber Team is a model of proportionality that is fast becoming the paradigm for all but the Big Three. In Sunday's warm-up, Heidfeld was second quickest and Massa was in fourth, mixing it up with the front running Ferrari's. In the race, the Sauber approach was further vindicated as Heidfeld finished in fourth place and Massa placed fifth, the only team with both cars in the points.

Retro Yellow

I spent qualifying with Jordan, but unlike Sauber I brought them no luck on a particularly unnerving weekend for the team, which began with the announcement of pink slips for senior staff, leaving Jordan Grand Prix back in the hands of the two people who were there when the first unpainted Jordan was introduced to the press 11 years ago: Eddie Jordan as Outside Man and Gary Anderson as Inside Man. If they re-hire John Watson as a driver, the Retro Jordan Team will be complete.

Interestingly, Eddie Jordan got a vote of confidence in another interview that weekend from Sir Frank Williams, himself no stranger in his early days to the difficulties of financing a team. Williams had no doubt that Eddie was both a racer and a businessman and that the racer in him would now come to the fore to solve the team's problems.

At first blush, it is clear from visiting the bright yellow garage that even after attrition there are still many more hands on deck in the Jordan garage than right next door at Sauber. And having two drivers as disparate in experience as veteran Giancarlo Fisichella and rookie Takuma Sato means the garage has an entirely different feel. Fisichella, now 29, is the picture of grace under pressure and nothing seems to phase him or unruffle his wavy hair. He jokes quietly outside the car with the mechanics, flips channels on the TV monitor (the spiffy kind, with a remote, natch) and goes about his business as a consummate professional.

Sato, on the other hand, gets right into the car, eager to drive, but keeps the team busy, breaking or hitting things, or not qualifying, or whatever, but definitely giving it the old college try. During qualifying, the team had the nose off the front of Sato's car and jacked way up high with another of those beautifully designed special tools - a hydraulic jack in this case, and much frenzied work was going on to get Sato's car repaired and back out again. In the end, Sato qualified 19th ahead of the two Minardis and McNish's Toyota; Fisichella managed 12th place on the grid, the top Honda-powered car, and just behind Massa's Sauber.

"What's wrong with Honda," was a question much on everyone's lips on race weekend, not just Eddie Jordan's. While three young and purposeful Japanese engineers tended to their fellow Gen-Xer Takuma Sato, as Frank Williams pointed out in an interview later on, these youthful engineers are two generations of Honda engineers removed from the era of the world-conquering Honda engines that powered the World Championship winning seasons of Williams in 1987 and McLaren from 1988 to 1991.

And when the question was put to Ross Brawn, his view was that Honda should focus on one team at a time, a solution Eddie Jordan is obviously wary about as if he doesn't already have enough troubles. Dr. Mario Theissen of BMW says that as a new player BMW would not have been in a position to support two teams and would not want to do so even now, after two years at it and having achieved a fair amount of success. Adrian Newey was the only technical director who declined to offer Honda free advice, responding responsibly that he could not possibly know what was going on at Honda and could not see himself lecturing them on how to improve things.

It seems clear that the handwriting is on the wall, but it might be in Japanese and indecipherable in the Jordan garage: may the best team win our engines but there can only be one winner.

In the race, Jordan's difficulties persisted with Fisichella out by lap 5, losing hydraulic pressure as he had at Imola. Sato, true to form, exuberantly overtook five cars at the start to end up 13th behind Fisichella, but then overdid it in the dirt, almost saved the slide but then lost it and spun out on lap 11 at turn 13 - the luck of the Irish.

Winging It on High Octane

In marketing circles they say that any publicity - even bad publicity - is a good thing as long as they spell your name right, and Jaguar and Minardi were following that principle much of the weekend.

For its part, Minardi drew attention to itself in some new ways: by supplying exciting highlight footage of two front wings and one rear wing detaching themselves at speed on both cars over a two-day period. Mark Webber had the distinction of losing both front and rear wings at various times and spun many pirouettes when his rear wing let go in Sunday warm-up before safely coming to a halt inside the tire barrier. Alex Yoong also had a spectacular front wing detachment on Saturday, running over his own wing, with his front wheels being launched into the air like a funny car doing a wheelie at a dragstrip.

After Webber's episode on Sunday morning, the Minardi team withdrew from the race. Paul Stoddart told me that the team had made yeoman efforts overnight refabricating new front wings in Faenza, Italy, and flying them back to Spain (it helps in a pinch to have your air force!), but when the rear wing went again on Sunday, he was not prepared to risk his drivers without more time to develop a fix.

Jaguar's problems were minor by comparison. As if the team did not have enough issues, a fuel sample (Castrol is the fuel supplier to Jaguar) was taken from Eddie Irvine's Jaguar before qualifying (Eddie qualified 15th, ahead of his Spanish teammate Pedro de la Rosa in 17th) and the results of the fuel analysis, as reported by the FIA Stewards of the Meeting, "showed that the fuel was not the same as one of those approved for use by the Competitor prior to this Event."

The Stewards graciously gave Jaguar a second bite at the apple and agreed that one more fuel sample would be analyzed, but the same results obtained: there was a fuel irregularity between the fuel sample submitted by Castrol two weeks prior to the Spanish Grand Prix versus the fuel sample taken before qualifying; the sample did not match the "fingerprint" filed by Castrol.

The Jaguar team protested that no perceived performance advantage was gained and that an immediate investigation had been launched by Castrol into how the fuel irregularity occurred. But Irvine's 15th place qualifying position was declared void and he was moved to the back of the grid which, because of the withdrawal of the Minardi team, meant that Eddie began just behind Sato's Jordan in 20th position. Niki Lauda, with his customary Austrian bluntness, summed up Jaguar's race succinctly: "a weekend to forget."

View from the Executive Suite

Max Mosley does not go to all the races but has a whole slew of talented and experienced people that run the sporting side of the race: Race Director, the Medical Delegate, the Stewards of the Meeting, the FIA Press Delegate and various other officials who silently go about their work well below the radar screen of public visibility.

I visited the FIA suite on Sunday morning, during warm-up, meeting with Alan Donnelly, who represents Max Mosley at the races when Max is not present. We stared in disbelief as Mark Webber's rear wing went asunder during warm-up and he spun out, unhurt. Most thought for a moment that the circuit TV was showing one of the periodic replays from earlier practice sessions when the Minardi had lost wings, but this was "live."

The other episode I watched from the FIA suite was the rare occasion when Schumacher's Ferrari lets him down, forcing him to pull off the track. Like an Indycar driver, he waited for a tow truck to appear and then got back in the car and held the tow rope while he was taken back to the pits, taking care to hold the rope up high enough to clear the pitot tube and the delicate antennas that bristle from the front of the Ferrari.

What was wrong with the Ferrari? As usual, it was shrouded in Maranello Mystery but the way Schumacher behaved you knew the problem was fixable and he was making sure no one touched that car until it got back into the arms of his mechanics.

Midnight at Montmelo

Montmelo, Spain, is the little town that is actually the site of the "Barcelona" track, and many people who come by train to the track hike up from the Montmelo train station: the signs in the town square say Grand Prix of Montmelo!

The Media Centre closes at 11:00pm and as the last scribes emerge from their labors, it is Montmelo ouside and not Barcelona anymore. The neat and tidy Ramblas of the Paddock is a shambles, in an aggressive state of simultaneous disassembly of everything from the team garages to Ron's World, all of it looking much like the back lot of a Hollywood movie set. English truckies from the Williams team wave from their huge trailer trucks to their Italian counterparts loading up the trucks headed for Maranello. Still others are discussing the relatively straight shot, medium haul down the Spanish coast to Valencia, Spain, where many of the teams plan to test in just a few days.

The European season of Formula One is in full swing, with team principals and drivers criss-crossing Europe in their private jets and these truckies and the support staff of the teams on the ground fanning out across the autopistas, autostradas and autobahns to bring Hollywood to Austria, Germany, and of course, to Monaco, the place that remains the spiritual center of Formula One and the only venue that is a match for the glitz and glamour now so intrinsic to the sport.

As I passed through the gates of the Circuit de Calalunya for the last time, no beeping electronic screening machines were there to greet me and even the security guards were gone. I walked for a bit to a place called the Rotunda, a kind of rotary circle with flowers all around to meet my taxi and in the half-light of the rotunda found myself startled to be face-to-face with Juan Manuel Fangio.

There is a life-sized and life-like statue of the Argentine legend on the sidewalk of the Rotunda, standing next to a sculpture of the Mercedes-Benz W196 Grand Prix car that he and Stirling Moss drove to such dominance in the 1955 season, and that marked the last appearance of the Mercedes-Benz factory team prior to the Ilmor-Mercedes collaboration with McLaren in the late 1990's.

Some race fans had laid flowers on the hood of the W196, the way they do at Senna's statue near the Tamburello turn at Imola. It is comforting to know that despite its calculated modernity and cutting edge nature, true blue Formula One fans somehow still connect back to the rich history and traditions of the sport which is part of its appeal to so many. I kept thinking: what would Fangio make of all this? But, at the same time, wouldn't the modest man from Balcarce, Argentina, be surprised and proud that at least we still remember?...