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| Three Days, Two Nights | |
| by Alexander Law, Australia | |
It's been five years. Five years since I went and heard an F1 engine up close. Five years since I had to contend with the horrendous crowds, the smell of octane-loaded fuel, the Ferrari fans. Five years since I stood in line for half an hour to get some lunch. Yes, that was 1993, and I was at Adelaide after a lot of persuasion of my father. There weren't such things as superscreens and spectator mounds, so we got a beauty seat at the grandstand on pit straight, and I got sunburnt, along with gastroenteritis after eating four days of literal crap. At least some things don't change. Human sentinence can sometimes really be a disadvantage in many ways, especially when you are so well trained that you pull the electric plug out of an alarm clock when it rang, making you late for the first practice session of your home race! Thus, I missed the first 60 minutes when 22 cars first turned a wheel in anger. Travelling to the track is such a breeze when you know what the public transport will be like. There aren't many tracks in the world that is situated so close to the city centre. Montreal, Monaco (literally in the centre!) and Sao Paolo….. but that's not really in the centre! Anyhow, I finally arrived just before the second practice session began, and found myself in a relatively interesting position behind the Lauda stand. It wasn't too bad, well shaded, on a small rise, so I could adequately see through the wire wall and hear the cars. The last time I heard a Formula One engine in anger was at Adelaide in 1993, and I remember well the high pitched whine of the Renault V10, the thinner but looser thunder of a Ford V8, and the ear-splitting roar of a Ferrari V12. At that time, I successfully predicted which car was coming into view, as all the engine tones were slightly different, bar the Ford drivers (at that time there were still many). In any case, any attempt to repeat that in Melbourne was stopped dead in its tracks when, I realised as the first cars went by (incidentally it was the Number 3 Ferrari), they all sounded more or less the same. I figured out in five minutes the thing to listen for was the entry into the corner, and their exit throttle. You could eventually pick a Ferrari engine from a Peugeot, and a Mugen-Honda from a Supertec. The effect was magnified by the tunnel-like effect of the overhanging trees, so as the F1 cars came storming through the section, the sounds of engines, downshifts, lockups, and accleration were doubled. However, I was more intrigued by how various drivers attacked a corner entry or exit. Hill and Frentzen were two I watched carefully. Hill is the epitome of smoothness, there isn't anything ragged about it. If he got ragged, he did it badly. Frentzen is similar, but his entry is much later, and he really attacks the corner quite a bit. Coulthard is in the same mould as Schumacher Sr., with early turn-in and early corner attack, and Hakkinen was similar to Frentzen. But watching Michael drive was like watching a prize boxer; the opponent, his car -- and he fought it every lap. His entry is early, but his attack is earlier still, and as he hits the apex, he's already sliding out towards the next straight, under total control. Impressive, because he's the only one that drives like that. I decided that listening to engines was going to sustain injurious bodily harm to myself, so I moved on to the hill in front of Turn 8. From a high viewpoint, I could watch and listen to how the cars performed in braking and acceleration. You can tell quite a bit from the throttle noise about how the car is performing. The McLarens were silky smooth into the braking zone, and they were smooth off as well. Hell, all the cars sound smooth, but sometimes, you can pick a bad shift, or maybe a missed marker, and a little lock up of the inside tyre. Villeneuve, for one, was downshifting as he braked into the corner, which is unheard of in motorsport training! However, it sounded that he was positioning himself up for the next piece of straight track. There was a moment when a Williams sounded like it had a minor gearbox problem, or a cutout miscue, as the smooth acceleration suddenly cut for a moment before returning. One of the most unbelieveable feelings was the rumble that I felt as I crossed over the track. As an F1 car passed underneath, the bridge underneath your feet rumbled. Serious stuff. For the last 14 minutes of the practice session, I settled down just beyond Turn 1 in front of the superscreen. As always, there was a mad dash to get some extra laps just before the finish of the session. It made for some neat watching as the cars zoomed by in a desperate effort to improve their times. It in the end was a wasted effort, as only Coulthard got the better of his team-mate Hakkinen and took pole by a whisker (and I mean a whisker!). At least by Saturday, I had realised my mistake and was up nice and early to catch the extended practice session. I was intent on plonking myself in the same place until the end of qualifying, so I had prepared well: water, food, reading material, writing material. I set myself up in a plum spot, near where I had been on Turn 8 in front of the superscreen. That way, I could tell what was happening on the track. While the Saturday morning practice session was interesting, if a little monotonous, it was well broken up by the classic cars and the various support races. It was immensely interesting to watch these cars from the 1920s to the 1960s race around the Albert Park track, not as loud as the F1s but just as impressive, and while the Porsche cup and the Australian Touring Car races were not as fast as the F1 machines, they were as well if not better supported than their much more technologically advanced cousins. Saturday qualifying provided some points of note: the harder compounds took longer to work up heat, so the cars were all doing extended runs of two or more hot laps. Also, the track cooled as the afternoon passed and the wind changed direction. So, instead of having a headwind on pit straight, a lot of drivers were caught by the tailwind which sent them scrabbling across the grass as they entered Turn 1. Finally, Sunday. And once again, the same spot in the morning and for the rest of the day. You tend to form a bond with the people that are immediately around you. I spent the day with a group from England and a New Zealander, whom I got along with immensely well. We laughed, ate, moved, fidgeted and watched the various races go by as the time counted down to the two o'clock mark. The Porsches did their stuff, ramming each other and spininng on something that had been dropped at the apex of Turn 8, which caused some of them to practice pirouetting in their 911s, followed by the Australian Supercars, as Holden trounced Ford (again!) comprehensively. Finally, the clock reached two o'clock, and then we were transfixed for one and a half hours as 22 cars reduced themselves to eight, and the luck of the Irish strike in two places simultaneously. Two things to remind me to do next year:
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| Alexander Law | © 1999 Atlas Formula One Journal. |
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