Going motor racing with Mr Gaddafi
August 2010 |
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I could understand it more if people went out with the purpose of catching food for breakfast but from the people I’ve spoken to over the years, on the rare occasions a fish is gullible (I almost said gillable) enough to fall for the old maggot-on-a-line trick, all that happens is the angler whoops with delight, eyes the fish approvingly, jots it down in his or her little notebook and then throws it back in the river where it will inevitably either die from its wounds or by swimming into a discarded condom and suffocating.
Golf and Snooker are other things I don’t get. I mean I like playing snooker and a bit of pitch and putt can be fun from time to time but I just fail to understand how it can be so hard to stick a stupid little ball into a stupid little hole. The concept is so simple. And I can’t do it!
This brings me teeing off and landing one straight on the fairway to another subject I don’t understand and that is how racing drivers who are so obviously useless can achieve so much. Now to sit here and list them all would take millennia so I will stick to one who has been in the news quite a lot recently: Jacques Villeneuve.
So once upon a time in the land of hockey, snow and Moose was born this little dwarf called Gilles. He was a bit of a nutter and made a name for himself as an exciting racing driver. His death behind the wheel of a Ferrari in 1982 cemented his place in motor racing folklore and he became something of a legend.
This pint-sized pilot produced a son called Jacques. Little Jacques idolised his father and decided to follow in his footsteps and become a famous racing driver. His early career was slightly less than average. In fact some might say it was rubbish. Still, with the name behind him and an opportunistic Scottish bloke offering him a management deal in the hope of cashing in on said name, he managed to get a drive in Formula 3.
He spent the best part of three seasons in the Italian Formula 3 series and achieved about as much success as McLaren do at an FIA hearing. He then moved to Japan where he managed to at least look like he knew what he was doing and picked up a handful of wins.
Seemingly wanting to try every continent in the world, presumably searching for the one most likely to allow him to achieve success, he then moved to the States to compete in Formula Atlantic. He actually did a fairly good job in his first year and was promoted to the Indycar championship in 1994.
It has to be said that he really started to look quite good at this point in his career. Finishing second at the Indy 500 at his first attempt, he went on to pick up a win later in the year and ended the season 6th in the final standings. He swept to the championship the following year, taking 4 wins including the Indy 500 and taking 3 other podium finishes.
His performance landed him a Formula 1 drive with Williams. At the time I thought this was a very risky move for the team and I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking that he would end up being another Michael Andretti.
To my surprise he did quite a remarkable job. OK he had by far the best car on the grid but anyone who manages to get pole position in their first race, take 4 victories in their rookie year and almost win the championship has to be fairly good, right?
Well actually it was his championship winning year the following season that marked him out as a useless waste of space in my eyes. Out of his 7 victories that year he inherited at least 4 of them. He won the British, European and Austrian Grands Prix as a result of Hakkinen’s Mercedes engine exploding and he won the Hungarian Grand Prix as a result of one of Damon Hill’s mechanics having a few too many spare parts after a botched DIY job on his Arrows. That is just off the top of my head. Without these strokes of luck he would have been soundly beaten by Schumacher.
Anyway, over the next few seasons he turned into a complete embarrassment. The BAR project was just pure comedy and went to emphasise that money isn’t everything. After being sacked from the very team he helped set up he unsurprisingly found himself without any other options for 2004. He did 3 races with Renault at the end of that year and proceeded to embarrass himself. He then embarrassed himself further at Sauber and BMW before getting the sack again.
Since then he went on to further embarrass himself in NASCAR, although he also finished second at Le Mans which is what confuses me somewhat. Surely anyone who wins the Indy 500, the Indycar and F1 championships in only their second year and can also finish second at the Le Mans 24 hour race has to have some talent right? Well then how can Villeneuve be so obviously crap? It doesn’t make any sense!
Now he has decided it is a good idea to set up his own F1 team – presumably with a view to driving himself. Firstly there were rumours that he was getting into bed with the son of Muammar al-Gaddafi, or social revolutionary colonel Gaddafi to most people. Now, call me paranoid, but I find the idea of a Libyan with access to that amount of petrol and other flammable liquid rather unsettling. Although he seems to have distanced himself from those rumours, what that means is he will secretly be funded by the Libyans in exchange for access to advanced Formula 1 technology that will allow Libya to construct a weapon of mass destruction.
He has now decided to form an alliance with Durango – the ex-GP2 team. So let me get this straight: Arguably the most undeserving champion in Formula 1 history is entering a team secretly funded by terrorists and in partnership with a team that has already folded from a lesser series because it ran out of money. And he doing this because no other Formula 1 team is stupid enough to give him a drive. Well that is going to be a success then.
One only has to look at how much Michael Schumacher is struggling after a 3 year break. This guy was one of the greatest Formula 1 drivers of all time and he has returned with the reigning champions. Does Villeneuve really think he is going to do well?
In many ways I hope he does get a spot on the grid next year because there is a malicious part of me that wants to see how useless Villeneuve Racing will actually be. Rest assured I will be laughing when he fails to qualify for the first race as a result of the re-introduction of the 107% rule.
