21st May 2019 – remembering Niki Lauda, Charlie Whiting and Bob Hubbard
(Niki at Nürburgring, Germany GP in 2009 – Pic James Penrose)
I still have my STP March team jacket from 1972 and that is a reminder of a very long time ago, another world, another place, a very different formula one to today.
I started to go to testing at Silverstone some time in 1971. Motor racing was something I knew nothing about, although my aunt’s step-brother was Piers Courage and my uncle shared a racing car with Piers’ brother Charlie, my only previous experience of racing was a family trip to the Daily Express race at Silverstone when we saw no racing cars at all, the crowds were too much and I was too small, my only memory was the extraordinary sound of the Lotus gas turbine.
But cricket being an ‘enforced’ subject at Stowe school, frankly one of the most boring sports ever devised, the vastly more interesting noise coming over the hill from Silverstone got my interest and I found a way to escape and hitch my way to Silverstone to see what the interesting sound was all about.
That day there were some red cars testing, STP March Ford cars, with Niki Lauda and Ronnie Peterson driving them. Having zero knowledge about F1 there was no hesitation in chatting with them both, and discovering they were heading back past Stowe at the end of testing I scammed a lift from Niki in his Ford hirecar, a Capri or something like that. The enduring memory being of going down Dadford Hill, through the little village, faster than I’d ever been in any car, a broad toothy grin on Niki’s face.
That started a pattern of going to testing at Silverstone and drivers giving me lifts back and sometimes arranging to meet so I could get a lift there at the start of the day too. Niki and Ronnie often offered lifts, Denny Hulme, Derek Bell and many others too.
I spent early years messing around in F1, then away from F1 for many years before coming back to F1 with Team Lotus in the late 1980’s. When I started going to races with Lotus it was strange to meet so many friends from many years past, friends who had been starting out in racing at the time I first knew them, but now world champions and many were now famous. A little strange to some of my Lotus colleagues (old-hands in F1) for these drivers to come up and say hello as a friend to the ‘F1 newcomer’…
At Lotus our motorhome was run by Karl-Heinz Zimmermann, an Austrian who’s superb cooking was matched by his extremes of practical jokes. Something Austrians excel in. If K-H Z, Niki, Gerhard Berger or other Austrians were about trouble was guaranteed to happen.
In later years K-H Z went from Lotus to run Bernie Ecclestone’s motorhome so the Austrian gang and ‘Honorary Austrians’ spent many hours in the back of Bernie’s motorhome tent at races. Always fun, mostly a private place where those at all levels in racing might drop in and be welcome.
When FIA Doc Sid Watkins hijacked a good amount of my spare time from 1988 onwards, Sid being an ‘Honorary Austrian’ dragged me in there for red wine and humour and this rekindled the friendship with Niki.
Working on racing safety is an occupation where most often you spend your time with people saying what you are doing is not necessary and an inconvenience – that’s often from the highest levels in governing bodies all the way through the racing world to mechanics.
Niki had a different view and in his way would embarrass people into taking action. He would never hesitate in delivering his view as widely as possible regardless of what other people might think. No-one would question his right to demand changes to safety after his Nürburgring accident.
Of those who’d suffered and survived there were very few still around in racing when I got back to F1 with Lotus. I remember Denny Hulme telling me about his methanol Indycar fire and showing me his burnt hands, Frank Gardner telling me about his ‘split-arse’ laps with petrol burns, Derek Bell telling me about his Le Mans film accident and how after being badly burnt and lying on a stretcher in the ambulance, it had driven off with the back doors open and he had gone flying out skate boarding down the road on the stretcher.
But none of these survivors were around in racing much by 1988, Niki was still there and used what he’d gone through to help those who wanted to make the sport safer, not less exciting, but take some of the stupid unnecessary risks out of it.
I faced a very uphill struggle after 1990 when I proposed the F1 super helmet (now known as the 8860 carbon helmet). Experts in safety departments and officials for a good 4 years told me it was a waste of time, unnecessary…..
Niki and Sid Watkins kept on pushing me not to give up and without their quiet help in the background I would probably have given in to the ‘fence-sitters’ who avoided the issue comprehensively till 1994 and Ayrton and Roland’s accidents made them do their jobs.
Nearly 10 years on from then and many of the same ‘fence-sitters’ and other experts (thankfully mostly now gone and replaced by competent good people) were still there making a hash of introducing the Hans, again it was Sid pushing me and Niki cajoling others.
Typically Niki got friends Nelson (Piquet), Keke (Rosberg) to get me to help their sons as well as his son to learn how to use Hans for the first time – three world champions sons using it, when so many were derogatory about it, did make a difference.
Niki was a very special friend for nearly 50 years and his humour and friendship will really be missed.
Barely a month ago we also lost Charlie Whiting and a couple of months back we lost Dr Bob Hubbard
(Bob at Barcelona testing in 2003 – Pic James Penrose)
Through the introduction of the Hans and subsequent F1 and other safety work, Bob, the inventor of the Hans and Charlie Whiting, F1 race boss, were unstinting supporters of pretty much all the work I did.
Bob Hubbard, was a mild mannered man, a tower of knowledge on automotive stuff – he designed the Hybrid 3 dummy head – a key part for any automotive (for road and racing alike) crash testing. Then the Hans – a project he developed in his spare time when a friend of his brother in law, Jim Downing, was killed in a stupid low speed accident, due to basilar skull fracture.
Bob and Jim were ridiculed for many years and indeed the early Hans was pretty unusual, but they did not give up. Most of the experts working up the project for F1 in Europe had loads of budget and 2 full years of testing and had given up, but totally out of the blue in early 2003 Sid gave me a chance to make the Hans work.
Absolutely crucial to what I did was not only Hubbard’s Amazing Neck Saver itself (as I called the Hans) but Bob Hubbard’s unstinting help, advice and help all times of day and night along with Jim extending me an incredible line of credit so I had a chance to make it happen. It is very very rare that I’ve felt someone in racing trust me so completely and for whom I’ve had such complete trust in them in return.
Bob Hubbard was a one-off, a really special person with a humility and ability to impart his knowledge freely, losing him to Parkinsons was an awful loss to one who gave racing such a gift as his Hans.
Along the same road with the Hans work I ended up being slotted into the FIA, always semi-officially until 2011, but it gave me a base, frankly almost no income, but a place to work from and semi-acceptance. Charlie Whiting was my boss and his unexpected passing in March shocked all who worked for and with him.
Within the ‘FIA F1 gang’ there are people from all backgrounds, huge experience in all sorts of fields who bring what they have to make F1 work, very quietly behind the scenes.
(FIA 2009 end of season official photo)
Charlie was the person to keep us all working together, in the same direction and invariably a calm voice in many storms.
In early 2003 Sid Watkins got me together with Charlie so that he could steer me through the mire of FIA F1 politics in the field of driver safety where a great many people seemed determined to make the Hans a failure.
From the very start there were some journalists making a meal of every small grumble. Indeed there was one who made serious income from getting some apparently bad news, holding onto it for a while and then releasing it weeks or sometimes months later when all the problems had been solved.
This always stirred up numerous other people to blurt off and on one occasion there was a ‘big news piece’ where Nick Heidfeld was grumbling about the Hans. On the very day the story came out, it happened that Nick wrote me an email saying ‘thanks for sorting out all the problems a good while back and saying the minor problems were gone’….
Charlie always had a way of putting water on those fires, knowing instinctively what were real and what were total BS. Long after the Hans had been accepted well into racing and I’d continued working with the FIA on driver safety overall in F1 there was the famous Kubica accident in his Sauber at the 2007 Canada GP.
It was a monstrously huge accident. After the race a journalist approached me asking to give a quote, I refused and referred him to the FIA press dept. On arriving in USA at Indy to the next race I had a really uncomfortable feeling that a lot of people were staring at me. Not knowing what had gone on in the press in the week between the races.
That individual had decided to invent a load of dramatic quotes – assigning them to me and the story went viral being syndicated around the world. The FIA press director took me to task, threatening this and that. Didn’t even think to ask me what had really happened, and when I explained it was disregarded.
Charlie called me in and went through everything and the story quietened down, the lies that had been printed made a huge impact on many people’s opinion of me and it hurt every bit of safety work I did for a long time after. Pretty much the only person to put his faith in me was Charlie.
There were countless good times and Charlie’s humour was classic, he could imitate a variety of F1 personalities pretty well. Some of his expressions were memorable – ‘going in with the size 10s’ when he was pissed off and on a mission to ‘sort things out’.
The end of the season FIA staff dinner at Fogo de Chao near Interlagos in Brazil or in the ‘Rog (Log) Cabins’ at Suzuka were always memorable. Very very hard to believe he is gone.
Three legends in so little time.
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