Well this cheered me up.
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That was a hateful weekend.
I was chief engineer at Benetton and JJ’s crash caused the first ever use of a safety car at the start and Michael’s win was a sombre affair 
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That weekend was horrendous and indelibly etched in my memory.
I was thinking I don’t really remember it, but then I was 9 when it happened, and my interest in F1 didn’t really start until about 2000, or possibly 2001. It was right near the start of the Ferrari / Schumacher powerhouse era.
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Near it, yes. Schuey was driving for Benetton that year.
Interesting grid for the race!
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If Perez wins this race I wonder how long he will accept 2nd driver status.
Even more interesting if Verstappen drives through the field to 2nd will RBR enforce team rules and ask Perez to give way?
Big job for Max to get through on this track and the more aggressive he is the greater the chance of a collission.
Should be interesting
Great drive from Verstappen
RBR look in a different league
They do appear to have an advantage.
{Cue overspending debate reinitialisation! 
]
Well done Alonso 
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They have, but it is probably not as big an advantage as some have had, the Lotus 78 and 79 when nobody else/few had ground effect was a much bigger advantage, and both the Williams FW07 and FW11 had big advantages over the opposition at some circuits for part of the season. I remember Jones being so far ahead of everybody else in Friday qualifying doing full tank race evaluations during Saturday qualifying and at Brands Hatch in 1986 where Piquet and Mansell battled it out (rather than winning at the slowest speed possible, Piquet’s preference) they lapped the whole field twice apart from prost in P3 who they lapped once and had in sight at the chequered flag so nearly lapped him twice too.
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I’ve a question for you in particular Frank, about a point you’ve made a few times, comparing Wolf with Horner, and Wolf having inherited a team already at the top. How much do you think Horner’s success from starting with a team in a worse position is that he got Adrian Newey?
Bloody hell !!
For all RB’s - or Max, certainly - dominance at Miami, it was fuck all compared to Spa last year.
I think we’re seeing the collective effect of everyone else shitting the bed
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In 96 I did some analysis for Steve Nichols that showed that the McLaren was weak in a particular area when compared to Williams. This was presented to Ron and after poaching people like Paddy and David Brown over the years from the dominant Williams team, it became clear to Ron that he needed Adrian Newey. Adrian duly arrived in late 97 and the team started to really deliver in 98.
However, Ron had a set of rules that you had to work by and Adrian I am sure was not keen on them. So when Bobby Rahal tried to get him to go to Jaguar it very nearly happened, and then when Horner and Red Bull took over the Jaguar team he set about getting Adrian to join them.
In a long winded way I am saying that recruiting Adrian and giving him the freedom that he wanted was an essential part of enabling RBR to win.
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A lot of it.
Horner was experienced enough to know the car is the star and Adrian the best of his generation.
His other key team building choices (IMO) were Jonathan Wheatley and Kenny Handkammer to knock a bit of discipline and focus into a rather slack and rudderless race team so they got the best out of what they had and finished races.
Kenny got head hunted by Elon Musk for a senior role at Tesla but it didn’t last that long and he is at Lucid.
Jon has made the race team effective, Adrian has presided over making the best car most of the time, Horner put it together and holds it together.
Wolf is more “mediatique” but, IMO, hasn’t a clue as to what is important and just lucked in.
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Exactly, Wolf lucked in to all the hard work that Ross Brawn and Bob Bell (and the rest of us) had put in to make Mercedes F1 ready to win for years.
All Wolf had to do was to not mess it up. He had a good go at that by bringing Paddy in, but Wolf soon worked out that Paddy was not needed and could not improve things at the team and so got rid of him.
So after that he worked on the cruise and collect mode of managing! Now that he needs to make changes he clearly does not know what to do.
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I was always amazed Ron chose Paddy and David, neither key parts of Williams’ previous sucess, David was a draughtsman who wanted to travel (and made a lot of drawing mistakes, he walked through the machine shop in his scooter crash helmet for a while…) it was sort of last chance saloon with Patrick and Paddy was a bright bloke I hired to write active suspension control software which was important but not requiring an overall understanding of what made the car quick.
I did however once tell Martin Whitmarsh Paddy was the cleverest bloke I had hired and maybe he put 2+2=5.
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We were also amazed that Ron chose Paddy and David as neither understood what was required for a fast car.
David was pushed off run the A1GP team, but somehow Paddy remained as he was a clever guy who could keep the bosses thinking that he understood racing cars.
In his defence Paddy was very good at seeing where to go in the longer term with the core technology that needed to be developed (e.g. driver in the loop simulator, the one vehicle model and simulation approach and nowadays outside of F1 with zero petroleum), but had no idea how to make a fast car.
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