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Autumn approaches, even for a Formula One pilot.
It’s raining and the evenings are taking on a
refreshing cool. The rain is good for the plants, but not
necessarily for those who take their summer holidays in Torquay
or Cromer. Maybe it’s our turn for a dousing rather than the
consistent turn that is the province of the Western Isles.
Still, let us not moan in latter months that the summer passed
us by this year. The lawn resembles the main street of
Tombstone and tumble weeds roll down the street outside more often than do buses.
But, let’s face it, a little less humidity doesn’t do anyone any
harm.
Talking of humility (sic), there’s a
marvellous scene in the 1966 western ‘Duel at Diablo’ , where
Jess Remsberg, James Garner as the weary scout, and Toller,
Sydney Poitier as the shrewd horse dealer, are standing off in
the main street of the frontier town. Remsberg, a man of
considerable integrity, has offended Toller, albeit
accidentally, but, rather than duel it out with Toller and
thereby remove one of the two headline stars too early in the
movie, Remsberg, no shrinking violet himself, decides the better
course is to apologise to Toller for his perceived sleight, thus
gaining the man's mutual respect and creating a bond between the two;
a bond which we have no doubt will come to mean something later
when the wagon train is holed up at the mercy of Chata and his
warriors in Diablo Canyon. It is a lightly disguised parable
with racial prejudice as its main theme. I like it for many
reasons. The first is that Marvin H Albert wrote the novel and
the screenplay, and he also wrote one of my favourite books; The
Gargoyle Conspiracy. I met him some years, and I mean some
years, ago quite by chance and he was no less inspiring in
person than in print. Secondly, the film also numbers among its
supporting actors Bill Travers, who I also met some years ago,
as I was at school with his sons and my wife-to-be went to
school with his daughter. Also Carol lived a couple of bushes
down from the Travers' household in Coldharbour, near Dorking,
where they once kept a lion, as I remember it. It may be of
interest to some to know that in the movie Travers’ character,
Lt Scotty McAllister, breaks his leg when his horse is shot from
beneath him. This unfortunately really did happen in the filming
and Bill Travers had to complete the movie with his leg broken;
an uncomfortable experience, or so he understated when he told
me about it. Dennis Weaver, later to become well known for his
urban-cowboy sheriff, Marshall McCloud, also stars, and the
movies possesses one of the best one-shot opening sequences you
will find. It is Cowboys and Indians at its best, or worst
depending on your point of view, and I digress as usual. The
real point of mentioning the movie is that it contains an
apology that is both unreserved and unequivocal and from it the
movie progresses.
With humility in mind I switch to
this season's Formula One shenanigans. Back in February I wrote
regarding the vagaries, in my view, of Mercedes Benz switching
horses from McLaren to Brawn, and how buying into last year’s
winning team doesn’t necessarily guarantee this year’s success,
and how buying a winning driver doesn’t mean your chances of
that success are actually improved per se. You didn’t have to be
Einstein or Murray Walker to realise that inserting Michael Schumacher back into
a Formula One seat was an act of the utmost hubris. For sure
Mercedes Benz had suffered watching their wunderkind Michael,
a pilot they had nurtured through his formative years, living and
breathing the cooler air of Modena and espousing the virtues of
Ferrari. Resentment must have festered in Stuttgart for years
and probably gnawed away at the very soul of the Daimler Benz
fraternity - a bit like Menelaus watched helpless as Paris
eloped to Troy with Helen I suspect - until it became too much
for their egos to bear.
Something had to be done about it,
selbverständlich!
So some bright spark, probably the same bright
spark who’s
been in charge of marketing, quality control, and production
outsourcing for the last ten years, decided he could sell the
main board the hugely expensive idea of seducing Michael away
from Ferrari with the carrot of his being their new driver; Sigurd
has come home. Were they really in so much trouble in their
home market?
Of course, plenty of older drivers have met with
considerable success; AJ Foyt was still racing cars long after
he was drawing a pension and Paul Newman finished second at Le
Mans in 1979 at the ripe young age of 45. But with Michael we
are talking Formula One - a very different animal to wrestling
USAC stock cars or co-driving at Le Mans.
We have all seen the less attractive
side of Michael Schumacher’s character before. Damon Hill,
Jacques Villeneuve, and Mika Hakkinen can all vouch for his
over-zealous enthusiasm at first hand. And I don’t really want
to get into a protracted debate about the many and relative
attributes that are required to become a multiple Formula
One World Champion. For sure Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher were,
or are, possessed of their uncompromising side, but I’m not much
of a fan of that style of racing. I like gentlemen to be
gentlemen, not wretches. I admired Senna for the breadth of his
genius, but some of his manoeuvres left a nasty taste in the
mouth, and in my book Championships really ought to be won by
champions driving, not playing destruction-derbys. They should be won by drivers
who would rather show their verve in overtaking and their
acts of daring-do, like Jochen Rindt, Gilles Villeneuve, Keke
Rosberg, and Nigel Mansell used to entertain us with.
So, the press tell us, Michael has
apologised to Rubens for doing his best to turn him into
concrete goulash. But this apology was neither unequivocal nor
unreserved. It was one of those ‘well if he needs an apology he
can have one’ apologies which mean about as much as saying ‘I’ll
be doing that again next time and you can have another worthless
apology again then - if you feel you need one’. From a PR point
of view this kind of apology ranks alongside ‘I didn’t mean to’
just after you’ve hit your brother on the head with a shovel and
‘it wasn’t my fault’ when the bath has run over and flooded the
flat below. It’s worse than saying nothing, because you just
look a bigger fool than the fool you looked immediately before
you offered the so-called ‘apology’. Contemporary offers of
regret run along the lines of ‘oh, we’ve taken on so much bad
debt, run up such a loss, that we’re going to have to borrow a
cartload of money off the government, cut your overdraft in
half, pay one per cent on your savings and charge you three over
base for borrowing. Er, times are hard.’
I am reminded of my headmaster from school. He
wasn’t a bad sort even though the toe-ends of his shoes curled
up and when he talked to you he looked at a point two feet or so
above your head as though you were a Moai from Easter Island. I
had committed a fairly grave misdemeanour for which I was,
justifiably, rusticated (great word, I always wanted to be
rusticated, but I didn’t think it would happen until I had
grandchildren) for a couple of weeks. To be fair to him I was
not what you might call a model pupil. But, at the end of his
diatribe, whereby he sought to convince me of the error of my
ways, I looked him squarely in the eyes – well as close as I
could from where I presumed they were focused, and said: “Mr ***
*******, Sir, I am terribly sorry.” Well I didn’t mean it of
course, but I thought I might as well try it on. I had no
credibility left to lose by this time, and I had seen my
father’s car parked outside even before I was summoned to the
Beak’s study, so I knew I was off for a period of parental
custody. “That’s alright, Crawley,” he replied, examining the
ceiling. Then, as an afterthought, he added: “I know you are.”
Thoughts of Pyrrhus and whether he drew any
comfort from the devastation of his victory over Consul Decius
Mus occupied most of the very silent drive home. Inevitably I
came to the conclusion that my headmaster was a wazzach! How
could a man as supposedly intelligent as my headmaster not
recognise my disingenuous intention?
And so I now wonder, as he sits of an evening and
polishes his trophies and counts the noughts in his obese bank
account, whether Michael Schumacher feels the same way about the
Formula One establishment as I did about my headmaster. Possibly
or probably?
The point is though that for most of us, and by
us I mean the ‘older I get - the faster I was’ set, the concept
of employing Schumacher and buying a winning team was a bit like
barrelling a loan car into Gerard’s at Mallory Park without
having first checked the tyre pressures. Someone has told you
it’s a dream of a fast corner, but then you come to realise as
the back steps out that for the next few seconds your future is
pretty much out of your hands. Hiring Schumacher is a PR
disaster, an ill-conceived motion made for all the wrong
reasons. He’s the wrong lead scout. He who doesn’t know how to
apologise for the sleazier side of his nature when the plot
exposes it - a weak and unattractive side that the audience
suspected existed from the very first scene of the movie;
Michael, the antithesis of Jess Remsburg. I like my heroes to be
heroes worth idolising, with a dose of honour and a straight
backbone, not a lip that curls too readily into a sneer. Mine is
not necessarily an old-fashioned or come-second attitude. I like
my heroes to be inspiring and at the same time reassuring. I
like them to breathe integrity and to show that they understand
the difference between right and wrong. Because if they don’t,
how are we supposed to know. Without the Jess Remsburgs, we risk
riding headlong into Diablo canyon from which there is little
hope of rescue. Daimler Benz, for goodness sake wake up and
smell the tarmac.
And surely, in the autumn of his years, even
Michael Schumacher ought to be able to see that his audience has
long since left the playhouse and it’s time for him to ride off,
quietly, into the sunset.
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