Newsgroup: it.sport.formula1.moderato
Titolo: [ENG] Monza

Source: 
grandprix.com
http://www.grandprix.com/ft/ft19604.html
History hangs heavy over Monza, much as it does over ancient cathedrals
or battlefields. Here in the Royal Park, the Kings of Lombardy once
hunted deer and wild boar, in between fighting bloody local turf wars.
The road circuit was first used for racing in 1922, and it has been the
scene of every world championship Italian GP since 1950, except for just
one edition held at Imola in 1989. This superfluity of tradition lends a
tangible solemnity to the parkland and its much venerated race track.
Not for a moment would I suggest that there is an air of foreboding this
year, at least not enough to silence the bird song in the sacrosanct
forest trees, although I suspect that one way or another we're going to
see some startling racing history made in the course of the next few
days.
It remains to be seen whether the momentous events which I am
anticipating will take place on the Milanese track or over a conference
table in Paris. McLaren and Ferrari are doubtless limbering up for both
confrontations, with Ferrari well ahead in the running for race success,
at least if we look at the statistics. Since 1950 the Scuderia has won 17
times at home, twice as many wins as McLaren (eight) and Williams (six).
This is also one of only five GP venues at which Fernando Alonso has yet
to climb to the top step of the podium.
If you like cliches, then to describe Monza as a "cathedral of speed"
does have a certain resonance. There's something romantic about knowing
that aspiring would-be champions once found their way, illegally, into
the place. Back in the early Fifties an impoverished refugee kid named
Mario Andretti famously got in under the wire to see his hero Alberto
Ascari in action, and I remember Michele Alboreto telling me how he once
managed to get in without paying. He was so impressed with the driving of
Ronnie Peterson that he would later adopt the Swedish colours for his own
helmet. For some reason the Italians describe the illegal intruders as
"Portuguese," presumably from some ancient military grudge. Driving into
the park on race day mornings I always wonder if one of the agile youths
climbing over the old moss-clad walls and trying to evade the
stick-wielding guards might one day be a championship contender.
Many of the once familiar landmarks of the place have gone forever. When
I first went there, in 1970, it seemed only right that the cars should be
tended in the cramped old concrete garages, if only because that had been
where the likes of Campari, Caracciola, two generations of Ascaris and so
many others had once instructed their mechanics (no race engineers then)
to adjust tyre pressures and richen the mixture by tweaking carburettors.
How many of this year's spectators even know what a carburettor is (or,
more accurately, was)?
On the face of it, as a race track Monza doesn't have much going for it.
It's very fast, of course, and uncomfortably narrow in places, but the
difficulties presented by the famously named original corners like the
Lesmos and Ascari (that's where two-times World Champion Alberto crashed
to his death in 1955) are overshadowed by the three chicanes introduced
for the 1972 race. These require good brakes of the car and sheer bravery
from the driver, a commodity which seems almost as unfashionable today as
the good old carburettor. There have been some changes this year at the
second chicane, long overdue, and I hope very much that the new run-off
area there will prevent some of the silly collisions which have blighted
races too often in recent years.
Sad to say, the combination of high speeds, personal commitment and
tradition don't always add up to great racing. Overtaking here is too
risky at what is always a critical point in the season that the event
frequently becomes a parade. I still remember the GP here when the only
driver creative enough to dare to overtake throughout 90 brain-numbing
minutes was Johnny Herbert, who made an honest attempt to outbrake Ralf
Schumacher at the first chicane. The unfortunate Johnny's reward was one
of the longest, scariest high-speed spins I ever saw.
I had the dubious pleasure of seeing two Italian GPs run on the old
pre-chicane circuit. It horrified me in 1970 to see the crowd chanting
"Reg-a-zzo-nee" as their new Ferrari idol sped towards his first ever F1
victory, apparently ignorant of the fact that my friend Jochen Rindt, the
leader of the championship, had perished less than 24 hours before in a
particularly gruesome collision with the incompetently aligned guard
rails at the Parabolica. When I walked into the Motoring News offices on
Monday morning, however, I was even more aghast to discover that the
headline for my race report, already on the page layout, was also
"Reg-a-zzo-nee" and that I was instructed not to mention Rindt's name in
my report: that bit of negative news was reserved for a short obituary
which would appear on half a page near the back. The paper's management,
I suddenly realised, was every bit as callous as the tifosi.
Although nobody got killed in the 1971 race, that was a matter more of
luck than good judgment after a slipstream thriller which would set a
record for the fastest-ever GP at 151.6mph. The record stood until
Michael Schumacher set a new mark of 153.875mph, also at Monza, in 2003.
It took 32 years, but the chicanes have obviously been a failure! I was
always glad in 1971 that the amiable and stylish Peter Gethin happened to
be the bloke who got the nose of his BRM in front on the lap that
mattered, but it could well have been one of the four other blokes who
crossed the line within less than a second of him. In those days, driving
at close quarters required an understanding between competitors which
disappeared from F1 with the arrival of the assassin-driver complex with
which we're all now familiar.
BRM's sleek P180 was undoubtedly the best car at the end of that 1971
season. Sadly, team boss Louis Stanley failed completely to learn the
lesson that pride comes before a fall. Somehow he managed to overlook the
fact that his team was already overstretched, as anyone could deduce from
the preparation failure which sent Jo Siffert crashing to a fiery death
in his BRM at Brands Hatch a few weeks after Gethin's Monza win.
Undaunted, "Lord" Louis went off to do a deal with a new sponsor
(Marlboro cigarettes) under which he promised to run no fewer than five
red-and-white cars in 1972. They managed a fluke victory in the rain at
Monaco, but the pressure on the hard-pressed staff soon told as BRM
collapsed into near-anarchy.
It's interesting to see that Marlboro is still skulking on the fringes of
F1. Italy was the first European country to introduce laws forbidding
tobacco sponsorship of sport, but Italian legislators have never been
anything but pragmatic. This explains why, instead of prosecuting teams
which wanted to compete in their full fag packet livery, they merely sent
a nice man from the ministry into the paddock, where for many years he
went round the motorhomes collecting fines calculated according to a
strict schedule of offences. I know that the Marlboro name won't be
visible on the Ferraris or their drivers this weekend, but it would be
interesting to know if the man from the ministry will be visiting Jean
Todt to discuss the appearance on Italian TV of Marlboro-branded Ferraris
at certain overseas races earlier this year.
But let's hurry away from such negative meanderings.
I have mixed personal memories of Monza, and especially of the 1970 race
which would prove so painful. I had arrived at the circuit on Thursday to
receive a message that Denny Hulme wasn't at all happy about something
I'd written and he wanted to see me. Given that Denny's gruffly
uncompromising attitude had earned him the title of "The Bear" (with a
sore head implicit in there somewhere), I somehow knew that I wasn't
going to enjoy the encounter. Nevertheless, I headed off to the McLaren
area of the paddock, where the team had installed a rented motorhome.
Denny, I was told, was topping up his tan on the roof.
I was left in no doubt that a piece I had written in MN's news pages that
week was not so much misguided as contrived by the insider who had
planted the story on the gullible reporter that I then was. Much to my
amazement, though, Denny quietly pointed out where I had gone wrong and
gave me his home number, just in case I needed to double-check anything
with him in future. We remained on such good terms that he never turned
bear-like with me. On a couple of occasions when his pal Eoin Young was
unable to do Denny's personal column, the job was entrusted to me. After
Denny retired from F1 racing in 1975, I made a rare call to him at home.
The upshot was an invitation to spend a morning with him at his house in
St George's Hill, Weybridge, chatting into a tape recorder. He was in a
wonderfully reflective mood and it is one of the greatest regrets of my
years as a reporter that I managed to lose that tape.
Having trashed a cigarette company earlier in this piece, I must confess
right here and now that I spent the 1972 and 1973 seasons in cigarette
livery myself as I divided my time, not without some pangs of conscience,
working weekends as F1's first uniformed PR man with the JPS Lotus team
before slipping into civvies on Mondays and nipping down to the Autosport
printers, where I helped to put the news pages together.
Those were wildly successful years for Lotus, with Emerson Fittipaldi
winning the championship in 1972. He clinched the title with a thoroughly
conclusive victory at Monza, where I proved to be less than capable of
handling the post-race press onslaught. We gave the TV channels first
rights, inside what seemed at the time to be a very luxurious paddock
motorhome, but with time slipping by and the print media getting
impatient, a certain amount of hammering on doors ensued. One
over-emotional Brazilian journalist got on to the roof, where he burst
into tears and accused me of deliberately denying him access to Emerson.
"You will not let me talk to him because I come from a third world
country," he wailed. The worst thing about being in PR is that you can't
satisfy everyone, regardless of how hard you work. I was glad to get back
to full-time journalism in 1974.
When the BBC secured its first permanent contract with Bernie Ecclestone
to televise GP races in 1979, I was invited to join the crew as Murray
Walker's lap charter and spotter. The word 'crew' is a bit laughable now,
given that at some races there were only three of us (a producer plus
Murray and me). The numbers increased when James Hunt joined us after his
sudden retirement in 1979, and then we got a sound man in to make sure
that our land lines were secure and working. Today, ITV sends a couple of
dozen people to every race, and the penalty for their excellent coverage
is of course the retrograde step of inflicting commercials on the viewer.
Yes, we're supposed to get used to the ad breaks. But they don't
interrupt football matches or World Cup Rugby, so why should F1 fans have
to put up with it? Even though this year's MotoGP races have been
disappointingly processional, you'll know what bliss it is to be watching
on BBC and not to have the event interrupted every ten minutes to
advertise products which real fans will instinctively shy away from
buying. Perhaps I am the only telly spectator who wants to boycott the
sponsors who spoil the races with their tawdry and repetitive advertising
...
Lap charting for Murray at Monza was always a delightful experience.
Instead of being cooped up in a tiny box with a heavily restricted view
of the track, we sat in wide-angle lapchart-friendly splendour at the
back of the grandstand overlooking the start-finish line and the pits.
Getting over there could be a hairy experience because it involved
descending into a tunnel which was under constant assault from noisy race
fans without the appropriate credentials. The entrance to the tunnel was
guarded by dark-jowled carabinieri armed with batons which they didn't
hesitate to use, and not all of them seemed to recognise a press
credential.
It was while waiting to get into the tunnel after a race about 15 years
ago that some light-fingered rascal managed to pick my pocket so
delicately that I didn't feel a thing. I suppose it could just as easily
have happened in England or Spain, but somehow losing my wallet in Italy
seemed to be part of the Monza experience.
Should you go? Of course you should. Monza is just as much a part of F1
racing as Monaco, and every true race fan should experience the thrill of
seeing the drivers build up speed to well over 200 mph before slamming
down through the gears for a 50 mph chicane. Take my advice, though, and
make sure before you go that you've got some sturdy ear defenders and a
money belt. You won't regret it.
Print Feature
Copyright 1988-2007, Inside F1, Inc.
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hunted deer and wild boar, in between fighting bloody local turf wars.
Non mi sento di dar lezioni a nessuno (al liceo mi presi pure l'esame a settembre
in storia, benché per svogliatezza), ma questa mi sembra un po' dubbia: il
Parco e la Villa Reale sono posteriori al dominio longobardo, o sbaglio?
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