|
Articles by Darren Galpin
| Interlagos - upmarket environs my arse! - Mon 26th Sep 2005 |
|
You have to hand it to James Allen, he does make you laugh, as well as make you wonder if he actually looks outside of his Formula 1 life. He claimed that the Interlagos track, which is within the city of São Paulo, is within a richer area of the city. Richer, in that it isn't actually in the middle of a favela (the local name for a shanty town), perhaps, but perhaps Allen should take a walk outside of the circuit once the race finishes.
The circuit itself is actually one of the better tracks to spectate at, and if you can get a seat towards the beginning of the main straight on the concrete uncovered seating areas, you can see a good two thirds of the circuit, and actually watch most of the action. The crowds are friendly, and a very enjoyable day can be had. However, outside of the circuit the conditions are slightly different.
I went there in 1998, and once the race was over, I walked down the Rua Carlos Pace to meet my friend who was picking me up. It was a nice and sunny day, so I sat down by the roadside and waited. A street cleaner made his way down the road, and spoke to me. I struggled to understand, as I could only reply in a very bad mixture of Spanish with the odd word of Portuguese thrown in. It was obvious that I was foreign, and he pointed to his watch. He said in Portuguese that by 5 pm, the area was very bad, and I should leave, even if my friend hadn't turned up. He said it twice just to make sure that I understood. Luckily, my friend turned up half an hour before the suggested vacation time, so I never saw the full Interlagos night-time experience. It should also be remembered that São Paulo has one of the highest murder rates in the world.
The race itself was a touch anticlimactic, with a sense of inevitability becoming palpable from half way around the first lap. Räikkönen had worked his way past Fisichella, and was sat behind a feisty Montoya. Alonso was in third, and not really being threatened by the following Michael Schumacher. And there it remained for the rest of the race, differing fuel strategies not withstanding. Alonso didn't need to win - third would be good enough, no matter where Räikkönen finished. Hence McLaren didn't need to choreograph the race, and Montoya could be allowed to win if he stayed ahead. And he did - indeed, he looked the better at the end of the race, as Räikkönen's neck was giving out, and he was having to lean against the headrest in the larger corners, the anti-clockwise circuit proving more arduous than the usual clockwise circuits that are raced on.
So Alonso was crowned World Champion, beating Emerson Fittipaldi's record of being the youngest Formula 1 World Champion ever. But did he deserve it, or did he luck into it?
On the face of it, Alonso lucked into it, as Räikkönen has lost many a race this year through mechanical breakdown. The McLaren reliability has been much worse than the Renault reliability, but then McLaren are leading the constructors' championship following the Brazilian Grand Prix. Montoya has been doing a far better job than Fisichella of finishing in the points, as McLaren's reliability issues have been fairly evenly spread around, compared to Renault where they seem to have been exclusively centred on Fisichella. And at least one of those failures for Räikkönen was caused by driver error, the flat spot at the Nürburgring having caused the suspension failure. Alonso though also exited one race through driver error, hitting the wall at Canada. So honours even.
So, from a seasons perspective, there hasn't been much to prove between the two when it comes to mistakes, and both drivers have put in strong drives. Due to the change in car performance and reliability over the season, we've never really seen them fight either, as when the McLaren gained its performance, Alonso was already thinking of gathering points and avoiding accidents. So did he deserve it? On balance, he probably did. His performances haven't been any worse than Räikkönen's, and Renault did a better job over the year. However, it would be interesting to see what he would really do when held under sustained pressure. He did a good job in repelling Michael Schumacher at Imola, but then Schumacher wasn't threatening his championship. That is when we will really see whether he has the ability to make that step from one time champion to multiple champion.
What the season does prove is the ridiculousness of the scoring system, which puts such a premium on finishing over winning. Given that there are only two points between 1st and 2nd places, if a driver fails to finish, he would have to win the next five races if the other driver finished 2nd all of the time in order to draw level. It defeats the idea of drivers fighting to win, if you can ensure a championship through finishing second. This new points system was brought in due to Michael Schumacher's dominance in his Ferrari, to try and ensure that the championship would take longer to be decided. But the problem then was that the Ferrari was technically superior to everything else, and this points manipulation enabled the FIA to maintain the fiction that the championship was still being fought for. Now that the championship is being fought over properly, the artificiality of the situation is shown in stark relief - we now have a NASCAR style championship which rewards consistency rather than winning. The sooner that the points scheme reverts back to what it was, the better. |
|
Other great sites
Search
|
