Formula One: Made In Britain
By Clive Couldwell
Virgin Books, £18.99
People love to knock the British, don’t they? Whether or not we comfort ourselves with the arrogant belief that this is because they’re envious and we’re better doesn’t matter. We have a lot to be proud of.
True, some of our greatest achievements lie way back in the past but their social, scientific and political benefits will endure for centuries around the world. So it is odd that we have waited so long for a dispassionate analysis and history of one of Britain’s greatest areas of success - Formula One motor racing.
In Formula One: Made In Britain, Clive Couldwell has produced a record of engineering development and excellence that spells out why Britain is the hub of top-line motorsport and will continue to be so. MIA, the Motorsport Industry Association, reports that the industry is worth £4.6 billion and contributes £2 billion annually to the UK’s export earnings. Dr Mark Jenkins of the Cranfield School of Management calculates the motorsport industry has quadrupled in size over ten years, employing 150,000 people of whom 25,000 are engineers. It’s more than bolting an engine into a four-wheel chassis and seeing how fast it will go. The UK has developed a world-class “cluster” of 2,500 performance engineering and services companies, many in the so-called Motorsport Valley across the South and Midlands, within which three-quarters of the world’s single-seat racing cars are designed and built. The Valley dominates globally not only in F1, but also in the World Rally Championship, CART racing and Indycars.
But Couldwell refrains from any jingoistic drum-banging about this British excellence, and this is what both enthusiast and browser will find captivating. You get the facts, lots of them. Couldwell has done an incredibly detailed reporting job, talking to team bosses and their underlings about the traumas and triumphs of competing in international motorsport. These are people who seldom give interviews and clearly Couldwell has gained their trust and insight as well as feasting on stories and anecdotes from the histories of McLaren, Williams, Jordan, Jaguar, Cosworth, BAR and many others.
Couldwell’s decision to treat his subject team-by-team is a great aid to clarity - and his detailed record of known fact is peppered with new knowledge and explanation. I believe the Jordan chapter is the first accurate account of the team’s financial and business exploits from the late 1990s right up to last Christmas. Other stories have been pure speculation. The BAR chapter was the first “real” interview with David Richards and his chums to look at the operation as it really is; and the Jaguar chapter is again one of the first interviews to be done with the new marque’s F1 management. McLaren’s story is told from its first breaths in 1963 when New Zealander Bruce McLaren set out to build a Formula One car. He drove his McLaren-Ford to victory in the 1968 Monaco Grand Prix. He died in a testing accident at Goodwood in 1970.
It would be dreadfully un-British not to acknowledge that Ferrari have had a modicum of success recently, but let’s not forget that the F1 cars were built at Guildford until 1997. They still rely on British expertise and British-born technical director John Barnard was at the heart of the Italian firm’s resurgence.
Couldwell might have a word with his flyleaf writer, who is clearly not a motor-racing expert. No - F1 teams do not seek “fractional increases in lap times”. If that’s the only error in this book, and given Couldwell’s track-record in hard-nosed reporting, the author can chalk up a triumph - especially as he had only the dying months of the 2002-3 F1 season to complete his task. There’s no escaping a reference to 1976 world F1 champion James “The Shunt” Hunt. Couldwell reminds us of the time the Hesketh driver helped Murray Walker with race commentaries and Hunt would repeatedly vanish from the commentary box. Walker would report that Hunt had gone “to have a look at the far side of the circuit.” In fact he was treating himself to an exotic cigarette or two. At least he didn’t smoke in the box. What a gent. Very British.
Stephen Wood