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LAST AMONG EQUALS

At home with Minardi
The Independent on Sunday, February 2004

MURRAY Walker, the now-dormant voice of Formula One, was fond of including in his glorious, hysterical commentaries the observation that “Anything can happen in Formula One – and it usually does”. As was famously often the case, Walker was wrong. Anything cannot happen in Formula One. Whatever twists and turns the 2004 season may negotiate, one thing that absolutely will not happen is the Italy-based team Minardi winning a race. Indeed, if you walk into a betting shop and ask for odds on a Minardi driver, at any point this season, occupying any position on the podium, first, second or third, your bookmaker will contemplate the circumstances necessary for such a result – the first dozen drivers on the second last lap being picked off by lightning strikes launched by a bored God, perhaps – and invite you to write your own ticket.
  In 2003, Minardi did not win a single World Championship point, which means they did not finish any of the 16 races in the programme in the top eight; they were the only one of Formula One’s 10 teams not to trouble the scorers. This drought goes back to the very first race of 2002, when Minardi scored two points, their driver Mark Webber – now with Jaguar – storming home fifth of just eight finishers in his home Grand Prix in Melbourne (a huge accident on the opening lap had wiped out nearly half the field). Those two points were as a sprinkle of rain on the driest stretch of the sandiest desert. Minardi’s previous score was three years further back, when Mark Gene’s sixth place at the 1999 European Grand Prix earnt Minardi their solitary point for that season. . . and that was Minardi’s first point for four years, since Pedro Lamy came sixth in Adelaide at the end of the 1995 season. Since Minardi became a Formula One team in 1985, whoever cleans their racing suits has never faced the problem of removing champagne stains – Minardi are yet to finish in the first three.
  It would be tempting, therefore, to snigger at Minardi, to caricature them as incompetent losers or “Wacky Races”-style eccentrics, knocking cars together out of bacofoil and string, to be driven by moustache-twirling pantomime villains and laughing canine sidekicks. Tempting, and unfair. Minardi may be the worst team in Formula One, but that still makes Minardi one of the best motorsport teams in the world.
  Failure in Formula One is singularly cruel. The budgets are much bigger, and the margins much smaller than in other sporting arenas: Formula One is measured in millions of dollars and blinks of time. Last season, in what amounts to Minardi’s home race, the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola, pole position after qualifying was held by Ferrari’s incomparable Michael Schumacher, on his way to an unprecedented sixth World Championship. At the back of that grid, in 18th and 20th positions, sat the Minardis of Justin Wilson and Jos Verstappen. Wilson’s qualifying time was all of 3.5 seconds slower than Schumacher’s. What can you do in 3.5 seconds? Scratch your head? Flick through a few television channels? Read one of these rhetorical questions? In Formula One, that’s the difference between being acknowledged the best of all time, and derided as chronic also-rans.
  This is why, if you’re going to pick a team to cheer this season, it should be Minardi. Like most of us, Minardi are good – good enough to get by, good enough to get paid for doing what we do, good enough to earn the respect of our fellow professionals. Like most of us, they’re just not, quite, great. But Minardi still dare to dream that they might be.

MINARDI was founded in 1979, by a former rally-driver called Giancarlo Minardi; Minardi were middling successful in Italian Formula Two before their Formula One debut in 1985. The Minardi team, like the Minardi family, is based in Faenza, a smallish town about an hour’s drive from Bologna, vaguely known for producing garish ceramics. The Minardi factory is on the outskirts of Faenza, across the street from a colossal industrial winery; when the wind shifts the right way across the the purple slagheap behind the steel silos, the air smells of spent grapes.
  From outside, the Minardi factory is two storeys of grime-stained concrete. Inside are immense, and surprisingly clean, workshops, where Minardi’s mechanics and engineers build more than 3,000 individual parts, amounting to 70 percent of each Minardi racing car – everything other than the engines (supplied by Ford Cosworth), the brakes (Brembo) and the tyres (Bridgestone). Over a couple of doorways hang images of the Virgin Mary; Minardi will take help from wherever they can get it.
  The factory floors echo with pop music from the radio, and chatter in Italian and English. The staff wear black coats with Minardi’s logo embroidered on the left breast, and go about their work with the palpable excitement of people who know they are creating something which, in a few weeks, will be marvelled at by a global audience of billions. The man overseeing this is Chief Engineer Andrew Tilley, a 40-year-old from Derbyshire. He’s the image of the distracted English boffin: thick glasses, unruly hair, mis-shapen jumper. If he’d been born 50 years earlier, he’d have spent his working days contemplating the most efficacious means of punching holes in the dams on the Ruhr. As it is, he is charged with finding the best way of fitting 800 horsepower into a 600 kilogram car.
  “We have different goals to the other teams,” he explains. “Theirs are to win the Championship. Ours are to complete races, and steal a few points, if we’re lucky. Basically, to score points, either we really have to pull one out of the bag, or they have to fuck it up.”
  I wonder whether morale becomes a problem. Tilley and his staff are, by definition, among the very finest automotive engineers in the world. Coming last all the time must get people down.
  “It’s up and down,” he admits. “In a relatively small team, one person can have a big influence, good or bad. It got a bit sticky morale-wise last year, and we got rid of a few people. But people realise what we’re up against when they come to work here.”
  I put a hypothetical scenario to Tilley. Just suppose Michael Schumacher decided he needed a challenge, and volunteered his services to Minardi. Would he win races in Minardi’s car this year?
  “No,” says Tilley, though the thought seems to amuse him. “The difference between us and a team like Ferrari is very difficult to close, because they’re pushing just as hard as we are, with ten times the money.”
  In the absence of any spare World Champions having a mid-life crisis, Minardi’s 2004 cars will be driven by newcomers. Above the garages in the Minardi workshop are painted the names, national flags and helmet designs of 22-year-old Italian Gianmaria Bruni, who everyone calls Gimmi, and 23-year-old Hungarian Zsolt Baumgartner, who is blessed with a truly splendid racing driver’s name: you can imagine “Zsolt!” appearing as a sound effect in a “Batman” cartoon, just after “Bam!” and “Kapow!”.
  Bruni is a total Formula One rookie. Baumgartner drove two races for Jordan last year. The pair are at the factory today, to talk to the mechanics, and be fitted for seats, which are moulded to their body shapes. They’re remarkably composed, given that, during 2004, they will become, by virtue of sitting on a Formula One grid, two of the most famous athletes on Earth (and, in Baumgartner’s case, possibly the most famous Hungarian who has ever lived). Still greater things may lie ahead. Minardi have an extraordinary record for discovering talent – at one race last year, eight of the 20 drivers who started had driven for Minardi. Among those was Fernando Alonso, the gifted young Spaniard, now with Renault, whose coronation as World Champion is generally reckoned to be only a matter of time.
  When Michael Schumacher won his first World Championship in 1994, Bruni and Baumgartner were both teenagers with a passion for go-karting. Now, after learning their trade in lesser grades of motorsport, they’re Schumacher’s rivals, at least in theory. In reality, Zsolt, during his two-race stint with Jordan in 2003, has already seen Schumacher up close the only way he’s likely to in 2004 – a cherry-coloured nosecone twitching in his rear-view mirror, looking to lap him.
  “That was. . . strange,” smiles Zsolt. “I just got out of his way as fast as I could.”
  It would, indeed, be poor form to shunt off a World Champion on one’s debut.
  “Minardi is a good start,” continues Zsolt. “Drivers here are under less pressure. You can learn about Formula One, and if you can show that you’re quick, who knows?”
  Gimmi, similarly, is unabashed about admitting that he hopes his Minardi drive is just the beginning.
  “Lots of people start here,” he says. “I need to be focused, and not to be too emotional. For an Italian, I think I’m not too emotional, so I’ll be okay.”

THE man who gave Minardi its name sold the team three years ago, but remains Managing Director. Giancarlo Minardi, 57, seems to have an affinity for lost sporting causes: he’s also Chairman of Faenza’s football team, at time of writing propping up Italy’s Serie D.
  “I’m realistic,” he says, of his Formula One team. “I’m aware of the difficulties. Our target now is to beat ourselves.”
  Minardi’s office is decorated with pictures and models of racing cars. A helmet sits in one display cabinet. It belonged to Esteban Tuero, a 20-year-old Argentinian Minardi driver who came into the office before the start of the 1999 season, announced that he didn’t wish to race anymore, and vanished, unheard from again until a Christmas card last year. “I keep it,” says Minardi, regarding the helmet, “to remind me that life is mysterious.”
  I wonder if Minardi ever pictures victory, imagines standing next to the podium, admiring his reflection in a trophy as one of his drivers hoses champagne over the men he beat into second and third.
  “I firmly believe in this,” he says. “The day this belief abandons me, it would be useless to continue. But this year, I know the best we can do is be as competitive as possible with the budget we have.”
  At Imola’s Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari the next day, Minardi’s place in the scheme of things can be gauged with a glance over the four other teams testing – it’s the last practice before the season starts in Melbourne on March 7th, the last chance to make these cars as fast as they’re going to get. The ascendant Renault team have seven vast trucks parked here, as well as a catering tent. Ferrari have six scarlet behemoths parked alongside, and their star drivers, Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barichello, aren’t even here: this is all in support of test driver Luca Badoer, another former Minardi driver. Jordan have bought five yellow lorries, Sauber four in their shimmering blue and green. Minardi have just two black trucks and one black sleeper bus.
  The Minardi garage doesn’t feel like the hideaway of skulking losers, though. There is much laughter, and a lot of earnest contemplation; the impression is of a close-knit team, looking forward to the struggle. The only person here without much to do – at least, without so much to do that he looks like he has time to be pestered by visitors – is Zsolt Baumgartner. Minardi, ever mindful of the pennies, have only brought one car today, and it’s Gimmi’s turn to drive it. I find Zsolt contemplating a rack of nosecones, each very subtly different from the other, and I ask him how much difference the variation in design can make.
  “Maybe one half of one tenth of a second,” he says.
  I ask if he can notice that difference when he’s driving.
  “Oh, yeah,” he smiles. “You can tell.”
  Zsolt suggests we take refuge from the screaming of passing cars in the Minardi bus. Once aboard, he apologises for it, and tells me they have a nicer one that they take to races. We take a seat, and I ask again how he faces the prospect of a season at the back of the grid, of dealing with that most excruciating of frustrations: being good enough to compete, but not good enough to win.
  “It’s best to be at the front,” he says. “Sure it is. But from the back, with a bit of luck, you can gain places.”
 
MINARDI’S cars have never been as instantly recognisable as most of the rest of the grid. Having to sacrifice identity to money, the team colours have varied wildly at the whims of their sponsors. In 2004, so you know what to look out for, Minardi will be in black and white, with red trim. The red is a recent sponsor-necessitated addition. The black and white, so they tell me at the Minardi garage, are an import from a different sport: Australian Rules football. Black and white are the colours of Collingwood, the Melbourne team favoured by Paul Stoddart, the 47-year-old Australian aviation magnate who bought Minardi in 2001.
  I speak to Stoddart on the phone after I return from Faenza. He’s in Melbourne, preparing for the opening race with that weirdly Australian outlook of laconic ebullience.
  “I don’t want to go into numbers,” he says, “but let’s say this season I’m looking at US$30 million in sponsorship, and hoping for US$10 million more. There are four teams, possibly five, who are spending ten times that. In Formula One, like anywhere else, the rich get richer and the poor get. . . you know what the poor get. Formula One is fraught with politics, and not always nice politics – they don’t call it the Piranha Club for nothing.”
  As long as the top teams are underwritten by globally-famous automobile manufacturers – Ferrari, Renault, Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Toyota – what chance is there for a small-town team living on its wits?
  “A handful of points,” says Stoddart, “would be good. The reality is that we’re going to come tenth, again, maybe challenging Jordan or anyone else who’s having a bad day. But those big auto manufacturers have come and gone before. And if they pulled out now, those top teams wouldn’t know what hit ’em. I’d rather be where I am, to be honest. We’re probably the last real team left.”

THIS is why, if you’re still wondering which part of pit lane you should bless with your favours this season, you could do worse than Minardi. It won’t be a self-consciously ironic gesture, like standing on a freezing terrace to watch a useless non-league football team comprised of knock-kneed no-hopers. It certainly won’t be as crass and boring and British as cheering on Eddie the Eagle, or any other attention-seeking time-waster who demands applause for being rubbish. Minardi’s mechanics and engineers are brilliant, and their drivers are brave and quick, and they’re all those things in the most testing arena under the toughest of circumstances.
  Seriously now. Who’d support Ferrari? Only the smug, bloated and successful seeking some sort of cosy reflection of their status, or – far more likely – life’s resigned losers transferring their frustrations. Minardi are for those who are good at what they do, and do their best, and work hard, and hang on, and hope. Go, Minardi. Go.

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