SPECTATOR SPORT
Business is business at Silverstone
Frank Keating
WATCHING Grand Prix motor racing seems a futile activity. Also deafening. Yet all Northamptonshire this weekend will be clogged by cars and choked with fumes. The Silverstone throng could as well get its fix by piling onto a bridge over the MI and watching the cars go by underneath.
The 'sport' has thrown up some interest- ing fellows. Not among the drivers overpaid, humourless, whingeing prats almost to a man these days — but in the ranks of the team bosses, the captains of the industry. Once again a Grand Prix season is being totally dominated by two teams, led by two ruthless, obsessive, and obviously brilliant Englishmen, Ron Den- nis and Frank Williams. Dennis is head of McLaren, which has won the world cham- pionship four times in the last ten years. So has the Williams car. In the decade, only in two seasons has Ferrari had the edge. In a savage, dollar-strewn, multi-national cor- porate war, these two contrasting men are way ahead of the rest. The Silverstone race Is this season's halfway point, and once again McLaren and Williams have scat- tered the field.
It is idiotic that Grand Prix motor racing should still masquerade as a chivalrous endeavour and take up room on the sports Pages. It is purely business — and business Is business. Ron Dennis wholeheartedly agrees. He was never remotely interested in any sport, even at school. He began as an apprentice mechanic 26 years ago, and his controlled, remorseless, management style had made his fortune long before he was 40. He is shy, soft-mannered and, touchingly, not at all hail-fellow at public relations. He runs a span-spick, contented ship (except for the annual mutiny of greed by the drivers which every GP team has to put up with) from a luxurious hi-tech acreage near Woking. McLaren may be just down the track from Brooklands, where the world's first custom-built racing circuit was opened 85 years ago, but Dennis has not the slightest romance in his soul about his 'sport' being in the line of those old animated sepia prints when John Cobb or the Marquis de Portago would smilingly dice down the straight in cricket shirts, Rockfist Rogan leather helmets, and a pair of goggles from Timothy White's.
The ebullient Frank Williams is much more that sort. He first set eyes on Silverstone when he hitch-hiked down from his Scottish boarding school for 1958's Grand Prix. 'Beautiful, beautiful. Mesmerising. I was hooked forever. Peter Collins won in a Ferrari. My utter exhilara- tion, I remember, was only tempered by the fact that it was a damn foreign car.'
He went into the second-hand car busi- ness, on summer weekends gypsying round Europe (with his goggles from Timothy White's) cadging drives in sports cars and Formula 3. 'I was a bloody awful driver: too erratic, always flying off the track. Safer to be a team manager.'
Not in his case, alas. Six years ago, `driving like the clappers', in a rush to catch a plane from Nice after a test session at the Ricard circuit near Marseilles, his car careered off the little, short-cut, B road at Moulinon. 'Totally my own bloody fault. Just cocked up the right line, didn't I?' Since when he has been in a wheelchair, where he will spend the rest of his life totally paralysed from the neck down.
But still, with Ron Dennis, lapping the rest of them.
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