This blog has now closed. Please visit my new blog, Stepreo.

Archive: Mike Coughlan

Did Martin Whitmarsh know more?

4 April 2009 12:42

Categories: Opinion

A new set of newspapers came out this morning, and that means a new set of stories about the latest McLaren scandal. It looks like Lewis Hamilton has won some respect for his contrite apology, which was apparently met with some applause after it finished. Now the media is casting the spotlight on Martin Whitmarsh. It seems as though the journalists don’t believe the McLaren team principal’s protestations of innocence.

This morning, three stories by three of the media’s top F1 journalists have provided food for thought. Take, for instance, Kevin Garside in the Telegraph:

Not so poor Dave Ryan, the middle-ranking manager who left Sepang carrying a heavyweight can, the kind of load you might expect a senior executive to bear. Not at McLaren evidently. Well, not yet anyway.

McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh says he is considering his position. Given the knife protruding from Ryan’s back, it would appear that any imperative to walk the plank did not seriously trouble the conscience of the team’s high command.

Ryan is a time-served McLaren fixer, a no-nonsense Kiwi 35 years with the team who can find his way around the paddock blindfold. He is normally an enforcer of policy not the author of it.

Ed Gorman in The Times:

It is easy to imagine Hamilton and Ryan making things up between themselves and going into the room and saying something they should never have done. But the part that stretches credibility to breaking point is the idea that after Melbourne and before the pair were summoned back before the stewards on Thursday in Kuala Lumpur, that no-one else in the team was made aware of what they had said and what was going on. It is important to appreciate that when Ryan and Hamilton went back to the stewards in Sepang they both continued to lie and to stick to their story from Melbourne. This has been confirmed both by McLaren and the FIA. It beggars belief that, in a team like McLaren which has been taught by Ron Dennis to think in a complex and often self-defeating way about even the most simple problems, that this critical issue would not have been more widely discussed by senior management before they went back in and approved by those people (or maybe not approved by some of them).

And Maurice Hamilton in The Guardian:

Is Ryan, who has been suspended by McLaren, being made the fall guy?
That would appear to be the case. Having known Ryan for more than 25 years, there is no one more honest or straightforward in formula one.

How much danger is the new team principal Martin Whitmarsh in?
He appears to have fallen at the first hurdle thanks to his lack of support for a man who has served the team faultlessly for 34 years. Ryan has widespread respect. On this basis Whitmarsh’s judgment is now being questioned.

This all leaves a serious question mark hanging over the McLaren team. Those that know Dave Ryan say he is an honest man who does what he is told by senior management. He has loyally served the team for 35 years. For me, that was one of the most staggering things about this story — that someone with so much experience could make such a serious error of judgement, and that someone would do anything to jeopardise the reputation of the team they have worked for since the 1970s.

I have to admit that last night as I reflected on McLaren’s latest foul-up, I was going through previous events in my head. All those times when McLaren’s version of events turned out not to be true. There have been plenty of them. I usually gave them the benefit of the doubt. But now, I am beginning to suspect foul play.

You may say that all teams and drivers lie and cheat in sport. This may be true, but it doesn’t make it any more palatable. What annoys me about the fact that McLaren are constantly caught with their pants down is the fact that this is the team that is constantly banging on about its honesty and integrity.

At least Jean Todt didn’t hide the fact that he was unsporting. He just shrugged his shoulders and said that’s what it takes to win. Ferrari have offended me a lot over the years. But they haven’t offended me as much as McLaren offend me today.

If there is even an ounce of truth in the hunch that the journalists have, McLaren are finished as a sports team. They will struggle to regain the trust of the fans unless there is a wholesale change at the top of the organisation.

It is bad enough to mislead the authorities. But it is a lot worse if the team then uses one of its most loyal workers as a scapegoat. Some have noticed the uncomfortable echoes of what happened to Mike Coughlan — so it would bring the events of Stepneygate into a new light as well.

2 comments

Yet another McLaren controversy

3 April 2009 15:44

Categories: Opinion

The story surrounding Lewis Hamilton’s disqualification from the Australian Grand Prix has moved quickly without me having had a chance to write about it yet. There are so many aspects to this story.

First of all, it’s worth looking at the role of the FIA stewards here, and the process behind how stewards make their decisions. Up until this week, I had assumed that the stewards — or at least someone at the FIA — monitored all radio communications as a matter of course. Presumably this is how the radio transmissions between the McLaren team and Lewis Hamilton were discovered. So fair enough.

But to me, it beggars belief that the stewards do not listen to any radio conversations that may have occurred during contentious situations. Moreover, the fact that the FIA did not clock the fact that Hamilton had told different stories to the media and the stewards earlier demonstrates that they don’t really have a clue how to minimise these sorts of situations which are damaging to F1.

It seems as though the entire world, except for those in the stewards’ room up the ivory tower, filled with Max’s mates who run caravan clubs and have never watched a grand prix before — knew that Hamilton deliberately slowed down to let Trulli past. The entire stewarding process needs reform, and not just the tinkering that the FIA does to try and placate the fans.

Race Control also have a potential role that could sort out this kind of situation with the minimum of fuss. They could have simply clarified the situation while the cars were on the track, rather than constantly altering the results behind closed doors. But as Keith points out, they seemingly can’t be bothered — or are deliberately ducking the responsibility.

Now onto McLaren’s role, and if the FIA seem incompetent, McLaren seem to have gone completely loopy. It is not often I feel sorry for Lewis Hamilton, but I have to say I feel awful for him right now.

If I was a driver, I think McLaren would be the last team I would want to drive for. Let us face facts. Despite their puffed-up prestige, McLaren have not been a very successful team over the past decade or so. After a few close calls at the start of the decade, McLaren went into a deep slump in 2003 and 2004 when they produced a car that was so unreliable it never raced, then followed that up with a car that was not particularly fast and was still unreliable.

It took them until 2007 to find their old form again, and it should have been a dream year for them. They had the World Champion in one car, and the hottest rookie F1 had seen in over a decade in the other. But the situation with the drivers was completely mismanaged, and Fernando Alonso had catastrophically lost trust in the team by the end of the season. Things came to a head in Hungary that year with the controversial incident in the pitlane, at which point we can safely say the relationship ended between McLaren and the best F1 driver since Schumacher.

That was nothing compared to Stepneygate. While you can question to what extent McLaren as an organisation, rather than Mike Coughlan and one or two other individuals, was culpable for that, it did reveal that McLaren as a team was not as well-managed as Ron Dennis liked to think — or liked us to believe he thought. The icing of the cake was when McLaren promised that they hadn’t used any of the knowledge attained from Ferrari’s dossier — only to issue a mea culpa when it was discovered that three elements of the car were inspired by the document.

All the while, what should have been a dream 2007 became a complete nightmare. What should have been a Drivers’ Championship (and McLaren had two drivers that were perfectly capable of winning it) and an easy Constructors’ Championship ended in disgrace and disqualification.

To an extent, McLaren put the terrible events of 2007 behind them to successfully gain the Drivers Championship in 2008. But the season was not without its problems.

At times, McLaren seemed to be conspiring against their own driver. Thanks to their inflexible strategies, which are generated by a computer in Woking, they almost threw away the German Grand Prix which should have been an easy victory. Tyre blunders at Monza completely put paid to Hamilton’s chances to win in Italy.

Meanwhile, throughout the season McLaren appeared to develop a paranoia over penalties handed out by the FIA. A siege mentality appeared to develop inside McLaren.

Matters cannot have been helped by last year’s Spa controversy. Indeed, Martin Whitmarsh even referred to Spa in his statement today, which suggests that as an organisation, McLaren continues to be badly affected by the events surrounding that weekend.

For me, McLaren’s actions in Australia demonstrate that they continue to be jittery when it comes to the FIA. As pointed out by a journalist during Lewis Hamilton’s press conference today, McLaren did nothing wrong on the track. The only thing they did wrong was lie to the stewards.

So, why lie to the stewards? Dave Ryan is a highly experienced person. He has been an employee of McLaren since 1974. He was Team Manager from 1990, and became Sporting Director last year. He is highly experienced, and by all accounts he is a good person.

But in Australia had made a humongous error of judgement when he withheld the truth from the stewards, and apparently advised Lewis Hamilton to do the same. Why on earth he thought this was a good idea, when he knew that the radio conversations will have been recorded, will surely remain a mystery. I would be surprised if Mr Ryan himself knows why he did it. It seems as though the siege mentality is still getting the better of McLaren, and Ryan lost the ability to think rationally. Emotions got the better of the team when it came to discussing the situation with the stewards.

Dave Ryan has been sent home in disgrace, suspended from work by the company he has loyally served for 35 years, apparently sighted in tears as he left the circuit during Friday Practice 1. Another McLaren employee’s career appears to have been left in tatters.

Like I say, I feel awfully sorry for Lewis Hamilton today. He is getting a lot of stick from the media at the moment. But he did nothing wrong. Indeed, he erred on the side of caution when he went on the radio to inform the team that he had passed Trulli while the Toyota driver was off the circuit. That is perfectly legal.

But McLaren were caught out not having the knowledge of the rulebook, which they really should have. They misinformed Hamilton. When they realised their mistake they created a convoluted way to rectify the situation, and failed to properly cover their tracks. Reminds me of Hungary 2007.

None of this is Hamilton’s fault. He may have lied to the stewards, but Dave Ryan must take the blame for this for badly briefing him. In that situation, I wouldn’t doubt someone as experienced as Dave Ryan.

The McLaren team is now a complete shambles. Now a perennially under-achieving team, it stumbles from one crisis to the next. You just never know when McLaren are going to put their foot in it again, but it will happen sooner or later.

If I was Lewis Hamilton, I would start seriously considering moving to another team. McLaren is constantly finding controversy. It is clear that the team doesn’t know the rules as well as it should. The team’s strategies are inflexible and often plain wrong. And most of all, they have produced a terrible car — not for the first time this decade.

Vodafone and McLaren’s other sponsors must be thinking the same. McLaren are coming across in the media as serial cheats and liars, and it can be doing no good whatsoever for “Vodafone McLaren Mercedes” to constantly be in the news for the wrong reasons.

Speaking of which, I wonder what Mercedes thinks of all this. For years they have shown a lot of patience in McLaren, despite the fact that the team has not always produced the results. This year Mercedes is trying out life as a supplier of engines to teams other than McLaren. The fact that Brawn could bolt a Mercedes into their car at short notice and cruise to victory standing on their head in Melbourne will have come as a revelation. Perhaps it is the Brawn, not the McLaren, which should have the silver livery.

McLaren need to sort themselves out, and fast. Everyone concerned — drivers, sponsors, engine suppliers — must be dreading what on earth is coming round the corner from this shambolic team.

11 comments

Racism reaches F1

3 February 2008 14:42

Categories: Current affairs, Formula 1, Media, Newspapers, Television

I have written before about the dangerously partisan, disgracefully nationalistic coverage of Formula 1. There is only one logical conclusion to taking a nationalistic angle in coverage of sports that have nothing to do with nationality.

Some British media outlets are guilty of putting an anti-Spanish angle into elements of their F1 coverage last year. It reached an all-time low when some papers insinuated that McLaren’s Spanish drivers Fernando Alonso and Pedro de la Rosa were “at the centre” of the Stepneygate scandal. This completely ignored the fact that the real protagonists of the scandal — Nigel Stepney and Mike Coughlan — are both British!

Now Pitpass is reporting that the partisan crowd during testing in Spain has taken a nastier turn:

Yesterday, according [to] the Spanish newspaper Marca, shouts of “puto negro” (fucking black) and “negro de mierda” (black shit) were clearly heard, and that large sections of the crowd were involved.

Pitpass also has photographs of a group of people tastelessly “blacking up”, wearing t-shirts bearing the words “Hamilton’s Familly [sic]”. This is absolutely disgusting. A lot of people find it far too easy to pluck out an accusation of racism whenever it is suggested that Hamilton might not be the messiah, but there can be no doubt about the nature of these people’s demonstrations.

The article also notes that “such insidious behaviour has never been part of Formula One” — although a cynic could say that this was because of the paucity of nonwhite drivers in F1 historically.

There have been growing concerns about the nature of the “supporters” who have been turning up to test sessions in Valencia, Barcelona and Jerez. For instance, yesterday Keith Collantine wrote:

But what I do find odd is that there are some Alonso fans who got up this morning, and decided to make a banner because they were going to an F1 test. But instead of making a banner supporting Alonso, they made one attacking Hamilton.

There are a billion reasons to like F1. I don’t like the thought that some people who buy Grand Prix tickets are in it for the hate.

There have also been reports that some people have been throwing missiles at the McLaren cars. This is totally unacceptable in Formula 1 for obvious reasons.

I don’t necessarily mind some of the more humorous anti-Hamilton banners that have been on display. My personal favourite read “Lewis, have you learnt to pee by yourself, or does daddy still help you?” — mocking the overbearing presence of Lewis Hamilton’s father which has seen Anthony Hamilton become a minor celebrity in his own right.

But there is a difference between this kind of teasing and the kind of outright racism that is beginning to be reported. Pitpass calls on Fernando Alonso “to publicly distance himself from these so-called fans”. But this isn’t Fernando Alonso’s fault. He has nothing to do with these racists, and has never spoken about Hamilton in terms of his race.

But the media should immediately stop its disgustingly debased coverage of Formula 1 — in the UK as well as in Spain.

10 comments

The most biased article about Lewis Hamilton I have ever read

11 October 2007 15:03

Categories: Entertainment, Formula 1, Newspapers, Television

And that’s saying something!

And would you credit it, it was by ITV-F1. WHY LEWIS IS TAKING THE FLAK, the headline screams, stomping its feet.

The article by Mark Hughes (who is normally one of the more sensible ITV-F1 people) starts as it means to go on, by taking a true event and completely twisting it out of shape:

When Lewis Hamilton put his car into the Shanghai pit lane’s gravel trap there was a lot of spontaneous and ill-concealed cheering in the non-British sector of the press room.

Yeah, do you know why? Because it was a spectacular event that turned the season on its head, just like when Nigel Mansell’s tyre exploded or when Michael Schumacher’s engine exploded last year. Not cheering when Hamilton beached his car in the gravel trap would be like not cheering when a goal is scored in the 89th minute of the football World Cup final. Only the most partisan of people would be unable to see this.

For an explanation from journalists — journalists who are British, but who aren’t hopelessly biased like the morons at ITV — of exactly why there would be cheering in the press room, just listen to the latest edition of the BBC (yes, that is British Broadcasting Corporation) Chequered Flag podcast.

David Croft: You mentioned a stampede in the press room. I hear there was quite a cheer in the press room as well when Lewis went out. Is that right?

Jimmy Roberts: Well, it was more a cheer of… Unbelievable scenes. We can’t imagine what we’re watching. The thing is, Formula 1 — it never fails to excite, it never fails to generate moments of sheer sporting drama. It reminded me of when Nigel Mansell’s tyre blew in 1986, and it was just one of those moments where you just have to shout. There was just pandemonium.

[...]

Maurice Hamilton: I remember the reaction in ’86. It’s an exclamation! “Whoa, look at that! How did that happen?” And the same thing, there’s Lewis Hamilton stuck in the gravel trap. I think the vision of that McLaren beached with its rear wheels spinning in the gravel will just live with Formula 1 forever. It’s one of those emblematic shots that people will forever remember.

In short, history was being made in front of our eyes. How can you just sit there? Despite the fact that even British mainstream journalists can see this, Mark Hughes is playing the usual game that British MSM journalists have been playing. According to them, it’s Brits versus the world (and Spain in particular).

You could even see this in some of the press coverage of the Stepneygate scandal, where some consumers of news were left with the impression that there was golden boy Britain’s Lewis Hamilton keeping his nose clean. It was those dirty Spaniards, Pedro de la Rosa and Fernando Alonso, who were at the centre of all this!

Let us just gloss over the fact that the real people who were at the centre of the scandal — Nigel Stepney and Mike Coughlan — were both British. But this just doesn’t fit in with the story that the racist British media wants to project. In this ITV-F1 article, Mark Hughes is pressing all of the same buttons, albeit a bit more subtly. You ought to be able to expect better from the country’s biggest commercial broadcaster. But I have given up.

Mark Hughes carries on through the article. I really wish it was good, but I am afraid it is just straw man after straw man.

Even Hamilton’s summoning for the marshals to push him out of the gravel was greeted with jeering by onlookers.

Just as it was when Michael Schumacher did the same thing. British journalists weren’t too keen about Michael Schumacher got pushed out of the gravel either. But even Schumacher never used a crane to re-join the race. Interestingly, Mark Hughes makes no mention of the crane incident anywhere in his article.

He goes on to take a look at Hamilton’s “on-track etiquette” before going on to talk about a number of Lewis Hamilton’s moves. Unfortunately, he paints a picture that all of the complaints about Hamilton’s etiquette are about hard moves. This is simply not the case.

Even so, though, let’s not forget how put out Hamilton was when Alonso played a similarly hard move on Hamilton at the Belgian Grand Prix. It’s so different when the boot’s on the other foot, huh? The other drivers lived with it, while Hamilton just started moaning about it.

Mark Hughes then completely twists the tale of Hamilton’s erratic driving behind the Safety Car at Fuji, completely glossing over the real issues. He mentions the first re-start, when Alonso was behind Hamilton. There is one particular point about this paragraph that makes me laugh so much (emphasis mine)!

On the restart behind the first safety car in Fuji he was perhaps a little over-aggressive in getting the jump on Alonso, braking so hard that Alonso (technically illegally) passed him to avoid an accident.

I love it! When Fernando Alonso does something technically illegal it merits a mention. As one of Hamilton’s defenders, Tom, said in the comments on another post on this blog, this rule is really a grey area — particularly if the car in front is effectively brake-testing.

But when Lewis Hamilton does something which is actually illegal, it is completely glossed over or just downright ignored in this article. The incident that provided the most controversy — the one when Hamilton brake-tested Webber and Vettel — does not get a single mention in this article. Yet this is the incident where it has been proved that Hamilton broke two rules.

First of all, Hamilton was driving erratically. This is against the rules, and there is no room for games behind the Safety Car. Drivers are not racing, and the purpose of the Safety Car is to make the track safer and to stop drivers from doing dangerous things. Hamilton did the complete opposite — as we can see from the number of accidents that happened in Safety Car periods compared to during the race.

Secondly, Hamilton strayed more than five car lengths behind the Safety Car. This is not some technicality that the FIA put in there for the hell of it. The Safety Car is designed to bunch the drivers up. This is partly to give the marshals plenty of time to clean up on-track debris. If the cars are more spread out, the marshals have less time (and less safety) to do this. Hamilton had complete disregard for this rule.

The FIA have since changed the rules so that a leader is allowed ten car lengths. This trick of changing a rule after it has been broken is usually reserved for pro-Ferrari purposes. And oh, how many times the British media has lambasted the FIA for it.

Hamilton effectively brake-tested Webber. Webber slowed down to avoid being “technically illegal” just like Alonso was. This is what caused Vettel to go straight into the back of him. It was all Hamilton’s fault, and you can see this in the video. But the British media just aren’t prepared to admit this — and you can see this in the fact that Mark Hughes has completely ignored this incident in his article.

So anyone with some vague notion of “Hamilton being controversial behind the Safety Car in Japan” will have the impression that Hamilton was completely in the right after reading this article. In reality, Mark Hughes has skirted round the issue completely. Nice piece of obfuscation there.

I find the views expressed by Alan Permane and Steve Nielsen in the latest Renault podcast interesting. You could say that they had a vested interest in Hamilton losing the Japanese Grand Prix, although they also say that he shouldn’t have been disqualified from the race, but given a grid penalty for China. Besides which, I think you would struggle to find many sensible F1-heads (that is, F1-heads that don’t have a vested interest in a British driver succeeding) disagreeing much with what they say.

Steve Nielsen: During the race, the only time we became aware of it was when the FIA came onto the intercom to us and said that Heikki [Kovalainen] should watch his distance to Lewis. Which is very unusual. What was implied was that we were too close — dangerously close — and so we conveyed that message to Heikki. And it wasn’t really until after the race, talking to a couple of the other drivers, and then the now famous bit of film that was on YouTube, that we became aware that Lewis actually was far from innocent in all of that and that his driving was questionable — very questionable in a couple of instances. And my own personal view is that he caused the accident between Vettel and Webber.

Alan Permane: Yeah, I find it a bit odd that Vettel got penalised, then they realised that actually it was not his fault, but we’re not going to penalise anybody. To me it was Lewis’s fault.

SN: And at that very race on Friday in the drivers briefing, Charlie [Whiting] told both the McLaren drivers that their driving behind the Safety Car at Monza — which was two races previous — had not been good enough. It was too erratic. And Lewis had a kind of — not a problem with it, but he certainly raised concerns and said he thought it was okay and was surprised that it wasn’t okay. And yet here we are two days later and he repeated it. And as Alan’s just said, for that to go totally unpunished, I’m a bit surprised at.

AP: What I find strange is that they felt that punishment was needed. And Vettel got that punishment. And then when the blame was reapportioned, or it was figured out it wasn’t [Vettel's] fault, that punishment [should] still [be] there, so whose fault was it? I don’t think it was just a racing incident or one of those things. It clearly looks like Lewis stops the car and it causes a bit of a pile-up. I think to exclude him from Fuji would have been way too much. That really would have been unfortunate for the Championship. But maybe a grid penalty or something in China, I dunno. Anyway, that’s all history now.

It is painfully clear to me that the FIA were aware that Lewis Hamilton was driving dangerously behind the Safety Car. Not only had they warned him about his driving at Monza, but they were also aware that he was doing exactly the same thing during the Japanese Grand Prix. We know this because after the accident between Vettel and Webber, Heikki Kovalainen was told by the FIA to keep an extra distance behind Hamilton during Safety Car periods.

Yet, they didn’t punish Hamilton for it. Yes, Hamilton really is getting all of the flak, isn’t he!

Back to Mark Hughes’s article.

There was also some glee from his detractors when Ron Dennis revealed that the circumstances leading to Alonso’s blocking of Hamilton in the Hungary pit lane during qualifying had been triggered by Hamilton’s non-compliance with a team request at the beginning of the session.

This, for me — and many other F1 fans — is the defining moment of Hamilton’s career so far. Yet, once again, Mark Hughes completely glosses over it. He even implies that Hamilton’s actions were somehow mitigated by the fact that there was “glee from [Hamilton's] detractors”. Give me a break!

Why do we have to keep on putting up with ITV’s awful, biased coverage?

16 comments

The FIA: Not only corrupt, but incompetent as well

20 September 2007 13:44

Categories: Formula 1, Internet, Max Must Go, Technology

The FIA (that’s short for Ferrari International Aid, in the words of Max Mosley himself!!) yesterday released transcripts of the World Motor Sport Council meeting where McLaren were fined one hundered meellion beellion treelion dollars about £15m.

The FIA promised that an confidential information would be removed from the documents before being published. Well, they certainly blacked them out. But simply copying and pasting the black areas revealed all! F1Fanatic has the story.

It is utter incompetence. Essentially, to remove the secret information, the FIA used a similar technique that internet users use to hide “spoiler text” when discussing films and the like. Highlight the text below, as they say.

Max Mosley would be hilarious if he wasn’t so pathetic!

So now all of Ferrari’s super secret information has been leaked for all to see. Not only this, but other sensitive information — such as Mike Coughlan’s salary at McLaren — has also been revealed. Who needs any rogue Nigel Stepney-style figure when you can get the FIA to do all the work for you?

The FIA have since fixed their documents, but of course it is too late. The originals are all over the internet now. On websites like major Dutch broadcaster RTL.

Do I envisage Max Mosley being fined $100m dollars for bringing the sport into disrepute because of this? Not a chance — even though he deserves it more than anyone else!

What was that you say? A double-rear master cylinder with spring? Very interesting!…

4 comments

Older posts »