Making the ultimate driver

The name's Bond. FernandoJackieAlainAyrtonMichaelNigel Bond. What attributes would comprise the ultimate driver? And don’t worry, I’m not trying to pitch to you a spin off series for Ross Kemp to front, it’s a genuine question.

Apart from the obviously robotic Nick Heidfeld, every driver in the rich history of the sport has been human. It’s this very fact that attracts hundreds of millions of viewers every fortnight to watch twenty 800hp monsters circulate for 90 minutes, knowing it’s a real person hanging on for dear life through every corner, carrying 300km/h through the Monte-Carlo tunnel, judging when and when not to pass and occasionally getting it wrong.

Of these twenty drivers, it’s the ones at the front who generally possess more than one positive talent characteristic that allows them to dominate their rivals, be it an ability to keep cool under pressure, ferocious raw pace or excellent leadership qualities. As every driver is human however, it’s simply physically impossible to be all things to a man.

You have your Juan Montoyas of the world who were rapid and could overtake anything in his way, yet would totally lose his head in any heated situation. On the other end of the aggressive scale, you have the silky smooth Jenson Button who could preserve a single set of super soft set of tyres for a Le Mans 24 hours but can’t pass wind, never mind a rival. Even the very greatest had their downfalls. Michael Schumacher was useless at defending his position to the point he eventually decided it was easier to just drive into you if you tried it on and one could hardly slap the nametag of “Mr. Cool” on Ayrton Senna unless it was April 1^st.

So, what would happen if Patty could hack our way into CERN and actually research and develop something people cared about, like a perfect racing driver? What aspects would make-up our perfect F1 driver? Put your résumé away Piquet, it’s The Ultimate Driver.

Trait #1 – Aggression – Fernando Alonso

As mentioned earlier, it’d be no good if our fantasy man took Jenson Button’s ability to pass people. Mr. Ultimate would just end up qualifying mid-pack, putting his feet up at the end of lap one and saying “Yeah, definitely,” every few seconds whilst trying to flirt with Lee McKenzie. No, what our ultimate driver needs are balls of steel and an aggressive and robust style from driving, starting and overtaking points of view. The best man for this job is Oviedo’s best export, Fernando Alonso. Known for his incredibly aggressive general driving style, the little Spaniard has the results to match too. What makes us most want to inject our designer-driver with Alonsoness though are his ruthless overtaking methods, both offensively and defensively. The incredible opening few laps of the 2006 Hungarian race best serve to visually explain Alonso’s ability to be mature, to pick and choose appropriately with the right amount of aggression and discretion and above all else, how to race with Quake narration. If you can stomach James Allen’s voice once more, then this video demonstrates Alonso’s great ability to defend aggressively without doing brisk business at the Renault parts department. And if you just fancy a laugh (and seeing a feature already installed in conversation form in Eddie Jordan’s head), check this old chestnut out of our Spanish donor brake testing a cube.

Trait #2 – Mechanical Sympathy – Sir Jackie Stewart

Whilst he may have been anything but sympathetic to his vocal chords over his years of life with RBS anecdotes rolling off his tongue faster than carbon dioxide, Sir Flat-cap was a master of nursing knackered cars home. Famously once saying negatively of engine braking that it’s far cheaper to replace brake pads than a gearbox, racing in an era where cars were cobbled together in a shed honed Stewart’s gentle touch with every steering wheel that passed through his hands. Whilst we want our Mr. Ultimate to ring the living daylights out of the car to the point where it ideally grenades into a thousand pieces as he sails across the line in 1^st, we don’t want a Kimi Räikkönen 2004 situation where the thing blew up every other race. As a result, we’re happy to pluck from Stewart’s ageing body his sympathetic ways, never demonstrated better than the 1968 German Grand Prix where Sir Jackie creamed the opposition to the tune of 4 minutes without a hint of a scratch on his Matra-Ford. Mr. Ultimate will live without the sideburns, though.

Trait #3 – Mentality – Alain Prost

As well as be a global pinup to both genders, Mr. Ultimate also has to have a brain and which better cerebral cortex to poach than The Professor’s? So brainy in fact was Alain Prost during his competitive racing days that he even looked like a Dad. In addition to this useful visual aid, his canny knack of slowly reading races like a game of chess rather than something to snatch at like a naked Anjelina Jolie in your bedroom led him to four world titles and fifty one race victories. Often in the 1980s allowing his competitors to race ahead in the early part of the race and inflict 1^st degree burns on their tyres, Prost would creep past in the latter stages of the race to victory with a face so smug only a Frenchman could pull it off. Imagine the scenes, it’s round 16, the Italian GP and Mr. Ultimate has won again for Team PattyF1. It’s his 16^th victory of the season and The Head is on the podium with him spraying cheap pop and asking the Foster’s girls for their numbers. Mr. Ultimate looks down at his rivals with utter smugness, and this 100 milligrams of smugness is what we want our human genome project to dish out to his rivals when he inflicts another devastating blow to their hopes of ever winning a race he is also competing in. Mr. Ultimate will for now be focussing on driving, but if he does ever consider team management, he will be sure not to return to Prost for DNA.

Trait #4 – Raw Speed – Ayrton Senna

Whilst we’re extracting the next trait off this bloke, I think it would also be a good idea to have a similarly banana coloured helmet for Mr. Ultimate, just to cement his reputation as being a bit mad. I’m of course talking of Ayrton Senna, international idol, humanitarian and inspiration of a curiously named motorbike. The attributes we’ve already mentioned for our shopping list are irrelevant if there is none of this – speed. You can be neat, precise and mechanically sympathetic but if you don’t have speed too then your name is simply Luca Badoer. 65 pole positions serves to underline the blistering pace Senna always had within him before he was cruelly taken from the world in 1994 at the duck. I’ve chosen Alonso’s aggression over Senna’s as sometimes the latter’s went a little too far, however for his ability to get results in 1993 he simply had no right to given his shoddy equipment, our source of speed can only come from São Paulo. And if you can’t agree with that, how can you argue with the speed of this?

Trait #5 – Teamwork – Michael Schumacher

You didn’t really think I’d leave the chinny one out did you? Arguably the most complete driver in the history of the sport, Michael Schumacher possessed a lot of the key elements required to become a race winner. That he excelled in much of them meant he wasn’t just a race winner, but also a seven time world champion. It would be all too easy then to point out Schumi’s good points and in all likelihood, if I tried, I would fill the capacity of the Internet. Whilst his victory in a total dog were impressive and fighting back from a career threatening incident even more so, what was most extraordinary about the now 40 year old was his ability to gel a team together. Having gained some experience of team work by driving for Mercedes in WSC and then realised more money was to be made driving without a roof, his F1 career at Benetton gave the first signs team work when his mini-dream team of Flav/Brawn/Byrne/Symmonds led him to a couple of titles. When he who married a Bond girl attracted Schumi to Maranello, that was when the real story began. After a few years struggling around that involved trying to beat The Hakk and being partnered with an Irish Don Juan, it all gelled together from 2000 onward where Schumi swept home to 5 straight titles with his super team. So, this is what Mr. Ultimate also aspires to having robbed Schumi of his teamwork genes. Even if the aforementioned attributes don’t give him an unfair advantage, he’ll always have a team mate ready to bend over and take it and a team not bothered to properly kit out his team mates.

Trait #6 – Hair – Nigel Mansell

I’ve saved the most important characteristic all drivers need to be quick till last – hair. I touched briefly on the sideburns look earlier as pioneered by Sir Jackie Talk-a-lot and Emerson Fittipaldi in the early 1970s, but this is 2009 not 1970, so that look is out. That also means that any 1980s mullet action is out of the window, regardless of how well Saved By The Bell’s AC Slater pulled off the look in the early 1990s. Further still, this judge is not going to give a 6.0 to the Italian entrant and steal the genes of Fabrizio Barbazza and his “Help Mum, I just stuck my hands in a plug,” look. What I do think would look very fetching on our Mr. Ultimate though is a super slug – the technical term for a mess of hair between the nostrils and the upper lip. The only man to ever pull the super slug off with aplomb is Britain’s own Big Nige’, so give a warm round of applause for Mr. Ultimate’s look to be. I think we may now need to re-assess the earlier comment about our boy becoming a global pinup.