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| Spin doctors
who can't be wrong
By Sarah Edworthy |
| YOU are whizzing down the back straight about to clock a fantastic lap time. Just three more corners to negotiate. Aaaaaargh! You mistime the hairpin, lock up, spin, bounce off the tyres and stall the engine. Right in front of banks of spectators. What do you do? |
| - Rule No 1: Immediately create the suspicion of a mechanical gremlin. Remember, at this level there is no such thing as driver error. |
| Hoist yourself out of the cockpit and walk a few feet away. Turn back to stare at your car (while undoing the helmet's chin-strap) as if to say "Now look what you've gone and done". Pretend you've noticed something. Walk back to car, examine suspect area closely, and walk away shaking your head as officials run to assist you. |
| Your team, watching in the pits, were banking on a good performance. They know you've blown it with a misjudgment, a tiny lapse of concentration. But what do you say to the outside world? |
| - Rule No 2: Underplay it. Refer to "a bit of a moment", not a crash. "Somebody dropped some oil", is a good line. "The car went away from me and then I was just a passenger... I'm very disappointed because if you look at my sector times up until then, I would have been on pole." |
| - Rule No 3: If this does not convince, turn philosophical. "But that's motor racing," you say with a superior shrug, confident that the world divides between those who were in the cockpit (you alone) and those who were not (the rest of the world). |
| Here follows a rough guide to what team and driver-speak really means: |
| "Understeer" and "oversteer" - very popular during qualifying. According to David Coulthard's race engineer, David Brown, understeer is where you hit the wall with the front of the car and oversteer is where you hit it with the back. |
| "A bit of a moment" - said with maximum understatement. Invariably a solo effort, which leaves a lot of black lines over the circuit, probably a spin of 180 degrees. Also used for unscheduled grass-trimming, gravel-skating excursions and near collisions. |
| "A bit of an incident" - said with sheepish understatement. More serious than a "moment", involving something solid. |
| "For sure" - useful phrase with which to begin sentences, as in: "For sure it was going to be my fastest lap but..." |
| 1. Employed
by foreign drivers to:
a) suggest they are fluent in colloquial English, or b) stall for time, while they summon up some more excuses, sorry, words in English. |
| 2. Employed by English-speaking drivers to admonish interrogator, as in: "For sure it was the end of my race but... " where the phrase "I don't need to be reminded of that, you b******" is understood. |
| "It's actually very difficult to explain..." - followed by a long-winded, technical, shaggy dog story, with explanatory gesticulation, to justify a crash into a pit-lane wall when coming in for a fuel stop or spin on the warm-up lap. |
| "Doing a Top Gun" - Johnny Herbert's description of Martin Brundle flying upside down above him in Melbourne. |
| "We"/"Our" - as used by Jacques Villeneuve. Grammatical ploy to differentiate driver/mechanical responsibility. This tends to go something like: "I was running a strong second and then the car got a bit sideways. It went up on the grass and that was the end of our race." |
| "Too much wheelspin" - a bad start. |
| "A rogue mechanic working under his own steam" - team member responsible for the part found to infringe regulations. |
| "A junior employee" - ditto. |
| "Problems with the chickens" - exclusive to Gerhard Berger. His pronunciation of chicanes. |
| "The car was perfect" - rare expression, used only by winner. |
| "I was surprised to win because I was stuck in fifth gear" - I am brilliant. |
| "It was good for the team that I finished fourth, ahead of my team-mate, especially because I lost first and second gear" - I am much better than my team-mate. |
| "Couldn't get the set-up right" - I don't understand my car. |
| "My next set of tyres altered the balance and I lost time in the final run..." - I realised I wasn't going to finish in the points so just decided to take it easy. |
| Of course, one thing not mentioned above is body language for which Nigel Mansell is famous. Most of Nigel's carryings on (such as falling flat on his face after pushing his car across the finish line at Dallas in 1984) were meant to play up the huge effort he was expending, or, when he crashed through the gravel pits in at Canada in '92 and sat motionless in the cockpit of his car "Hey, this wasn't my fault". |
| Most frequently, you will see the shake of a fist, which really is meant to be (for North Americans) the middle finger extended or (for Europeans) the "V" sign... A casual wave lapping a back marker can usually be interpretted as "thanks for not running me off the track" while a single fist in the air upon winning usually translates into "I am the greatest" (incidentally, Damon Hill sure has the "royal wave" downpat!) |