Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Do you want to win?
Is the most important feeling in Formula 1 the desire to win?Or is it something else.
James said something interesting the other day, i know, i know, he suggested that the thing that was driving michael wasn't so much the desire to win but was more a desire to stop somebody else from having that winning feeling.
I wonder if it's only Michael who thinks like this. I actually doubt that. The evidence seems to be bourne out by the difference that is made to a driver who has broken his duck. Usually this is explained by the idea of getting the monkey off your back but actually what it might be is that in Formula 1 it isn't a let down when you win. Which is kind of incredible.
Think of Rubens, he had to wait more than 100 races before he had his first win. All of that time he must have been dreaming what it would be like and in his mind it would just keep getting better and better. But when he finally won you could see by the look on his face and the tears in his eyes that it had still beaten expectations.
And that's kind of amazing after that kind of a build up. So to get back to the point. Given that actually winning is a better feeling than you could even expect it to be aren't the drivers who have experienced winning driving around in something closer to a jealous rage? And that could be very powerful.
Finally what about drivers who's first win is under a cloud couldn't that ruin you as a driver? I think this happened to Fisi. And i think it was going to happen to Kimi but Ron stopped it from happening at the last moment i think he sacrificed a win to make his drivers first win more special.
Now Fisi has signed for Renault, who do you think will take up the other seat? I think it would be too humbling for Kimi to do it, but they need a star, not a rookie, to fill it.
We know about the Schumacher leap, and Kimi we know has his one idosyncricy in that he drinks some of the champagne before he sprays it. Alonso doesn't seem to have any signiture thing on the podium. He does his signiture things in the car before he gets out and while standing on top of the car before going up.
The main thing though is the spraying of the champagne. A few years ago the drivers seemed to always be spraying each other and then after a quite a while of that they would go for the engineer or whatever.
Alonso seems to now only spray his engineer really, and if he's on the podium without his own engineer he gives a slight spray and then gives his champagne away.
So Michael seemed to copy him. It was like he didn't want to celebrate when he wasn't winning. He just wanted to get off the podium so he would give the champagne away pretty quickly.
This weekend threw that into relief for the first time, because for the first time we had all the main guys on the podium for the first time in ages. And Michael and Kimi ganged up on Alonso I seemed to remember. While Alonso was going for his engineer, Kimi and Michael go for Alonso. This is basically a traditional champagne moment. One we haven't seen for a while.
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