di mei 02, 2006 11:01
20 jaar geleden dodelijk verongelukt. Elio de Angelis.
Nigel Roebuck
De Angelis, I suspect, would not have much liked the F1 cars of today - although undoubtedly, with his subtle skills, he would have been delighted to see the end of the electronic 'driver aids'. Elio's style was ultra-smooth, and I'm not sure that the contemporary cars much lend themselves to smoothness. For that reason, too, I doubt that, say, Alain Prost would have been much in his element in this era.
Since de Angelis's time, the entire format of a grand prix has changed. No longer is it a matter of getting a set-up for 200 miles, which will work well with a full fuel load and a virtually empty one. We have refuelling now, and set-up is much closer to what used to be a 'qualifying' set-up. Even a massive fuel load these days is good for not much more than 100 miles, and the races have become a matter of sprint-stop-sprint.
How good was Elio? Not as good as he could have been, in my opinion, in the sense that, while I think he had natural talent to throw away, his ambition never matched his ability. He came from a very rich family, and so raced primarily for the pleasure of it. With Elio, you never felt that F1 was the centre of the universe; it came easily to him, and was one of many good things in life, there to be enjoyed.
He was often not far away from Lotus team-mate Ayrton Senna in '85, and occasionally he was quicker - I can still remember Ayrton's displeasure at Rio that year, when he was out-qualified (at home) by his team-mate. Perhaps the biggest single difference between them was that de Angelis went racing because he loved it, and Senna went racing because he had to. Elio would have liked to be World Champion; for Ayrton it was an absolute necessity, and as soon as possible.
Those of us who knew de Angelis remember a delightful man, with a lovely, ironic, sense of humour, and manners from another age. Jo Ramirez, who worked with him in his early days at Shadow, remained a close friend to the end of Elio's life, in a testing accident at Paul Ricard 1986. This is how he remembers him.
"Elio was like Francois Cevert in many ways, charming, completely genuine, a very good driver. I remember the day he signed the contract for his first F1 drive - we went out to celebrate, to a coffee shop in Northampton called Cagney's, where we had hamburgers and chips! For all his wealth, Elio was a very down-to-earth person. He used to come to my house, and play the piano - like Francois, he was classically-trained.
"I remember going testing with him at Paul Ricard once. No one wanted to go out on the wet track, even though it had stopped raining, and then someone suggested that we all took our hire cars out, and dried the track! I went with Elio, and it was fantastic to watch him - he just floored it all the way round, slowing the car with the steering wheel. Superb! Things like that...well, nowadays no one would do it, would they? It was so much more fun back then.
"Elio was a wealthy man, but he wouldn't buy what he wanted just because he could. There was a particular Rolex watch he wanted, but it took him weeks of deliberating before he said, 'Yes, I'm going to buy it'. Then he took off the watch he had, and gave it to me. It was a gold Baume-Mercier, and although I wear it very rarely, I happened to be wearing it the day he died at Ricard."