Green Races Red

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All the European or foreign drivers – there was usually about half a dozen of us – would stay in the President Hotel. It was home-from-home and so much more convenient than renting a tiny apartment. Everyone knows me there. I quickly fall into a familiar routine.

I will walk down to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, then amuse myself by playing Space Invaders or checking out the latest magazines. Then back to the hotel, perhaps for a snooze before dinner, and then on to the night clubs. I know my way around. I feel very comfortable in Tokyo and, in some ways, it is even better than being in Dublin. It feels more personal. I live near Dublin so I’m obviously in the city quite often. But it’s somehow special visiting Tokyo, a bit like returning every now and then to a favourite holiday haunt.

It is an appropriate description because this was the first time I had been able to relax for quite some time. I had arranged to share a flat in Bologna but I had been unable to find time to unwind as the team would regularly call me to Fiorano. It is a forty-minute run on average – I’ve done it in twenty-three minutes but it’s not healthy at that rate. I prefer just to plod along. Inevitably I would show up and a problem would have arisen. I would then return to Bologna, but being on call meant it was impossible to organise anything, and I couldn’t even go to the gym. It made life very difficult.

I had to be ready for action at all hours. The team was prepared to run until dark. Sometimes we would go beyond that. There were occasions when it was pitch black but we needed to take the car out, if only to discover what was going to go wrong next. Testing is very spectacular at night because the disc brakes glow bright orange and the row of little lights on the dashboard, indicating when it is time to change gear, flash back and forth. The exhaust pipes spit flames. It’s all very dramatic. Fantastic, actually.

It is all part of the atmosphere at Fiorano. The test track, which is owned by Ferrari, is on the edge of Maranello and there is always a sizeable crowd pressed against the fence. As a Ferrari driver, you are continually under the microscope. All the talk among the crowd is about lap times. It doesn’t matter that you might be trying various ideas out on the car and lap times are out of the question. In front of the tifosi, there is always this pressure to perform. When I completed my first laps at Fiorano, I was trying to do decent times – and I could tell the team were encouraging that because they kept giving me fresh tyres. With Michael, it was the reverse. They were trying to slow him down because he was a known quantity and they didn’t want him to show his hand with the new car.

When Fiorano was built in the early seventies it was way ahead of its time. In fact, Ferrari remains the only team with its own private test facility. It is extremely useful to be able to run the car whenever it suits the team rather than having to book a circuit and then travel to the track in question. Fiorano is so narrow that if you make the slightest error or deviation, it is exaggerated and shows immediately. The tifosi will stand there all day. On one occasion, because of problems, we managed just one lap, which was in the dark. And yet the fans waited from dawn to beyond dusk just to see it. There is nowhere else where that sort of thing can happen. It’s unreal.

I was thinking about the pressure induced by all that attention while I was flying from Japan to Australia. Tokyo had made the perfect stopping place en route to Melbourne: eleven hours from London then ten hours to Sydney and a short hop from there. It was the perfect split. I had time to reflect on everything that had been going wrong.

I knew it was going to be very difficult for the team but, personally, I was not that concerned. If I am criticised, it usually goes straight over the top of my head. If I’m not doing a proper job, I am aware of it. I don’t need someone to tell me. I know when I am wrong and I know when I’m right, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks. On the other hand, the Italian temperament is quite soft. They are quite susceptible to criticism and I knew there would be a lot of that flying around in Melbourne.

I really thought the whole Ferrari team was about to be massively embarrassed.