Breakfast with Sir Jackie

Together with several colleagues from Fleet Street I was lucky to be invited to have breakfast with Sir Jackie Stewart at Barcelona and the legend that he is was in excellent form, ranging widely over present day issues and giving us some memorable insights into what racing was like in his days.

Jackie attends Grand Prix in his role as global ambassador for RBS but he is also in the paddock because he absolutely loves every second of it. As people grow older they often succumb to "nostalgia disease" - coming to the conclusion that anything in the past was somehow superior to the present.(Motor racing is badly afflicted by this dreary sentimentalism).

You certainly could not say this about Jackie. He talks about the past a lot but only to help illuminate the present and what strikes you about him is his excitement about the here and now and the future. He just couldn't stop talking about Lewis, about his potential, his qualities and the example he believes that young man is setting both in and out of the car. I wrote about this in Tuesday's paper but inevitably much was left out of our discussion in the Williams motorhome on a beautiful race morning at a buzzing track in Catalonia

Living in my memory is his haunting description of the awful events at Monza on September 5th 1970 when his friend Jochen Rindt was killed during practice for the Italian Grand Prix. This was at a time when Jackie was going to funerals and memorials for fellow drivers with depressing regularity. I don't pretend to know all the details of this particular tragedy, but Jackie described how he got out of his car and found Jochen lying in the back of a truck all alone. Jackie said he cried then when he saw him. But there was still a race to prepare for and later he got back in his car and within four laps he had set his fastest ever time at Monza.

That just blows you away doesn't it? The danger, the fear, the closeness to death and the racing - it was just a completely different game then and thank God the sport has changed for the better in this respect. These days we go to F1 to see sporting competition, not a game of Russian Roulette. Anyway Jackie told us about this to help illustrate a point about nerve and how drivers sometimes lose it after a bad crash. He believes, for example, that Alex Wurz has not really been "on it" since David Coulthard almost took his head off in that potentially very nasty incident at Melbourne in March.

As I mentioned Jackie spent a lot of time talking about Lewis. He sees a huge talent with massive potential and a young man who sets a great example in the way he conducts himself. He feels Felipe is another very positive role model. But he is distinctly unimpressed with Kimi and he told us anecdotes from his own experience which underlined what many of us already know - namely that Kimi is happy to do the absolute minimum in terms of his duties outside the car. As a result Jackie would never call him "the complete driver" and he doubts Kimi will ever reach the heights suggested by his extraordinary talent.

When talking about Lewis and the difference in performance in qualifying between him and Fernando and Kimi and Felipe, Maurice Hamilton(he of BBC Radio Five and the Observer) remarked that we should remember that the margins are absolutely tiny between these men. Jackie siezed on this: "Look at the times, look at the margins, you're talking about 16 corners, you talking about every brake, every turn-in, every accelerator pedal, every exit, taking the steering angle off, knock the scrub speed off towards the end of the corner, 16 times. When I started off, the corner had three segments, the entry, the apex and the exit. By the time I'd finished (my career) the corner had eight windows because I was able to develop myself to find eight places where I could gain or lose time in that same corner. I don't think Lewis Hamilton knows that because it's coming so naturally to him."

Towards the end I asked him what he would say to ordinary sports fans who might turn round and say, "Why does Lewis always qualify fourth(he's been second once in fact)?" or "why can't this Hamilton chap win?" (People are already saying this sort of thing).

Here is Jackie's practised answer and it's a classic.

"Because he is driving against 22 of the best racing drivers in the whole damn world," he said. "There are hundreds of millions of people who have driving licences, very few million have competition licences, a few hundred thousand do it on a regular basis, a few thousand make a living out of it, a few hundred make a decent living, 22 are on the grid and, of those 22, only six are any good and, out of those six, at any one time there's probably only three with extraordinary talent and, out of those three, there's usually only one genius."