Nigel Roebuck על אלאן פרוסט

[דובי מילר]

כבר בן-52 , האלוף הנוכחי של סדרת האנדרוס טרופי, מרוצי ראלי-קרוס על שלג וקרח ובעיקר ארבע פעמים אלוף עולם .

כאשר התחלנו להכיר את הפורמולה-1 בישראל אי שם בתחילת שנות ה-80 הכיר לנו רוני אהרונוביץ' במגזין "טורבו" עליו השלום , את פרוסט ונהיגתו ואם אני זוכר טוב שידור הפורמולה-1 הראשון בטלויזיה, ערוץ-1, היה גראן-פרי מונקו עם פרוסט ברנו-טורבו הצהובה.

בשנת 84 הגיע הנהג שגרם לי אישית להתאהב בפורמולה-1 וזה שהיה יריבו הגדול ביותר של פרוסט, איירטון סנה כמובן , והעולם מבחינתי נחלק לשתי אסכולות סנה או פרוסט .

אלאן פרוסט היה מוכר בכינוי "הפרופסור" בגלל הגישה שלו והנהיגה שלו .

השבוע Nigel Roebuck עוסק בשאלה מה עשה את פרוסט כזה מיוחד -

 

Back in 1986 I watched final qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix out on the circuit with Denis Jenkinson. It was the usual frantic hour of drivers looking for a clear lap, then putting in the banzai run, hoping not to be impeded. Senna, Mansell, Alboreto, Berger, Rosberg...all were on the limit, and looked it. Because of the racket, we couldn't hear the track PA system, of course, so it wasn't until the session was over, and then engines shut down, that we heard the times. Fastest - by nearly half a second - was the McLaren-TAG of Alain Prost.

 

'Jenks' looked bemused. "How does he do it?" he said. "Never even noticed him..."

 

I knew what he meant. In all the chaos and drama of a final qualifying session at Monaco, Prost had calmly and quietly blown the rest away. And the following day, he took the lead at the start, and simply drove off into the distance, winning consummately from Rosberg and Senna, and looking as if he had all the time in the world. Which he had, of course.

 

That was always the thing about Prost: as you say, he was (blisteringly) fast, yet looked slow. I don't believe, in all my years of watching Formula 1, that I ever saw anyone who made driving a Grand Prix car look more easy and effortless - as if you could do it yourself. And there lay the art of Prost, of course.

 

A genius at set-up - at McLaren they still say there has never been anyone like him in that respect - he worked tremendously hard at providing himself with as perfect a car as possible for the race. When they were team mates at Ferrari, Nigel Mansell sneered that, "Prost was more of a chauffeur than a racing driver - he likes the car to do all the work".

 

And Alain, in fact, smilingly took that as a compliment: wasn't that the object of the exercise? For the record, Prost won five races that year, 1990, and Mansell one.

 

Alain used to say that he enjoyed driving on a slippery surface, when you could slide a car around a bit, but he never lost sight of the fact that 'sideways', while lovely to watch and fun to indulge in, was by definition slow.

 

"In Fangio's time," he said, "the cars had so little grip that 'drifting' a car was the quickest way through a corner. But it's not like that now. There's too much grip to 'drift' - these days, if a car is sliding, it's losing time. If it's going sideways, it's not going forward as much as it could be..."

 

Therefore, Prost's style was immaculate - and undramatic, which was why some found him 'boring' to watch, and also why - for reasons unclear to me - he is rarely considered to be on the level of Senna and Schumacher.

 

I've been watching the Andros Trophy races recently, and, you're right, Alain's technique is markedly different from most of the others' - again the accent is on smoothness, on not wasting time, which was always his hallmark in F1. Seems in work in both disciplines, doesn't it. World Champion four times, and now - as his 52nd birthday beckons - the Andros Trophy champion.

 

As for his fitness, well, Prost has always been obsessive about that, and it didn't stop when he retired from F1, at the end of 1993. For a long time he has been a fanatical cyclist ( of the serious kind), and it seems to have kept him in very good trim. The hair's a bit more grey, but otherwise, as you say, he doesn't look greatly different from the F1 driver we knew so well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ומה אתם חושבים על פרוסט ?

 

 

דובי

[ניר.]

מה חושבים על פרוסט ? שסנה שם אותו בצילו..

יש דיון ארוך על זה בפורום ה F1 הישראלי, אני פשוט לא מוצא אותו.

מספיק להסתכל על העקיפה שפרוסט עשה על סנה בקיאלמי 93 כדי להבין את כל הברברת שרובוק כותב.

[דובי מילר]

ניר

הדיון על פרוסט VS סנה היה בראשיתו של הפורום בפורמולה-1 ומאז עבר הפורום לדעתי 2 שדרוגים בגלל תקלות ונמחק.

 

 

דובי