Jenson Button: Inspired or desperate?
M’learned colleague James Allen set off quite a kerfuffle yesterday on his blog with what I considered to be a nicely balanced and thought-provoking piece about McLaren’s fortunes at the 2010 Australian Grand Prix. Unfortunately the thoughts it provoked among James’s readers weren’t uniformly positive…
F1 fans are a passionate bunch, and as a journalist it’s very hard to write anything about anyone without being accused of bias; especially when we indulge our penchant for hyperbole, as we do. I found during my time on customer magazines that sometimes a client will focus on something that catches their attention – something they don’t like – and it plays merry hell with their ability to judge the rest of the product. In this case, it’s James’s second line that has caused many readers to chafe:
Jenson Button won the race with a performance of measured perfection and instinctive tactical brilliance, while Lewis Hamilton lit up Albert Park with his audacious passing, but ended up looking diminished in comparison with Button, less in control of his destiny, less mature.
It’s part of the folly of sportswriters that we occasionally overcook our opening paragraphs. While we’re in confessional mode, I’ll admit to describing Jenson’s early pit call as “inspired” in my post-race wrap on Formula Santander. But was it inspired or merely an act of desperation?
When analysing any tactical move, many people fall into the trap of judging it in the context of data that has subsequently come to light. But you have to come to it as if it’s a fresh page: on that particular lap Jenson didn’t have access to the split times of his car and those surrounding him, or to video images or still pictures showing how much he was losing or gaining. He was merely a man with a decade of Formula 1 experience, sitting in an F1 car – a harsh, stressful and vibratory environment – feeling a lack of balance in his tyres, seeing his team-mate pass him and pull away, and probably feeling rather than seeing the car behind him closing up. What, then, to do?
The choice was to KBO (“Keep Buggering On,” as Winston Churchill put it) in the hope that the tyres would improve, or roll the dice there and then by fitting a new set. It was a snap decision made in the heat of the moment, not a considered analysis based on all the facts. Don’t forget that when he announced over the radio that he was coming in, his pit crew were still sitting around picking their noses.
Had the decision not paid off we would now be describing it as foolish and inept. But Jenson’s call worked out, so in the flowery phraseology of sports writers it becomes “inspired” rather than “potty”. That’s how history is written. We remember Alexander Fleming, who lucked into the discovery of penicillin because he couldn’t be bothered to do the washing up, but we forget what’s-his-name* who spent years slaving over a means of mass-producing it.
What was the exact proportion of luck involved in Jenson’s win? Impossible to say. People on F1 forums like everything to be neat, clearly defined, black and white; sorry, ladies and gents, but sometimes inspiration and desperation run into one another down a dark alley and end up doing something their mothers wouldn’t want to see. Journalistic bias doesn’t come into it…
*Howard Florey
Very true, I would imagine it’s all well and good when you’re praising someone but when you’re telling the truth sometimes a reaction happens even when you’re telling the truth! In a perfect world we’d all read the whole article before judging!
Dear Stuart
I see you subscribe to a view I posted elsewhere just yesterday (not sure if I also put it on spc but as I was packing for Jordan on Sunday maybe not….
A “nothing to lose” move that I don’t believe he’d have tried if he hadn’t gone backwards from the start and hadn’t been struggling on the intermediate tyres that some drivers (Lewis?)found fitted them like comfortable slippers…
The win coming of the back of one passing move (Kubes just after he’d changed tyres) and a lot of backwards action at the start when others seemed to pass much of the grid at least twice seems a reward that only a fairy godmother could grant…
However he did well despite a sticky first lap on new rubber and I don’t mean to belittle him…
However the Press superlatives seem a little overblown for a win fashioned from one part cool desperation and one part good luck….
We here agree with you 100% Stuart
That is exactly how my friends & I saw it during the race, Button pitted out of desperation, after Hamilton passed him & buggered off down the track.
Good piece Mr Codling.
I was beginning to grow tired of the way Button’s decision at the weekend was wrongly interpreted. To me, he made the choice not of maturity or skill, but of desperation. That, or face dropping further down the order.
And James Allen? Hmm, well… I think his blog/website has been going downhill sadly. I still read it everyday, but it just seems full of PR-fluff and more superlatives than an episode of Top Gear.
@Lady Snowcat
Dear Lady, please forgive us our superlatives, as we forgive those who superlate against us…
@Dank
True enough, but he could easily have done nothing and gone backwards – and then what would we be saying about him? See also: Michael Schumacher. Where he?
Personally I don’t really care if Jenson’s decision was inspired or desperate, it provided us with some fantastic racing.. more of the same please.
I particularly like the final paragraph about interpretations not being black or white. Luck and Hobson’s Choice are two common features of great victories. Let us remember, to take one random example, that Lewis Hamilton won Monaco 2008 largely through crashing at the right time to change tyres to match the weather conditions and getting a puncture at the right time to not need another pit stop before time ran out…
Perhaps I should explain Hobson’s Choice – I realised just after I hit “Submit” that it’s an old and somewhat parochial term.
Hobson’s Choice is where there is only one reasonable option (there is a second one, but so undesirable that few people, if anyone, would voluntarily take it). It derived from the days when horses were the primary mode of travel. There was one particular place (presumably run by someone called Hobson) where you could swap horses around. However, when it became time to pick a horse, the only one available would always be the one that looked least suitable. This would be Hobson’s choice. Given that the alternative would be to take the exhausted horse the potential customer had brought to the horse-swapping place and walk it to the next horse-swapping place, many customers would accept what appeared on the surface to be a poor choice of new horse.
My instant reaction to Button pittig was he had decided he was racing his team mate and no-one else. He couldn’t natch Hamilton on the same tyres and early in the season he has to establish himself so it was worth gambling on tyres.
What I really don’t understand is why switching tyres worked for him. Logic says that with their driving styles Button should have been better on the softer inters and Hamilton on the harder slicks. Something somewhere just doesn’t add up.
@Alianora La Canta
If only you’d been around to explain this to a mate of mine when he bought a clapped-out Peugeot 205GTI a few years ago!
Do I take it he complained a lot about it?
@Alianora La Canta
I think he took the old nag to the glue factory before too long…
Great reflective piece Stuart, I really enjoyed it, thanks.
I think James has hit kind of a wall with his blog where it has grown to the size where his ‘community’ is no longer small enough to generally self-enforce a certain standard of behaviour.
I remember my first post here, where I went off on one when you wrote about Michael. Generally because the post counts are still relatively low, you can kinda respond coherently to that sort of post (or at least reason with the poster
) When you have 500-1000 of them, that must be hard.
Hi Stuart,
I heard about your blog from sidepodcast and thought I would look it up. I was delighted to read this article first. There are many frustrating things about being an F1 fan, but for me one of the most annoying things I find is not boring races or politics, but the polemic and uncomprimising opinions of F1 fans on the Internet when they make their comments.
Your article hits the nail on the head – in F1 fan terms that must mean you are the greatest sports writer in the world and I want to have your babies!
Keep up the good work.
@Aaron James
Coherent? Moi?
Times are hard (yes, I know, smallest violin in the world, etc) for the journos who travel to all the races because nobody wants to pay for news (and why should they, since it’s readily available for free?). Nobody clicks on ads, either, so the only way of generating an income from a blog is to stick out the virtual begging bowl or to get sponsors.
Most of my work nowadays is commercial/advertorial stuff which goes out without my name on. It may not be glamorous but it means that the cats don’t have to go out and catch their own dinner… It also keeps me very busy, which is why I don’t update this blog often enough! I also don’t want to tread on the toes of my colleagues who are trying to earn a living from the news beat – if that means not having stratospheric traffic levels, so be it…
James’ started off pretty low on commentors too, joe sawards are still low despite the updates. The I don’t know what happens, suddenly a blog will go mental and grow suddenly.
I know what you mean about making a living, sadly writing doesn’t seem to have the same value attached to it as it used to. It’s almost being commoditised.
You can see the lengths it is pushing some of the f1 circus what with mr saward feeling the need to grub it up with the common folk to make a few bob
Not sure what the end game is here – but I stopped buying print a while ago because the quality dropped to keep costs down. That quality gap is getting bigger and bigger I hope someone works out how to fill that gap and earn a decent living at the same time.
Inspired or desperate? Neither, really. Through circumstance, Jenson was placed in a poor position and needed to make a change of some sort to have any chance of a decent result. If Red Bull hadn’t waited as long as they did, Webber may have remained ahead of Button and (on the large assumption that the race went ok for Webber from then on) Button’s pit stop would have been ‘clever’, ‘smart’ or ‘well-timed’ rather than ‘inpired’ and similar superlatives.
It is up to the writer, though, to make a statement and to call Button’s pitstop inspired is much better than ‘thought it might give himself a reasonable chance of improving his position’…especially when the second paragraph in an article.
@Jon Waldock
Exactly it was lucky, Mclaren did the same thing in Malaysian GP qualifying, the risked something with the tyres and it didn’t pay off.
Was funny to see that Button kept going on about “we” made the decision that time and not “me”.
@TommyB
Difficult call to make on that one, Tommy; racing drivers tend to use the royal ‘we’ interchangeably with ‘I’ these days… That and their continuous abuse of the reflexive personal pronoun. What is it with sports stars and politicians, this mania for saying ‘myself’ instead of ‘me’?
@Alianora La Canta
Another case of certain members of the press just seeing what they wanted to see…
But then… they need a good story… because that’s what sells…
I can put up with poor grammar with the usage of ‘myself’ and ‘me’. I can even live with ‘I’ vs ‘we’. The problem lies in the almost inevitable third person reference of their own name.