Sidepodcast

Qadbak: How the Deal Went Wrong

Guest writer Stuart Codling is working hard on getting his own site together, but has found time for one more post here before he takes up the reigns. This time, he untangles the mystery of BMW and Qadbak.

As Richard Nixon once said to Dwight Eisenhower, with admirable directness but a certain lack of politesse, “There comes a time when you have to s**t or get off the pot.” Similarly, if you’re planning on buying a Formula 1 team, then at some point you’re going to have to convince the seller that you’ve got the money to buy it.

It’s over this crucial point that the BMW board, after weeks of curious dithering, finally changed tack and decided to halt the sale of its team to Qadbak Investments Ltd, an offshore investment vehicle about which very little is known.

Formula 1 has made many of its participants very rich. But it’s also a sport in which, over the years, a motley procession of rogues, charlatans and mountebanks have spent vast swathes of other people’s money before disappearing into the ether. To identify potential dangers you need to ask questions; and the harder you dig for details about the people behind Qadbak, the more elusive they become. The trail takes us from the British Virgin Islands to Pyongyang via Zurich, Dubai, and, er, Nottingham.

It was Somerset Maugham who described Monaco as “a sunny place for shady people.” Most tax havens are like that. Individuals who create networks of which-shell-is-the-peanut-under offshore companies are usually doing so in order to mask their wealth (or, indeed, the lack of it) from the scrutiny of tax inspectors, alimony lawyers, intelligence organisations, and auditors doing due diligence. If you’re registered ‘on shore’ – in the UK, for instance – then your accounts are open for public scrutiny. A talented accountant can work wonders with the figures, but for real financial acrobatics you have to look offshore, where with the right advice you can really make your balance sheet stand on its head and sing Jerusalem.

On the other hand, F1’s undisputed king of the offshore tax haven is Bernard Charles Ecclestone. He has never scurried off with the goods, even though for those of us on the outside, trying to ascertain which mattress Formula 1’s cash is stuffed under is like playing that fairground game where you have to whack the gophers over the head with a padded stick.

Consider also the reclusive Barclay brothers, David and Frederick, whose business empire includes London’s Ritz hotel and the Daily Telegraph newspaper group. Although former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes famously described them as a “stinking mob”, and questions have been tabled in the House of Lords (most recently by Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, this June) regarding their tax avoidance activities, they have never been accused of any crime.

So there are many reasons why one would wish to conceal one’s paper trail offshore, and not all of them relate to outright criminality. We merely assume that because someone is hiding something, it follows that they have something to hide. But that something isn’t necessarily fraud. I need to point this out because, like my phone, my copy of McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists is set to both ring and vibrate, and the ‘F’ word sets it off.

Announcing the €80million deal on September 15, BMW described Qadbak as a Swiss company that represents “the interests of certain Middle East and European-based families.” This June it acquired Notts County football club via a specially created subsidiary, Munto Finance, persuading the supporters’ trust to sign over its controlling stake for the nominal sum of £1. It subsequently acquired former England manager Sven Goran Eriksson as director of football, who reportedly accepted a salary of much less than the going rate in exchange for equity in a company called Swiss Commodity Holding, which shares at least two directors (Nathan and Peter Willett) with Qadbak.

So we’ve got a Swiss foundation representing Middle East and European-based families, but registered in the British Virgin Islands. And we have a football team who, when called upon to reveal its anonymous benefactors, either complains about a media “vendetta” or names people who subsequently deny any involvement (Anwar Shafi and Dr Moeen Qureshi). Are you still with me?

Let’s introduce Russell King. ‘Dubai-based businessman’ would no doubt be his preferred appellation, although my favourite is the delightfully Germanic collision of nouns used by the Zurich weekly Sonntagszeitung: ‘Finanzjongleur’ (literally ‘financial juggler’). My former boss, in the pages of F1 Racing, perhaps unkindly described him as ‘disconcertingly obese’. Or we could, owing to the business of an insurance claim for a car that was never actually stolen, say ‘convicted fraudster’ without a tremor from the bookshelf.

He has also been connected with the failed company Belgravia, which had £1.9million of assets frozen by a court in Jersey. Although King has denied any connection, the court acknowledged an affidavit that showed a company bearing King’s initials (RK Holdings Ltd) owned 50 per cent of BG International Holdings Ltd, which owned 90 per cent of Belgravia.

King first appeared in F1 as an associate of Essentially Sport, the agency that mismanaged Jenson Button’s career so disastrously that Jenson had to buy himself out of a contract he’d signed with Williams. Together with Essentially Sport’s John Byfield and, ahem, Belgravia, he tried to set up a Dubai-based F1 team in 2004 – through Grand Prix Investments, a company registered in Gibraltar (yes! Another tax haven). “I have to say,” McLaren’s Martin Whitmarsh told reporters at Suzuka this year, “I started being concerned for BMW Sauber when I heard his [King’s] name.”

King’s name also rang alarm bells in the football world. Qadbak passed the Football League’s ‘fit and proper person’ test on October 20 after giving assurances that King’s sole involvement had been to provide strategic and media consultancy, and that he had relinquished that role and was no longer part of the set-up. Indeed, Notts County hired former Sky Sports presenter Matt Lorenzo to be head of communications – but he quit two weeks later.

On October 22 a delegation from Swiss Commodity Holding visited Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, to present a gift to Kim Yong Nam, the country’s second in command. North Korea has mineral reserves worth between $3.7trillion and $6trillion, depending on which figures you believe. This is entirely consistent with Swiss Commodity Holding’s claim to be involved in the mining industry – although it also claims to be the world’s biggest mining group by asset value, according to figures it has produced to support a proposed stock market flotation. This came as news to established mining giants such as Rio Tinto and Anglo American, who told the Daily Telegraph that they’d never heard of them.

In an official photograph produced by the state media service, Kim Yong Nam is pictured with SCH delegates Shanti Sen, Nathan Willett (who also sits on Notts County’s board) and… Russell King. Although SCH’s logo now appears on the club’s badge, Notts County pointed out that neither King nor anyone else were in North Korea on club business.

Earlier, on October 15, Swiss Commodity Holding agreed to buy First London Asset Management, part of a group that includes the company that signed the £5million guarantee of funds for Munto Finance to back the acquisition of Notts County. This guarantee has also recently been called into question.

Over the past month, a number of national newspapers have been investigating the complex structure of the deals to acquire Notts County and BMW Sauber. Whenever lawyers and large sums of money are involved, the threat of injunctions always looms large, so the papers have to be sure of their facts before they go to press.

Today the Guardian broke the story that the Football League is to reopen enquiries into the sale of Notts County. “Guardian investigations into the companies that own County have revealed that they are part of a complex and confusing structure with many connections between individuals associated with the project,” it said.

The story in Sonntagszeitung last weekend made much of the claim that Qadbak intended to finance the continued operation of BMW Sauber through the team’s share of the 2009 TV money. This isn’t unusual; it’s how Brawn GP survived and ultimately prospered, making its partners a healthy profit thanks to the Mercedes buy-out. But you also need to know and trust who you’re dealing with. Ultimately it was this uncertainty that convinced BMW to reconsider who it was selling its team to; having a smaller sum in the bank is better than having a bigger sum on a promise.

And selling the team back to the person whose name is still partially above the door is preferable to selling it to – who are they, anyway?

How Driver Negotiations Work: Mercedes GP

Guest writer Stuart Codling digs deeper into the untold stories behind the Mercedes announcement - or should that be the over-told stories?

You say tom-ah-to, I say tom-ay-to. In amongst the epic quantity of gun-jumping that took place in advance of today’s Mercedes-Benz announcement, two news sources led with differing predictions of who would drive for whom in 2010. Auto Motor und Sport placed Nico Rosberg and Jenson Button at the newly rechristened Mercedes GP; the venerable BBC went for Rosberg and Nick Heidfeld.

Intriguing as the possibility of a Michael Schmidt vs Andrew Benson deathmatch would be (on stilts! With pugil sticks!), it’s a tricky one to call. Schmidt is one of the most hard-nosed newshounds in Formula 1 and his consumption of bananas is second only to Ross Brawn; and although Benson has been pilloried for posting links to utter tat on the BBC’s website, don’t forget that it was he who broke the news that Damon Hill was to get the boot from Williams. So let’s delve into the murk behind these speculative stories. As ever, it’s a fascinating tale of wheels within wheels.

Time was when negotiations between a team principal and a driver would be transacted in person or by phone, often with the driver’s manager as the medium. It could take months. There would be arguments. There would be haggling. Each party would play off potential suitors against one another. Eventually they would settle on a mutually agreeable rate. Famously, Ayrton Senna and Ron Dennis once settled one of their protracted contractual tussles on the toss of a coin.

Now that we all march to a rolling news cycle, the internet has introduced a wealth of new stratagems for the savvy negotiator, especially if they like to play dirty – as all the most effective driver managers do.

In recent weeks we’ve seen David and Steve Robertson publicly flirt with Toyota as part of their campaign to ensure Kimi Raikkonen gets a healthy stipend at McLaren (although they’ll be regretting pinning their tail to that particular donkey now). John Howett obligingly issued an on-the-record quote to the effect that he’d love to pay Kimi an exceedingly large amount to bring his winning pace, if not his winning PR sensibility, to Toyota. The news went round the internet faster than you can say Ctrl-A-Ctrl-C-Ctrl-V. In due course, somewhere in Woking, a phone rang…

Jenson Button’s manager, Richard Goddard, has been playing a similar game for a couple of months now. It’s a tricky pursuit, because controlling how news is disseminated on the web is like trying to take a firm grip on a conger eel, but play it right and it’s win-win all the way, even if the news outlets who unwittingly become your shills are second rate. It’s all in the phrasing.

In previous weeks we’ve been invited to feel sorry for JB because he has to pay for his own dry cleaning. Last week Goddard let it be known, also via the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, that Jenson had visited the McLaren factory.

“Let’s face it, everyone likes to feel wanted,” he said. An innocuous enough sentence, but in the hands of unscrupulous amateur hacks who are hungry for clicks it is potential dynamite. Thus followed the Planet-F1 headline: “Goddard: Button feeling unwanted by Brawn GP.” With a little help from the Twittering classes and a spot of Ctrl-A-Ctrl-C-Ctrl-V from other sites, the story was soon everywhere, even though it bore scant relation to the words Goddard actually uttered.

For these reasons, quotable people who work in F1 are usually very careful what they say. Over the weekend, the Times followed up the factory visit story, fleshing it out with some well-sourced advance details of today’s Mercedes announcement. It was interesting for many reasons, not least because it contained an on-the-record admission from a McLaren spokesman that Jenson had been in town: “Having just arrived at Heathrow, Jenson made a small detour to Woking to say hello.”

My old boss is a smart cookie. He knows when a denial is pointless (a separate Times piece, carrying Martin Brundle’s byline, kicked off with a claim that Jenson was there for two hours and met both management and a senior engineer) and when an “I can neither confirm nor deny” will be taken as a “Yes”. The soundbite confirmed that McLaren are in the game without actually committing the team to a position, and its wording was supremely difficult to beat out of shape if you were of a mind to try to spin a story out of it. He could easily have appended the hashtag #upyoursGMM.

Driver negotiations generally don’t fall within the PR department’s remit, so it’s fair to assume that the other salient details in the Times story came from the Button camp rather than the McLaren spin machine. But this isn’t a one-player game – and that’s where Nick Heidfeld comes in. He may be a middling talent but he’s a free agent and he was born in the right country to be a plausible prospect for a Mercedes seat.

But why would any front-line team employ a driver who has next to no PR value, even in his own country, and who has failed to parlay a race-winning car into a race win when he had the chance? The answer is that they probably wouldn’t, and yet here we are reading that Nick Heidfeld is to drive for Mercedes GP. It smells like a bluff to me. You can read it as Brawn saying to Goddard, “Just because we’re about to take delivery of a stack of Benz wonga, it doesn’t mean we’re going to buckle to your salary demands.”

It’s ironic that the money for the windtunnel that shaped the BMW that provided Heidfeld with his best chance to win a grand prix came from Mercedes – to buy Kimi Raikkonen out of his Sauber contract when Mercedes chose him over Heidfeld in 2001.

In spite of Kimi’s well-documented battles with unmotivation and the bottle, he has a world championship to his name. Heidfeld? Michael Schumacher he ain’t. Even the sturdy burghers of his home nation are wont to ask, “Who are you, anyway?” Mercedes declined to employ him in 2001 and he has done nothing in the interim to convince them that decision was wrong. Auto Motor und Sport knows that, whether they’ve been tipped the wink or not.

Of course, I may be wrong. But let’s not call the whole thing off.

Tumbleweed in Tokyo: Toyota Leaves F1 Empty-Handed

With the news that Toyota are throwing in the towel, Stuart Codling takes a look at where it all went wrong for the Japanese team.

After nine years, and the expenditure of sums that even Toyota’s legion of accountants can probably only guess at, the Toyota Motor Corporation has left a sport that it didn’t really want to be part of in the first place. It might be the world’s largest car manufacturer, but it owes that position less to clever marketing than it does to producing durable, inexpensive motor cars.

TMC was led by the nose in to F1 by its European arm, which was desperate to attract a younger constituency of car buyers by cultivating a racier image. But at board level, Toyota regarded F1 with a level of bemusement. It couldn’t understand why it was pouring so much money into the project, and its own cumbersome internal mechanisms prevented it from making its F1 team a success, or marketing it effectively. It never even got around to producing a range of sporty road cars to bask in the halo of the sporting success it ultimately never achieved.

Historically, Japan was a martial society and this reflects in the way it does business. There is tremendous emphasis on the chain of command. And it’s still trying to cling on to a jobs for life ethic, which is anathema to progress: what you get is a large body of employees who clock in and clock out on time, and who never rock the boat as they cruise serenely towards retirement. No one wants to take responsibility for anything. Everyone ‘manages up’. Vital decisions are delayed as they pass from desk to desk, meandering up the hierarchy.

The official launch of Toyota’s first proper F1 car in December 2001 was a big deal, and I covered the build-up to it with Darren Heath for a feature in the world’s biggest-selling F1 magazine. With a year of testing in the bag, Toyota ought to have come out of the box flying. Instead, Allan McNish, Mika Salo and a host of who-are-they-anyway dignitaries pulled the sheet off a box-sided vehicle that could most charitably have been described as a clone of the Ferrari F1-2000.

What had they been doing all year? Circulating Paul Ricard to no avail in an embarrassingly slow test hack, that’s what. Toyota had already fired one designer (Andre de Cortanze) and replaced him with another (Gustav Brunner, from Minardi). De Cortanze is an odd character. He loathes journalists (he evicted me and several others from the Toyota garage personally at Le Mans in 1999), and, so one of the team told me, he would occasionally kick everyone out of the garage so that he could talk to the car. Brunner? Well, he’s been involved in some good cars, but he’s not Adrian Newey.

So, far from entering F1 like a bullet with a year’s worth of useful experience, Toyota limped on to the grid with a hastily developed ‘blank sheet’ design that achieved very little, apart from nearly killing McNish at Suzuka. By the end of the season, not for the first or last time, the team management decided that a quick fix was required to assuage the bad vibes emanating from Japan. It had become clear that Salo, who had been hired to be the superstar, was merely on cruise-and-collect, interested only in being slightly quicker than McNish – which he would achieve by, say, a tyre pressure adjustment immediately before his final qualifying run.

Canning both drivers continued the trend of ‘managing up’; “It’s not our fault for designing a slow car – it’s theirs for not driving it fast enough.” Over successive years the team would devote increasing resources to managing the expectations of Japan, producing reams of statistics to demonstrate that, yes, actually, they were improving, even if they weren’t actually winning anything.

The hiring of Mike Gascoyne for a ludicrous fee at the end of 2003 was another doomed quick fix. Commuting to Cologne daily via private jet, he joined the team too late to influence the 2004 car, which was another flop. As Gascoyne analysed the working practices of the team, he was shocked by the unscientific methodology of the aero department in particular. Under pressure to produce results, the aerodynamicists were looking for big jumps; but in modern F1, progress is achieved through an accumulation of tiny gains. You can’t find half a second a lap with just one component.

Although performances improved under Gascoyne’s watch, his maverick nature led to conflicts with Japan. Never one to worry about the chain of command if something needed to be done, Gascoyne became increasingly fed up with what he saw as inertia and interference, particularly when it emanated from a time zone eight hours further around the globe. It can be very frustrating when your first act upon reaching the office is to open a series of emails demanding clarification of certain points; and the person who sent them, from whom you require authority to perform various actions, is about to or has already left for the day, so you are forced to spend the rest of your day doing very little. Little wonder that Gascoyne equipped his office with a remote-controlled model tank, which he would fire at any arrivals he didn’t like.

Towards the end of 2005 TMC decreed that because it had reached an OEM deal with Bridgestone to furnish its road cars with tyres, the F1 team must also use Bridgestone rubber. This scuppered the team’s 2006 season even before it started.

The Bridgestone family of tyres had to be run at a much more aggressive camber than the Michelins to arrive at their optimum operating temperature. Toyota’s 2006 car, which had been designed to run on Michelins, lacked the range of adjustment to make the Bridgestones work. Gascoyne duly carried the can, and the team eventually produced a B-spec car with prominent nodules on the nose to accommodate the revised geometry. Still, lacking knowledge of the Bridgestones continued to serve as a handy excuse for the next couple of seasons.

And so, then, to 2009, and another season of irregular flashes of form commingled with long spells of midfield mediocrity. It was inevitable, given the economic circumstances, that Toyota would wield the axe.

This is a company that aimed to have a 15 per cent share of the world’s car market by 2010, but which is now facing the same issues of overcapacity as the American giants it once bestrode. In a world driven by accountants we are all slaves to ROI; and Toyota, that quintessentially accounts-fixated car corporation, could not overlook such a grotesque cocktail of overspend and underperformance forever.

Of Driver Salaries and Other Guff

Eagle-eyed F1 news consumers may have spotted the driver salary story that broke today. Here, the ever knowledgable Stuart Codling takes a closer look at the make up of such a news piece.

The internet has changed many of the rules of PR, but one of those maxims has survived: if you want to get noticed, make a list. Thanks to the sheer number of F1 blogs and news aggregators jostling for attention, any buddling list-maker has an army of willing shills falling over themselves to be first(ish) with the ‘news’. One story in particular caught my eye this morning.

“The F1 drivers [sic] salaries have been released today,” trilled the blogger in question, enthusiastically. Oh, you poor sap. That’s an epic fail, right there. Released? By whom? What mysterious and magnanimous agency has so diligently gathered this highly privileged and confidential information and rendered it into easily cut-and-pasteable form?

Regrettably, the author of the piece didn’t see fit to attribute the source or interrogate the ‘facts’. I’ll get to the source later, but let’s examine the whole philosophy of this story. Driver salaries are not a matter of public record; you can view the accounts of UK-registered companies at Companies House, but such records are always opaque when it comes to specifics of who earns what. The figures aren’t just sitting there for any goon to stumble over.

How, then, to get the gen? I could search through dustbins in Monte Carlo, hoping to find bank statements and extrapolate from there. I could, if I was in Abu Dhabi (which I’m not), doorstep Steve Robertson (for instance) and ask him how much Kimi Raikkonen earns.

“None of your damn business,” he’d probably say; followed by, “Who are you, anyway?” (A favoured put-down of F1 eminences grise, and so much more cutting than “Bog off”, don’t you think?)

Or I could swing by Toyota, sidle up to John Howett, and inquire – on the QT of course – how much Kimi’s people are asking for. But even if he gave me a figure it still wouldn’t be a definitive one. In any negotiation each side has three figures in mind: the one they want, the one they’ll settle for, and the one below which they will not go.

In any case, Kimi’s people are only cosying up to Toyota in order to drive up his stipend for the seats he’s actually interested in – although Toyota have form in employing overpaid cruise-and-collect drivers (see also: Mika Salo, Ralf Schumacher). Kimi is just one of several about-to-be-out-of-contract drivers for whom the reality of the recession is only just dawning.

At a press briefing at the 2008 Chinese Grand Prix, little more than a year ago, McLaren’s Ron Dennis remarked that F1 is often one of the last to feel the effects of a recession. It’s certainly feeling it now, but that contingent of rich men at the heart of the sport have been isolated for far too long. They seem genuinely baffled that there isn’t as much money on the table this time around, with the possible exception of Jenson Button; he (to use figures that I’ve heard anecdotally, albeit from reliable sources) took a drop from $8million a year, plus incentives for points and wins, to a flat $3million a year, including paying his own expenses.

Certainly Jenson would like to be paid more, and he would deserve it. Can Brawn afford to pay more? That depends on commercial negotiations – with sponsors and potential shareholders – that are, as they say, ongoing. Even so, according to a recent story in PR Week, Jenson could easily parlay his status as World Champion into $15million from endorsements in the coming year, regardless of salary.

All of which, in a roundabout way, brings me to the nub of my argument: headline figures about driver salaries aren’t worth a damn when viewed in isolation. Some drivers earn undisclosed amounts from sponsors, whether or not they draw a salary from the team. Some are on incentive schemes that give them bonuses for points (step forward Nick Heidfeld, among others – there’s a reason for that consistent semi-mediocrity). And some are just inexpensive to employ because they want to carry on in F1.

The author of the post cited above didn’t bother with any of this. Having copied and pasted the list, and composed a sloppily punctuated introduction, he was content to sit back and wait for the clicks to roll in. Dear oh dear. A little digging – not very much at all – would reveal that the source of the list is Tom Rubython, and that it was originally presented as an EXCLUSIVE (not for long in this day and age) by Arabian Business magazine’s website in a piece carrying the byline of editorial director Anil Bhoyrul.

Rubython and Bhoyrul are not unknown to one another. Rubython employed him as editor of Eurobusiness magazine (a title funded by Bernie Ecclestone, no less) a decade ago, before Bhoyrul was disgraced in a share-tipping scandal at the Daily Mirror. Now, Rubython is infamously litigious, so I’ll be careful what I write. It is perhaps enough to say that he has some good sources, and that in my experience he has occasionally been close to the mark. But it’s also fair to say that he and Bhoyrul have a colourful past, of which you can read more here.

I can’t be sure of the reasons for composing this salary list, apart from PR for some enterprise or other, but for my money the majority of it is based on hearsay and guesstimation. What a shame that thanks to an epidemic of unthinking cutting-and-pasting it’ll soon be taken as fact. I’ll bet it’s on Wikipedia already…

Get Out From Behind Your Keyboard

Scott has been scouting around the comments for advice on getting into journalism, particularly sporting and motorsports. Who better to ask than Stuart Codling? Here he dispenses some invaluable advice.

“What advice can you give me if I want to start a career in motorsport journalism…?”

Well, Scott, you asked – and there’s no definitive answer, because times they are a-changin’, although there are a few principles that should hold true even in the internet age.

1) Language!

This is a communications industry, so a decent command of the lingo will be your biggest asset. Yes, I know I’m stating the bleedin’ obvious here, but you would be astounded at how many people covet a job in journalism without actually being able to operate its principal medium: English. Trust me – the evidence used to accumulate in big piles on my desk.

I’ve seen some real horrors; writing punctuated so randomly that I could only imagine the author had filled some giant pepper grinder with apostrophes and commas, then sprinkled the contents over the page as if they were putting the finishing touches to a pizza. And although there is some dark amusement to be had in reading that someone claims “attention to detail” as one of their strengths, having pitched you a feature on “Bridgestone vs Mitchell tyres”, depression soon sets in.

For all that they want to write for a living, a lot of prospective scribes don’t read enough. Perhaps it’s because they see writing as a means to an end (the end in this case being involvement in motorsport) and aren’t interested enough to find out how to do it properly. So here’s a tip: read for pleasure, and do it often. It doesn’t have to be Voltaire; Terry Pratchett will do, at a pinch. You’ll learn a lot about grammar, spelling, punctuation, pace and storytelling.

2) Know your audience

As Alex said, nobody is going to give you an F1 hardcard, a wad of plane tickets and some accommodation vouchers, and say, “Here you go; toddle off and watch some races and maybe jot something down afterwards.” As a journalist you are entering into a commercial relationship with your audience. They are your customers. You are writing for them, not for yourself. You can wind them up a bit, but don’t bore them.

So: re-read your work. Is it spelled right? Does it make sense? Is it interesting enough? What can you profitably remove, for the sake of pacing, without detracting from the flow of information? A common error – particularly among writers of motorsport history – is to utterly up-end the fact bucket over the poor reader, leaving them bewildered at the flow of information. Keeping it simple is becoming increasingly important in this era of declining attention spans.

3) Practice

Having a blog is an excellent way of improving your writing because you learn by doing – and, with any luck, you’ll get instant feedback from readers. After all, you don’t run a marathon without doing the hard miles in training first.

4) Get noticed

As Boris Johnson said, “The first duty of a columnist is to be read.” Whether you’re fulfilling a commission for a magazine or newspaper, or writing a blog entry, avoid letting it slide into blah-de-blah. In the consumer age, all people want to do is get to the end of a story and move on to the next – don’t give them an excuse to flick to the end of your piece without reading it.

Say something interesting. Make every sentence count. Play to the gallery occasionally (all successful bloggers do it).

Many people criticise my erstwhile colleague Mr Bishop, but you all know who he is and you care enough about what he says to have read his work. Even if writing a whole story about how he told Ralf Schumacher to Foxtrot Oscar was perhaps, in hindsight, not the most sensible course of action.

5) Get out from behind your keyboard

Social skills are still important. You can’t interview people on Facebook (yet). A worrying number of applicants for journalism jobs are either cripplingly shy or have poorly developed social skills. They are often very good at assembling a story based on internet research, but they founder when they have to do anything face-to-face.

If you want to differentiate your work from everyone else’s – talk to people! You may – perish the thought – learn something that doesn’t come up on the first page of Google.

6) And finally

…as someone who will remain nameless once said to me, before I arrived for a job interview, “All you have to do is turn up and not be a c—t.”

When Did You Lose Interest?

Frequent commentator on Sidepodcast, Stuart Codling is most likely a name that needs no introduction. Perhaps this is another target for our 'please get a blog' campaign, but for now, we are honoured to feature his thoughts here.

_{Like it used to be?}

"There is a cult today that it is fashionable to be 'bored by it all' and in that cult you are not permitted to show any enthusiasm for anything, unless it is enthusiasm for being bored..."
- Denis Jenkinson

I love motor racing and consider myself fortunate to have been employed at various times to write about it. Having this kind of mentality enables one to (for instance) get off a 24-hour flight to Australia with a spring in one's step and a cheery demeanour which even the dreary officiousness of that nation's Customs & Excise officers cannot despoil.

But there are others who purport to enjoy motor racing, and F1 in particular, yet can see nothing good in it. Chiefly these people inhabit internet forums and greet any new development with a tiresome blast of cynicism and negativity, issued more often than not from a very shaky high ground of assumed knowledge. Formula 1, they say, isn't as good as it used to be. And of course it's Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone 'what done it.'

The LAT archive is a marvellous place. In a recent moment of serendipity while researching the project codenamed 'my booky wook', I came across a piece by the patron saint of motor racing scribes, Denis Jenkinson (for anyone new-ish to F1, 'Jenks' co-drove Stirling Moss in the 1955 Mille Miglia, reported from grands prix in the days long before live timing and 24-hour internet news – and lived in a shed with just a Honda generator for power). 36 years ago he was getting every bit as wound up by these tediously predictable naysayers as I am today, and over two and a half pages in the March 1973 edition of Motor Sport magazine he outlined why. The story was called "When did you lose interest?" and I’ve abridged it for reasons of brevity and copyright:-

I can almost guarantee that as I cross the paddock at Brands Hatch, during the Race of Champions, to look at the new UOP Shadow I will meet someone who will say, "Grand Prix cars are not what they used to be, are they?" hoping to draw me into their pet aversion. This sort of thing seems to happen at any motor-racing gathering that I go to and I have to refrain from the obvious reply, which would be, "No they are not. If they were, they wouldn’t win races or break lap records..."

I find the ones I meet at gatherings other than Grand Prix events are the most vehement, so I ask the question, "When did you lose interest?" to which I get evasive answers and a lot of chat about "I don’t go to Formula 1 races any more, can’t stand those wide tyres and those wing things; more like aeroplanes than racing cars." The objections cover a wide range of things, like "they all look alike", "can’t see the driver working", "all those fancy sponsors' colours they paint them nowadays", "can't see the driver's face with those space helmets", and "they've all got Cosworth engines". While listening to these moans I can't help feeling that for people who have "lost interest" they have a remarkable knowledge of the current scene!

Occasionally I can track down an actual point in history, like "when Alfa Romeo withdrew the 158s" or "when Hawthorn and Collins died" or even "when Jim Clark died" but these are rare. Most of the moaners cannot say exactly when they lost interest but they know full well that they don't like "Stewart and his lot" or "their black and gold Lotuses" or "the little roller-skate wheels" or "the advertising and funny colours", in fact, they don't like anything that is on the current scene. To tell the truth they are professional moaners who keep in touch with all the latest trends just so that they can complain.

It amused me to read that a period considered by a substantial number of bulletin board windbags to be the golden era of motor racing was viewed with such disdain at the time. The whingers of the early 1970s no doubt had the 1950s in mind as their own golden era; but how insipid the Coopers and Vanwalls must have seemed to those who were fortunate enough to have seen the pre-war Auto Unions at play. Ah, those were real cars! Stirling Moss? Who he? You are nothing if you haven't seen Nuvolari in his pomp!

To anyone who has already decided that KERS is a waste of time; that Michael Schumacher ruined F1; that F1 was better in the 80s/70s/60s/50s (delete as appropriate); that the 2009 cars are hideously and irredeemably ugly; that things haven't been the same since turbos were banned; that a single-engine rule would kill the sport; that you wouldn’t watch another F1 race after Lewis Hamilton’s penalty in Belgium; that any manner of change is axiomatically bad: a last word from DSJ:-

We all have high points and low points in our interest, usually tied up with a particular happening. I enjoyed the Monoposto Alfa Romeo as it was the first Grand Prix car of which I became aware. I loved the sheer dominance of the Mercedes and Auto-Union, but I prayed that the 1938/39 Maserati would one day beat them. The post-war 158 Alfa Romeo 158s were marvellous, but the 4.5-litre Ferraris that beat them were even better, and Fangio’s reign was terrific, but what a high point it was when Vanwall conquered everyone. The Cooper/Brabham era was a bore, but the rise of Jim Clark and Lotus was refreshing while the return to 3-litre power put things back into perspective.

Ferraris have always sounded wonderful, but the Lotus 72 was really exciting and the Lotus gas-turbine, in spite of its failure, had me on tip-toe with excitement. The abortive 4-wheel-drive season depressed me, but the G-forces developed in 1972 were staggering, as were the lap records. The almost total disappearance of British drivers from the leading group in Grand Prix today is depressing at the moment, but the end is not here by any means.

I don’t think it is possible to "lose interest" in Grand Prix racing, once you have discovered it. Moments of disenchantment may appear, but loss of interest is unlikely. I may be wrong.