Arrows Beside the world champion, 1997–1998

On the Thursday before the 1997 Japanese Grand Prix, Joe Saward of grandprix.com took the bullet train to Suzuka and found himself travelling with Damon Hill and Pedro Diniz. The two Arrows drivers had bought a tiny video camera in Akihabara and were making a film of the journey. Diniz talked his way into the driver’s cab, with Hill filming him, and the train slowed: the driver, Hill said, thought it was being hijacked. At Shiroko station Diniz found that his ticket was still on board, jumped back on to fetch it while the others held the doors, and then rode his suitcase down the last flight of stairs.

By then they had been team-mates, and friends, for most of a year. Friendship was not why the world champion and the son of a supermarket magnate had been put in the same team. Tom Walkinshaw had left Ligier in March 1996 and bought control of Arrows, a team that had never won a Grand Prix. In September he signed Hill for 1997, for a salary reported at about US$8 million, and in October, at Suzuka, he announced Diniz beside him; a few days later Hill clinched the 1996 championship. Diniz’s sponsors, by the reports of the day, helped to pay for the champion. grandprix.com put his package at about US$10 million, with Parmalat adding US$3 million to be associated with Hill. None of it was ever confirmed. Diniz, for his part, said: “I know from experience that Tom is someone I can achieve things with.”

The team worked from TWR’s base at Leafield, in Oxfordshire. Its car, the A18, had been designed under Frank Dernie, who had come with Walkinshaw from Ligier, and it ran a Yamaha V10 built and rebuilt by John Judd’s Engine Developments, on Bridgestone tyres. It began badly. Every groove for the hydraulic O-⁠rings had been machined to the wrong tolerance, Dernie remembered, and a leak was only ever a matter of time. At Melbourne, the first race, Diniz missed the 107 per cent qualifying limit, at 107.39 per cent of the pole time; Walkinshaw persuaded the stewards that trouble had stopped him setting a time, and they let him start. The cynics, grandprix.com reported, thought the exceptional circumstance was his money. Hill stopped on the formation lap. Diniz hit Jos Verstappen’s Tyrrell on the first lap, lost 2 laps while the team fitted a new nose, and finished 10th.

Five retirements followed. At Interlagos something broke at the rear and he spun off; in Argentina he gained 11 places on the first lap on a heavy fuel load and then lost the gearbox; at Imola the gearbox failed again; at Monaco, in the wet, he was the only car lost in the chaos of the first lap; at Barcelona both Arrows’ Yamahas failed and both cars stopped on the pit straight. The team scored nothing in the first eight races. John Barnard arrived as technical director for the Canadian Grand Prix in June, and there, with Yamaha lowering the rev limit by 1,000 rpm, Diniz finished 8th, one place ahead of Hill: his first finish since Melbourne. He had qualified 0.046 seconds slower than the champion, and he told Folha de S.Paulo he had raced ahead of him all afternoon. At Magny-Cours a fortnight later he out-qualified him for the first time.

Hungary, 10 August 1997

The nearest Arrows came to a win in those two years was Hill’s day, not his. Both cars ran the softer Bridgestone compound, unlike most of the other Bridgestone teams. Hill qualified 3rd. Diniz, confused by the changing conditions, ruined his tyres and spun off going for a time at the end of the session, and started 19th, more than 2 seconds slower than Hill: the widest gap between them all year. In the warm-up, though, he was 5th fastest. At the start he met two Minardis: “I made a good start, but the two Minardis did a kamikaze maneuver trying to overtake me and put all three of us off the track. This made me lose some positions.”

Hill passed Michael Schumacher and led from lap 11, by half a minute at one point, and when his lead began to shrink it grew again as Jacques Villeneuve and Heinz-Harald Frentzen came up to lap his team-mate. Diniz fought back to 10th and retired after 53 laps, when the alternator failed. With under 3 laps left a hydraulic failure left Hill unable to use full throttle or all his gears, and Villeneuve passed him on the last lap. Hill was 2nd. It was Arrows’ 299th race without a win.

At home Folha’s headline had him outshining the champion. grandprix.com put it with an edge.

Pay-driver Pedro Diniz showing why he is worth $12m to any team willing to take it from him. Damon Hill, who received most of that money this year, was behind Pedro – a curious state of affairs.

At the A1-⁠Ring in September he was fastest of all in the Saturday-morning practice session. Then two engines blew in qualifying, he started 17th, and Yamaha’s project leader, Takaaki Kimura, apologised to him in public. The next day Walkinshaw confirmed that Hill, who wanted at least US$10 million for 1998, was leaving, and Mika Salo would take his place. Diniz stayed, bringing Parmalat and Zepter with him, and grandprix.com reckoned his backing would lift the team’s budget by about US$17 million. Walkinshaw announced the pair as a partnership: “I am sure the undoubted talents of both Mika and Pedro will provide the perfect partnership to take us forward.”

At Suzuka, the weekend of the bullet train, he out-qualified Hill for the third time and finished 12th. At Jerez two weeks later Walkinshaw announced a new contract, for two more seasons as Folha reported it, and threw a party for Diniz’s 50th Grand Prix. The words that went out with it, as Diniz’s website reproduced them, were Walkinshaw’s warmest: “This year as Damon’s team-mate he has more than proved himself a top-line driver”. In the race he spun out of 13th place.

The numbers were the champion’s. Hill out-qualified him 14 times to 3 and scored 7 points to his 2, and was 12th in the championship to Diniz’s 16th; Diniz was level on points with Salo, his team-mate to be, and ahead of him on countback. But when both Arrows finished, Diniz was ahead three times out of five, and three times, at Magny-Cours, Spa and Suzuka, he had qualified ahead of the world champion.

1998: Salo and the A19

The car for 1998 was Barnard’s A19, and it ran on Arrows’ own V10: Walkinshaw had bought control of Brian Hart’s engine company, and only Ferrari among the other teams built its own engines. The A19 was mainly black, underpowered and fragile. Diniz retired from the first five races, three times with the gearbox and twice with the engine. At Melbourne his race car failed before the start and he set off from the pit lane in the spare, whose gearbox hydraulics failed in the same way on lap 2. At Barcelona, where he retired again, he out-qualified Salo for the first time.

Monaco, 24 May

At Monaco Salo qualified 8th, the best grid Arrows had had since Hill’s 4th at Jerez, and Diniz was 12th, 0.2 seconds slower; Atlas F1 took the gap as proof that the chassis was good and the engine the problem. Salo ran with the leading group and stopped from 5th on lap 41, while Diniz raced Jarno Trulli and Herbert for 8th through the middle of the afternoon. With 6 laps left Alesi’s car stuck in neutral, and Diniz was 6th. On the last lap Michael Schumacher, a lap down after an earlier collision, dived for the inside at the exit of the tunnel, left it too late and went into the barrier rather than hit him; the Ferrari lost its front wing and spun, and kept its place. Salo finished 4th and Diniz 6th: both Arrows in the points, and the first race he had finished all year.

A corrida foi muito mais difícil do que eu imaginara. Terminar em sexto, depois de largar em 12º, foi ótimo.

The race was much harder than I had imagined. Finishing sixth after starting twelfth was great.

The summer brought little. In Austria he qualified 13th in the wet, and gave the rain the credit: “In my case the rain clearly helped. The drivers who found the track clearer or with a bit less water were luckier.” On the first lap of the race, pushed onto the grass by Verstappen, as he told it, he lost control and hit Salo, and both Arrows were out.

Spa, 30 August

He called Spa his favourite circuit, and the week before he had tried a new D-⁠specification engine at Silverstone. Salo crashed heavily at Eau Rouge on the Saturday, and Diniz qualified 16th. The first start, in heavy rain, ended at the exit of La Source, where David Coulthard’s McLaren speared across the track and about a dozen cars piled into one another. Diniz’s car was among them. The mechanics had started work at half past two that morning on a new spare, and Diniz took the restart in it, while Salo, with no car left, did not restart.

After the Safety Car he was 9th. He was running 7th behind Irvine by lap 17 and made his single stop on lap 21, and on lap 23 Schumacher nearly hit him in the spray while lapping him, a lap before the Ferrari ran into the back of Coulthard’s McLaren. As Irvine, Giancarlo Fisichella and Schumacher crashed or spun, Diniz came through to 5th behind Hill, Ralf Schumacher, Alesi and Frentzen, the day Jordan won its first Grand Prix. Only eight cars were classified. It equalled the best result of his career.

It was a good result, especially after what happened after the first start. … I am just happy that we have something to celebrate after a very traumatic weekend.

Salo out-qualified him 11 times to 5 over the year, and when both finished, Salo was ahead. But they scored 3 points each, and Diniz was 14th in the championship, one place behind his team-mate, as high as he would ever finish.

Leaving Arrows

By the autumn he wanted a more competitive team; Arrows, he said, was not making progress. In late August grandprix.com reported Walkinshaw and Craig Pollock of British American Racing discussing a move for him to BAR, as Villeneuve’s team-mate, and a fortnight later had him fighting Ricardo Zonta for the seat; at BAR, it noted, he would have a better engine and a chance to shake off his image as a pay driver. At the Nürburgring in September the word was that he had signed for Sauber instead. On 7 October Sauber announced him at Hinwil, for one year with an option on a second, and Folha put his personal sponsorship at about US$6 million. He told the paper: “It will be a leap in quality.”

He still had a year left with Arrows, but his contract let him leave without paying the termination penalty if the team performed poorly, and Arrows had scored 6 points. grandprix.com weighed the move in both directions at once.

While everyone concerned was keen to dress up the deal as being a result of Diniz’s good showings this year with Arrows, the fact remains that the Brazilian would not have been hired if there had not been considerable finance behind him. Having said that Diniz has done better than expected on occasion in the course of the last two seasons, showing flashes of speed against Damon Hill in 1997 and this year against the highly-rated Mika Salo.

His last race for Arrows, at Suzuka on 1 November, lasted 2 laps: he had qualified with a bad cold, and spun off.

Walkinshaw did not let him go quietly. In January 1999 Arrows sued. Diniz argued that the team had failed to meet the performance clauses in his contract, and in February the Contract Recognition Board, sitting in Geneva, found for him: the Sauber contract was valid, and the Arrows contract had been terminated in accordance with its terms. grandprix.com reported it with a line on the money: “The case marks a rather bitter end to a three-year relationship between Walkinshaw and Diniz, who poured at least $25m into the coffers of teams that the Scotsman was running.” Arrows took the case to the Commercial Court in London, which found for Diniz in February 2001 and ordered Walkinshaw to pay him about £500,000, and on 5 February 2002 the Court of Appeal dismissed Arrows’ appeal. By then Diniz had not raced for more than a year, and the week before, the team his family had bought into when he left Sauber, Prost Grand Prix, had been put into liquidation.