‘Johnny Herbert is doing an interview tomorrow’ the email read. ‘Would you like to join us on the phone?’ Why, yes, I would, thank you very much Sky I thought as I excitedly hit ‘reply’ to say yes. After interviewing Natalie Pinkham and Alice Powell earlier in the week I was already as high as a kite, but in the grand scheme of lovely emails, this one’s up there with the one inviting me to the Sky F1 Media Day earlier in the year.
I’ve always liked Johnny; he was a driver I admired as I grew up as a young child watching cars fly around tracks around the world on my tellybox, and lately, I’ve become accustomed to him as a broadcaster – up there with Martin Brundle as one of the best driver-turned-pundits. I’ll skim over the fact that for some bizarre reason his car seemed to be attracted to mine on the Playststion as a youngster. While we (‘we’ being a select few journalists to grill him) didn’t get to go in-depth on his career, I managed to get his opinion on a wide-range of topics all the same.
Starting with Jenson Button, he said that he has been ‘in a good mood’ despite the a few poor weekends at the office, explaining that ‘in Bahrain, he was still bubbly and positive. It was obviously the race with his team-mate Sergio Perez and there was obviously a chat going behind the scenes between the two’ before pointing out that ‘they [McLaren] have worked in the past many, many times that they have been behind, they have been able to respond to the difficulties they are under’.
And as for the reason why the McLaren is struggling this season? ‘it’s the balance that I think is the big issue with the car’, explains Herbert – himself a decent Formula One driver having won three races during his stint in the elite – adding that ‘It’s just a design correlation issue for me’.
I was keen to ask Johnny about the new regulations for next season; at the Sky F1 Media Day his colleague Martin Brundle had confessed his fears that it would create a two-tier grid which would be bad for the sport. Johnny meanwhile seems more interested in what the new ‘power units’ as we’re meant to be calling them, will sound like explaining‘I think the sound should always be part of what Formula 1 and motorsport is about. If it does change and it will be a bit quieter, which I think it will be a little bit, and people will get used to it’ before telling the journalists on the phone that Nikki Lauda has heard an engine run on a dyno. And his verdict? ‘he said that the sound is actually not that bad’. ‘We will have to wait and see exactly what they sound like but there is no reason why they can’t get a bit of a rasp out of the engine like they did back in the 80s’ added Herbert in a clear attempt to be nostalgic.
According to Johnny, Kimi has the hallmarks of a Red Bull driver: ‘His mannerisms are very Red Bullish of old; he had the relationship when doing rallying which makes complete sense’ while he believes Mark Webber is about to be shown the door, ‘it seems that is bubbling up rather quickly. It does seem to be the case now, yes’ when asked whether the Australian will leave the raging bull at the end of the season.
Much like at the Sky F1 Media Day, Lewis Hamilton was high on the agenda. Asked whether the Mercedes driver will win the championship this year Herbert gave a very quick ‘no’, saying that ‘the car is a very good one lap, two lap qualifying’, adding that he doesn’t think they could even win a race this year; they still have the problem with the tyres in the race. So they have got to basically need to put all their effort into next year for that to happen’.
Another big topic over the last few weeks has been women drivers in motorsport. I suspect you will have heard Sir Stirling Moss’s comments on the subject and you will have probably heard Susie Wolff’s response. Does Johnny rate Susie as a driver? ‘It’s a question that I can only base it on past history of formulas coming up and what she was doing in DTM’ (which – and with all due respect to Susie – wasn’t very much) Herbert said before adding ‘I think that at the present time, not yet, down the line, maybe’.
I wanted to hear Johnny’s thoughts on the current junior racing ladder; when he started out racing there was a clear route: start in Formula Ford, go into F3, go into F3000 and then jump into Formula One. Nowadays, with racing being so expensive and so many championships around it seems to be a little more complicated to get into the piranha club than, say, 20 years ago – look at Formula Ford for instance; there used to be huge grids and now they’re tiny.
I put this to Johnny and he voiced his concern that there’s too many categories, ‘what we seem to have now is that we have so many different choices of where you can go’ said the 1985 Formula Ford Festival winner, ‘we do need to have a form of a route, and standard route for all of these drivers to go through rather then let’s say them all starting in Formula Ford, then get them into Formula Three where there is less choice, but you’ve got 3.5, you’ve got a little behind that you’ve got F2, which has been canned’. To show his point, he then said that I had to help him list the current junior categories, and there are millions of them, which adds another complication, which says Johnny means that ‘the routes have got a little bit diluted’, concluding that Gerhard Berger is attempting to do a similar thing to make the route into Formula One a little less complicated and fraught: ‘that’s what Gerhard is trying to do; a very basic thing which is actually trying to clean up the categories that are there to help these youngsters come through and mature in the right ways instead of it being a little bit of a zigzag and a bit of a guessing route that it is the right place for you at the right time’.
Pirelli are like marmite: you either love or hate the Italian tyre maker with a passion since its involvement in Formula One. With the introduction of another set of tyres for free practice one, it was good to get a commentator’s view on the news. Johnny correctly pointed that fans ‘want to hear them [the cars], they want to see them, they want to smell them’ and believes that the extra set of tyres will help ease the cars out of the garages a little earlier than normal, but pointed out that ‘I just hope we still don’t see that holding back of waiting for the track to be at a better working state’ before concluding that ‘I still think there’ll be a little bit of a lull at the beginning but I think it’ll be less than what we’ve seen in the past’.
Herbert is also the first person I’ve ever heard who is happy to have 20 – or more – races in a season, defending his move by saying 'there’s no reason personally why you can’t have 20 or so races. I think 20 is there or there abouts personally because I think it still gives you as a driver time on track. I know drivers want to drive and testing doesn’t exist anymore as such so why not do it in a race scenario?'
He also offered an insight into why the sport isn’t so popular in the Arab states – and gave a suggestion as to how it could change for the better, ‘in Abu Dhabi they like their dragsters, they like their off-roading and their four-wheel drives, in the sands. That’s what they know and a bit about rallying as well, [its] mainly Formula One, single seaters which they don’t know much about, they haven’t got a local driver in Korea or the Arab states so if that comes, that will change’, citing China as a key example, ‘China’s the same thing, there’s a little bit that has got better over the years, maybe slower than expected, but I think everyone can understand it’ adding ‘I think that’s an important thing for a new country that hasn’t had much heritage in motorsport needs to have your own drivers to follow as well, so that’s always something that’ll change but you’ve got to be given time for that to change’.
Silverstone in Johnny’s mind is a circuit that deserves to be on the calendar, ‘it [Silverstone] is one that always adapts: the circuit, the new wing, to try and bring its standards up and it is the best modern facility that we have in Europe, compared to what we have in Italy and what we have in Hungary and Germany and that always seems to be a very positive thing from what Silverstone are always able to do; they’re able to adapt the circuit’.
That concluded our time with Johnny: we said our goodbyes and our thank-yous to him as he was off to film a few features that you can see this weekend on Sky Sports F1. My thanks again go out to Johnny for spending almost an hour on the phone to us and for providing his opinion on a wide-range of subjects. You can follow Johnny on Twitter here and I look forward to the next phone-in.
Watch live coverage of practice, qualifying and the race from the Spanish Grand Prix on Sky Sports F1 HD. Watch on TV, online, on the go via Sky Go, and using Sky F1 Race Control.
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