IS THERE A LIFE AFTER FORMULA 1? - CAR Magazine

Could there ever be life after Formula 1? Surely a question asked by many enthusiasts of the world’s most expensive and highly visible sport.

From the outside looking in life with a F1 race team represents utopia. One of indulgence visiting a stunning list of exotic locations around the globe, the constant attention of F1 groupies, and an almost constant adrenalin high as the season progresses through as many as 18 races.

The reality though is a little different. The exotic locations rarely have more to offer than the journey from the airport to the team hotel and the hotel to the circuit. For most it is a case of arrive on Thursday and leave on Sunday. With luck all will go well in the early part of the weekend and there will be time to venture out away from the hotel, not too far mind, for a taste of the local cuisine. Forget any exotic beverages, a clear head at the circuit is mandatory and each day is likely to be a 14 hour working one.

Then there is the constant quest for clean laundry. Lose your washing two weekends in a row – that’s experience for the young and adventurous. For the proven globe-trotter it becomes a little tedious. When you start to notice the fact that your toothpaste is made in Japan, your shampoo in China, and your deodorant is from Brazil then it’s time to sit up and take stock, especially when the race results aren’t quite what they could be.

Not surprising then that after a difficult season with Honda in 2007, Alastair Gibson, Chief Mechanic with the team since its inception in 1999, decided that there was more to life than a continual chase around the planet after attending more than 167 Grands Prix over 14 years in a high-pressure work environment.

“Make no mistake Formula 1 is an exciting environment and one that has been very rewarding for me but there is a time to take stock an explore other values in life,” says Alastair. “There have been some great times with Honda. We started from nothing in 1999 just lots of money and in 2000, just our second year, we scored 20 points in the manufacturers’ championship for 4th place! In 2004 we were second in the championship and we won our first race in 2006. In Formula 1 that is not a bad progression.

“You always measure yourself against the top teams like Ferrari and McLaren, but you also have to measure yourself against yourself – what you have been able to achieve. Formula 1 is so competitive that there are a huge number of people in it that have toiled away for years without any kind of result. No second place in the championship, no race wins. Just an endless cycle of banging their heads against an anvil searching for the success that keeps everyone coming back each year.

I regard what we achieved at Honda during my time with the team as a reasonable success considering that the team came into F1 during an era of total domination by Ferrari and McLaren. There have been highs and lows – probably the best high, aside from Jenson Button’s first win for the team, was the 2001 Spanish GP where we came into the pits in 14th place and jumped most of the field to get the car out in 3rd. That creates a huge buzz. The worst low was the pit exit fiasco when we got our signals all crossed up and I lifted the lollipop early signalling (Jenson) to boot it away from the pit with the fuel hose still attached – and then trying to stop him by bashing him with the lollipop.

“I would rate a GP pit stop as one of the most mentally and emotionally demanding moments in sport. The pressure is just so intense. Your driver has chiselled away at the opposition lap after lap and then it’s all up to the pit crew to get their job done. If you do it right it can give you a race winning edge. Get it wrong and you will be at the back of the field.”

Alastair’s journey to becoming a significant player in a top line F1 team has its roots in an interest fostered by his father, Alastair Snr, who in his time was one of the most respected motor sport technicians in South African motor racing, mostly working with Dawie Gouws.

“I used to go to Kyalami and watch races during the golden F1 years of our local motor sport when the Cosworth powered cars screamed around the circuit and dream about a life in Grand Prix racing. I dabbled in Formula Ford locally for a time but my heart was in travelling to Europe and trying to make it into one of the teams on the technical side.

“I travelled over in 1987 with little more than a backpack and found my way into Formula Ford with Van Diemen, and then started climbing the ladder through FF 2000, F3 and then into F3000 for a five year spell in Europe and Japan. The early years were a real grind in the lower formulae, especially travelling on a South African passport but it all came good when I moved up to F3000. I really enjoyed my time in there. We had a big V8, just like the Cosworth DFVs I worshipped as a youth, and I could relate to the cars as being very close to what I had set my heart on working with in my dreams at Kyalami.

“The F3000 cars were really interesting to work on and I wasn’t really focused on moving on to F1. I was really quite happy to carry on with F3000 but at the end of 1993 I had an approach to move to America with a Champ Car team. I built the cars at Reynard and was set to go to the States to run them when I answered an advert for a number-one mechanic at Benetton, more out of curiosity than anything like a drive to get into F1.

“I had been a No1 mechanic in F3000 but the leap up to the same position in F1 is quite a substantial one – normally you would be expected to work your way up the ladder in the team so it was a bit presumptuous of me to expect to go in at the top really. Anyway I had a really good interview for the job – they offered me the No 1 mechanic’s position right away.

“I knew that Rory was there, and Ross Brawn too and there seemed to be a lot of money available to rejuvenate the team so I took the job. I learnt a huge amount at Benetton and had a most enjoyable time there.

“Then I had a contact from Adrian Reynard to say that he was working on a new project in F1 (Honda) and would I be interested in joining them. I decided then that I wanted to take a break and came back to South Africa for about six months and got involved in Touting Cars. Then Adrian called to say that he had clinched the British American Tobacco deal and wanted me on board as Chief Mechanic from day one, so it was back to Europe for a development year with the team in 1998 and our first year in competition in 1999.

“So it was back on the F1 treadmill for me, albeit a very rewarding one, especially with a new team that has showed so much promise. But as you age you tend to have more clarity of thought. There was always the dream of winning a world championship with Honda, but also the realisation that even if you won the championship the euphoria would only last a short while, until you had to come back and do it all over again and work harder with the intensified pressure of defending the championship.

“The pressure is intense, and while I thrive on pressure but rather my own pressure and through 2007 I started to feel that F1 was placing me under far too much pressure over which I had little if any control. The sacrifices I was making in terms of my lifestyle, and my family life in particular, were outweighing the benefits. As I have said F1 at the coalface is a young person’s preserve and I felt that it was time to explore another area of my life and develop a talent that I have before it is wasted.”

That talent is a keen sense of art, sculpting in particular, and in recent years Alastair has quietly built up a reputation as a sculptor of unique pieces that represent a fusion of art and Formula 1 technology. His subject: fish. And the materials? Carbon fibre and other advanced materials used in F1 cars.

“I have always had a nagging interest in art as a hobby particularly carving and sculpting. During my early time at Benetton I decided to carve a shark out of wood and then had the idea of laying an aluminium skin over the carving. Friends that saw this were blown away and encouraged me to do more.

“Certainly what my experience in F1 has taught me is that there is always a better way of doing things. It also exposed me to hi-tech materials and processes and that led me to a point where I realised that working in wood was just too time consuming but I didn’t want to drift across to mimicking regular taxidermists by using fibreglass as the material for my work so I explored carbon fibre as my medium and that has been hugely satisfying.

“At Benetton I also started to realise that allied to any fast track development process is a fairly large amount of waste. I had come from an environment in F3000 where we expected to use things for years. In F1 some hugely expensive bits and pieces had a life of weeks if not days. At the end of my first year there I was simply blown away by what was being sent out as scrap at the end of the season.

“F1 cars are themselves works of art. Unfortunately most of the pretty stuff is under the skin. Just imagine if the FIA could mandate a transparent skin for F1 cars to expose the components – the punters would be blown away by the real under-the-skin beauty of these cars. At the end of the season all these delicate parts are thrown out without reserve to make way for a new improved batch of parts. I decide that I could use these in my sculptures at some time and so started to salvage the more interesting smaller components to incorporate with the carbon fibre bodies of my sculptures.

“I did a couple more works, mostly as gifts for friends, and fine honed the processes, but kept a few as well. When I moved to Honda, Lucky Strike came on board as the major sponsor and they had an exhibition planned to promote work done by people within their organisation in their spare time. They saw some of my work and were massively keen to show it off.

“They had a big launch for the exhibition, which included three of my fish, in London and from there the whole collection went on a tour of seven countries. They were so impressed that at the end of the tour they purchased the three works and placed them on display alongside their extensive art collection – there had been an amalgamation of the Lucky Strike brand with the Rembrandt cigarette interests – and the collection included a number of works by Rembrandt. That was a huge buzz for me.

“My first proper work in carbon fibre was quite a large hammerhead shark. BAT Italy bought that off me and then the commissions just started rolling in. To date I have completed 41 sculptures and have another 15 commissions to fill. One of my more recent commissions was a trout for a wealthy fisherman. He wanted a sculpture of a specific trout from his favourite fishing grounds and provided me with a set of pictures to work from. “He waited four years for that and was over the moon when I finally got it to him.

“Another commission that I have just completed is a Piranha for Rubens Barrichello, this is actually one of a limited edition run of 10 examples that he has allowed me to do. Yet another recent job was for the head of the Drambuie liqueur company. I produced a mackerel for him.

“The aspect that makes my work unique is the medium of carbon fibre and the fusion between the carbon and the other F1 materials. No one else is doing that. Carbon is extremely difficult to work with and the processes quite complex but I have the resources in Brackley to do the work to the highest standard, much of it alongside work for the Honda F1 team.

“I have found a niche that caters for the rich and famous and there is a strong demand for my product so it’s really an opportune time to take the leap into a new phase in my life. I would like to think that mostly anyone of reasonable means can by a Rolex Daytona, but an Alastair Gibson original sculpture will always be a rarity. At the moment the market is right for that and I need to develop it. At the moment I have work on display in galleries in London and Cape Town and momentum is building around the works.

“I haven’t burnt any bridges at Honda, in fact they have tried desperately to persuade me to stay on and work at home base. To that end we have reached a bit of a compromise. I will give them one day a week of my time to develop special projects for the team, mostly in the area of refining some race procedures and equipment. There is work to do there that could provide an edge so I will keep my hand in with the team.”

As his art takes over as his major work interest, Alastair aims to have more time to devote to his family and hobbies that have taken a back seat of late. One of those is the restoration of two classic motorcycles. The most complete of the two is a 1928 DKW, a bike that when it ran on the Isle of Man, could be heard on mainland England some 40 miles away. The other bike is a 1936 vintage BMW. Both bikes were owned by Alastair Gibson Snr.

When he needs to let of steam with friends there is always the fold down Scalextrix layout of Kyalami to play with. “An absolute hoot after a couple of beers with friends.”

If you are interested in an Alastair Gibson carbon fibre original remember they are strictly for the rich and famous (or those that aspire to those attributes). Be prepared to shell out several thousand pounds, depending on the subject and scale of the model. Any takers for a full scale Mako Shark embellished with inconel F1 exhausts?

Alastair's email contact is: alastair@carbonart45.com

CAR Magazine