With the Formula One season less than a fortnight from us, I am confident with one prediction: that between kick-off in Melbourne and the Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi thriller nearly eight months away, I will not watch a single grand prix from beginning to end.
So here is another F1 prediction: the first F1 grand prix I will ever manage to sit through will be the one when Alex Waters finally gets a drive. If he hadn’t contracted cancer, beaten cancer and then raised so much money to fight cancer, you might have heard of him by now. As for the real question - is he good enough? - that barely figures. His career stats have proved time and again that he possibly is. But that doesn’t count for much in motor-racing. Alex’s problem is that neither of his two rather lovely parents were born heirs to a Middle East oil empire.
By the same logic, I am not quite sure how Kimi Raikkonen made it in F1. His family’s economics were such that they could not afford an indoor toilet. Likewise Sebastian Vettel, whose father was a brickie. Both, presumably, are proof of the fact that you need talent plus the enormous good fortune of picking up a staggeringly wealthy benefactor; otherwise, you have no chance.
Waters rose fast through Formula Ford and up two levels straight into more success in F3. To get a good drive in F3, though, you need to bring a lot of money to the table. That is why one of Waters’ former team-mates was the Prince of Bahrain. Around £500,000 a year would be nice. Half the paddock would download it straight from their father’s bank account. This was not a talent show, just a competition with cheque books. And we’re not presenting Waters as some down-and-out here. The Bath house is nice, just no oil field in the garden.
When he was in his hospital, recovering mentally and physically from the skin cancer, Waters made a vow: that every £1 that he raised to support his career in driving, he would give 50p to a charity, CLIC Sargent, which helped kids struggling in the same fight that he was embroiled in. When he came back to the circuit, he drove a pink car – a livery the same as CLIC Sargent pink. He turned a few heads and a few people noticed.
And now? Now he is doing a ski season. The end of his driving career, I presumed. Beaten by economics. Until I rang him up and he explained.
He is not just doing a ski season, he is doing a season as part of a BBC TV reality series. You can watch it next October. And the main reason he has done it is as a publicity stunt, to get people to know his story to help fund his career as a driver. He has already had helicopter shots taken of him in a KIA ProCeed, spinning through Alpine snowfields. KIA loved them. The wheels are turning again, he is hopeful of getting a drive in the American Le Mans Series which is pretty much the premier league for sports cars. And yes, CLIC Sargent is still part of the deal.
I hope it works for him this time. I hope it takes him all the way to the F1 heaven where he wants to be. And I look forward to watching his first, entire F1 grand prix.
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