F1 Racing November 2005

Sorted for G's and Whiz
Words: Steven Tee

Racing and testing skills are all very well, but to win real credibility Red Bull’s F1 drivers must Party hard and be game for a laugh.

Tonio Liuzzi can dance. I mean really dance. It’s 3.17am and the night is still young at Ibiza’s Pacha club. Radio 1’s superstar DJ, Pete Tong, is on the decks. On the dance floor, scores of other metrosexual, be-mulleted, perma-tanned Latinos – along with a few hundred lobster skinned Brits – are all giving it large, circling the club’s females. But none is pulling a crowd of honeys to rival Tonio’s.

Being a Formula 1 driver helps, of course. But Liuzzi would turn heads with these moves even if his day job were handing out fliers down the West End in San Antonio (Ibiza’s nastiest tourist strip). In fact – and I’ve thought about this long and hard – I’d say Tonio is F1’s best dancer. I say this with some trepidation because my good friend Mark ‘Tommo’ Thompson (rival F1 photographer at Getty Images) has long been F1’s undisputed – if slightly unlikely – dance king. But a new monarch has been enthroned. If Tonio can drive an F1 car with as much precision and panache as those hips of his display, he’s a future champion.

Liuzzi has earned himself a reputation this year as a bit of a party animal, and some criticism, too – unwarranted in my view – for being not much else. In fairness to the guy, if he appears to be at a lot of parties, it’s because Red Bull throw a lot of parties (one a night during grand prix weekends) and it’s his job, and that of other Red Bull drivers, to go to them. Not bad work if you can get it.

Tonio’s buddy, Christian Klien, is taking it easy over at the bar. David Coulthard is out on the town, too, but skipping the Pacha tonight – he was there last night. Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya are due in town tomorrow. Fat chance, I reckon. Of all the drivers in F1, they’re the least likely to attend their own sponsors’ events, let alone anyone else’s.

Tomorrow’s event – or rather today’s, since sunrise is only a couple of hours away – is the ‘Battle of Kings’, an annual Red Bull fund-raiser for Wings for Life, the spinal injury research foundation set up by Red Bull boss Dietrich Mateschitz and motocross champion Heinz Kinigadner, whose son, tragically, was paralysed in a motocross accident two years ago. The F1 contingent, be it three- or five-strong, will hammer it out with other motorsport and extreme sports stars - including MotoGP legend Mick Doohan, a good friend of DC’s, and GP2’s Nelson Piquet Jr – on jet skis, quad bikes, and in rally cars and kart cross buggies. It’ll be a hoot. But no one has any intention of getting a decent night’s kip in preparation. Nor, indeed, does team principal Christian Horner, who’s just ordered another round.

With a glint in his eye, Klien joins Tonio and his gaggle of babes on the dance floor. Among them are the three stunning air stewardesses from the beautiful Red Bull Douglas DC-6 we flew down in yesterday, straight after the Italian Grand Prix. What an aircraft. Sitting on the pad at Milan Linate’s private jet terminal, we attracted more lusful looks than Flavio’s, Bernie’s and Ron’s jets put together. Now bad for an old 1950’s bird. She used to belong to the president of Zambia and before that to Yugoslavia’s dictator, Marshal Tito. Dietrich Mateschitz got his hands on her in 2000 and converted her into the flying babe-magnet she is today, complete with lavish teak interior, garish sofas and funky chrome fuselage.

The flight down was relatively sedate for a Red Bull affair, Klien and DC crashing out after the GP. Tonio, full of beans, not having driven since the Friday practice sessions, switched the Red Bull extreme sports medley on the screens for a DVD of the international break-dance championships. So that’s where he gets his moves from, Tommo.

Klien can dance a bit, too, but is generally more reserved than his team- and flat-mate, Tonio. (The two share premises in the distinctly un-Red Bull post code of HP1, Hemel Hempstead.) He’s quietly self-assured tonight, though, after it was announced earlier that he’d be driving again at Spa, a welcome vote of confidence by the team. Thankfully, he and Tonio won’t have to carry on this awkward seat-sharing business much longer, now that Red Bull have bought Minardi. No one is really talking about that though, because it has yet to be officially announced.

The ‘night’ finally wraps at about 6.00am and we head back to our hotel in Ibiza Town. Three hours later the drivers are supposed to be out jet-skiing for the first event on Talamanca Beach. Remarkably, they all turn up on time and are raring to go. Only DC looks unconvinced about getting involved. Soon, though, the Ibizan sun takes effect and DC – like any racing driving would – is turned on by the sight and sound of the skis. They’re proper powerful, racing jet skis, too.

It’s a shame Juan Pablo isn’t here because he’s big on jet skis. And, no, Ralf hasn’t turned up, either. But the excuses filtering through are fantastic. Apparently JPM got the date wrong, thought it was tomorrow and has to sort out his visa for the Chinese GP today. Ralf is just too busy, he says, but we hear, unofficially, that he backed out as soon as he heard Mateschitz wasn’t coming.

DC is amazed by just how physically demanding the jet skis are: “Either you have to be really fit to ride these things, or I had a bit too much sangria last night.” Hmm. Klien turns out to be the best of three F1 boys on jet skis, followed by DC, then Tonio.

Next it’s off to Hipodromo de Sant Rafael for some serious dirt-racing action. Quad bikes first, which the F1 drivers sensibly opt out of, Ozzy Osbourne’s recent accident cited as the reason for the sudden rush of common sense. The quad race is spectacular, though, for the epic battle between motocross aces Travis Pastrana (USA) and Ben Townley (NZ), adrenalin junkies both. Pastrana flew in from the US after becoming the first man to land a double back-flip in freestyle motocross. Nice work. But Townley beats him.

In the VW Touareg rally cars, DC just edges Liuzzi, followed by Klien, who was unimpressed: “Quite a lot of fun but not enough power.” The final event, kart-cross, is much more his thing. The 1300cc Yamaha-powered buggies are the same as those used in the Race of Champions in Paris last year, but this doesn’t seem to help DC, who took part in the RoC. I’m looking forward to having a go myself, until the media race is cancelled because the extreme sportsmen have trashed the buggies. As with the jet skiing, the F1 kart-cross order goes Klien, DC, Liuzzi, and that’s how they look in the final points standings.

The overall winner, though is former Paris-Dakar winner Nani Roma, whose jet ski performance just edges Piquet’s. I’m amazed to see Nelsinho finish second. To my mind he’s just been hanging around looking cool all day. Somehow, without me noticing, he manages effortlessly to whip all the F1 boys. It’s a sign: he will go on to take his first GP2 win at Spa in four days’ time.

Predictably, there’s another party this evening, though the less said about that the better. Let’s just say we have half-naked, breasted men dancing on podiums with 10-foot albino boa constrictors. Enough?

The sight obviously affects the Red Bull boys deeply, though. Next day on the flight to Spa, Liuzzi takes to painting DC’s toenails while he’s asleep. What’s more, DC doesn’t seem to mind when he wakes up. Again, the less said about that the better. God bless Red Bull. I think.

All photos and article from F1 Racing Magazine. All credit goes to them.