Dear Pat,
Odd that you ask this question at just this moment – recently Martin Brundle and I discussed the very same thing, and I have written about it in my next column in the magazine. Having been a Grand Prix driver, Brundle could see things from both sides of the fence, but he admitted that he – like I, like any journalist – sometimes found it a difficult juggling act to say what he thought, tell the truth as he saw it, and yet maintain a workable relationship with the person or team he had seen fit to criticise.

Over the years I’ve had my difficulties and spats with people in F1, but the great majority have blown over relatively quickly. On more than one occasion, for example, I was on the wrong end of one of Ken Tyrrell’s ‘froth jobs’ (as they were widely known), but neither of us ever bore a grudge – Ken liked to say his piece if he thought you’d got something wrong, but that was the end of it, and he would then invariably invite you to have a cuppa with him at the motorhome, and talk about cricket.

Looking back, the silliest spat I ever got into was with Riccardo Patrese – it lasted for years, and how absurd that seems now. It arose after a brief… conversation we had at Zandvoort in 1979. He had crashed (brake failure) at the end of the pit straight in what Jackie Stewart would call “a fairly important way”, and when I later asked him what had happened, he gave me advice which was not only anatomically impossible, but also, I thought, somewhat rude. That being so, I made a similar suggestion to him and stalked off, siding with those who thought him a brat.

Thus, we had one of those ridiculous ‘situations’, and it persisted until Patrese joined Williams in the late ’80s. Ann Bradshaw, the team’s peerless PR, dragged us together one day, like two schoolboys. “Look,” she said, “I love you both, and it’s stupid you don’t talk to each other…” And so Riccardo and I shook hands, exchanged apologies, and have been good friends ever since…