Let us start with an audacious understatement: there are not many drivers whose Formula 1 preparation involved making coffins. Perhaps there is only one, for that is where Heinz-Harald Frentzen’s story begins, in green and pleasant Mönchengladbach, in the west of Germany, where the aroma of timber and varnish was far more familiar than the scent of hot racing oil. It is the sort of detail that somehow suits him. Throughout his life he has seemed a little apart from F1’s mainstream currents: polite where others were pushy, private where others sought fame and fortune, and introspective where others shared their opinions with bluster and bombast. Even now, more than two decades after he last raced in F1, he remains one of the sport’s most enigmatic figures: a man who reached its summit, challenged for its greatest prizes, then quietly walked away.

“Sure,” he begins, already chuckling, albeit quietly, when I ask him about those early years. “My Spanish mother [Angela] was my German father’s [Heinrich-Harald] second wife. He’d had daughters before, so he was hoping for a boy next time, because in his family the tradition had always been that all the boys became craftsmen – my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, all the way back. We only ever made coffins to make good use of all the surplus wood we had, because the main work that my family always did down the years was to make wooden patterns [ie: template models] for heavy industrial machinery – steam engines, internal combustion engines and so on.

“Later, my dad began to concentrate more on coffin making, because it was easier and less time-consuming than making wooden patterns for heavy industrial machinery, and from when I was eight years old I began to help him with it. Then, when I was 11, I realised that I was quite mechanically minded, and I loved cars, so I took the engine off my dad’s lawnmower, and I tried to fit it to a pedal car, but I couldn’t make it work. Then, one day, my dad was looking for his lawnmower, he eventually found it, and he said, ‘Where’s its engine, Heinz-Harald?’ So I had to admit what I’d done. I showed him my half-finished project, he laughed, he helped me finish it, and that was my first go-kart.”

Unlike many future F1 stars, young Heinz-Harald was not a child who spent every waking moment dreaming of F1 glory. “Not at all, no,” he says when I ask him whether he watched many grands prix as a kid growing up in the 1970s, “but I enjoyed my little home-made kart, so when I was 12 my dad bought me another kart, but it had a 50cc engine that produced only 4bhp, which wasn’t much good, so almost straight away he bought me a better kart, but that one was three years old and was powered by a McCulloch chainsaw engine, which wasn’t much good either. So, finally, he bought me a proper kart, which was my third kart within the first four months of 1980. I started doing club races in it, and I went pretty well. In fact I started winning straight away. Then, when I was 13, we went to a kart track in Kerpen [in the west of Germany]. I raced an 11-year-old boy called Michael Schumacher there, I won the winter trophy, and after that, in 1981, when I was 14, I did my first karting championship, the German Junior Karting Championship, and I won that, too.”

The mention of Schumacher is inevitable, for Michael’s and Heinz-Harald’s racing careers would intertwine for years, beginning on those German kart tracks and continuing through sports cars and, in the end, in F1. Yet Frentzen recalls those days not as the opening chapter of some meticulously planned ascent but simply as a happy period of youthful competition. “No, I didn’t think that way,” he says when I suggest that he must already have realised how gifted he was. “I knew I loved karting, and that I liked winning, but I was just enjoying what I was doing, not thinking about the future at all. However, my dad began to realise that I might have real potential, so he began to take my karting seriously. We started karting almost every weekend – but, actually, although I enjoyed it, and I was doing well, I missed doing normal family things, and I missed hanging out with my mates.”

There speaks the real – and unvarnished – Heinz-Harald. Interrogate his childhood and you will find none of the ruthless, single-minded mythology that often characterises descriptions of elite sports stars’ formative years. Even so, by the late 1980s he was climbing steadily through Germany’s fiercely competitive junior racing ladder: Formula Ford, Formula Opel Lotus and Formula 3.

F1 and Le Mans stalwart Jochen Mass’s name was attached to the Formula Opel Lotus team for which Heinz-Harald raced and won in 1988, and later Mass would mentor Frentzen, Michael Schumacher and Karl Wendlinger in the formidable Sauber–Mercedes sports car programme. At that time, if you pressed him, Mass would tell journalists that Frentzen was the most naturally gifted of that soon-to-become-famous Sauber-Mercedes trio.

“Michael Schumacher was the hardest worker. I was the one for whom things came easiest”

“To be honest, we were all talented,” Frentzen says now, refusing either to accept or reject the compliment when I remind him of it. “Michael was the hardest worker, I guess I was the one for whom things came easiest and Karl was a mixture of the two of us. We all started to do well, maybe better even than the regular Sauber-Mercedes drivers, and I think that surprised Peter Sauber. It was a very good time for me because I realised that I really enjoyed driving long, long stints in sports cars, and learning how to be fast while saving fuel, which is a skill that I took with me to F1. It was also the first time I ever earned any money out of racing. I was paid a salary of CHF50,000 [about £20,000 at the time] plus the use of a Mercedes road car. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something. It felt like heaven, and it helped me clear the debt I’d accrued to pay for my F3 season, which was DM180,000 [about £55,000 at the time].”

Next he did Formula 3000, first in Europe then in Japan, without a huge amount of success I feel honour-bound to remind him. “So how did you make your way into F1 with Sauber in 1994?” I ask.

“It’s complicated!” he replies, smiling broadly. “I was in not-great cars and I had a not-great time in F3000 in Europe in 1990 and 1991 – I was driving a Reynard when the car to have was a Lola, and I was driving a Lola when the car to have was a Reynard – then, after that, I did Japanese Formula 3000, and at some point during my first year in Japan, 1992, I thought I was going to have to give up racing altogether because it didn’t look like I was going to have a drive at all for 1993. In fact I went home and I started making coffins with my dad again. Then I got a phone call from [driver, team owner, and sometime drug dealer] Charles Zwolsman Sr, whom I’d got to know in my Formula Ford days and in whose Euro Racing Lola-Judd I then raced, alongside him actually, at Le Mans that year [1992].

“I could talk about Le Mans all day – sadly we haven’t got time – so I’ll just say that I’d like to have raced there more often, because I did Le Mans only one more time, for Aston Martin, many years later, in 2008, but in that Lola-Judd in 1992 I drove the fastest lap overall in the warm-up and the fastest lap overall at night in the rain, too.

“Anyway, Le Mans 1992 reopened the door to motor sport for me, because Charles Zwolsman Sr then offered me the chance to race for him in Japan. I got that opportunity because his driver Volker Weidler was going to have to retire, even though he was only 30, because he had severe tinnitus [which was widely attributed to the noise and vibration of the extremely loud quad-rotor Wankel engine of the Mazda 787B that Weidler had driven to victory alongside Johnny Herbert and Bertrand Gachot at Le Mans in 1991]. So in 1992 I raced Volker’s Lola-Mugen in three Japanese F3000 races [finishing sixth at Suzuka, seventh at Fuji, then third at Suzuka], and if that hadn’t happened I’d probably be a funeral director now.”

Instead, the following year, 1993, while Frentzen was continuing to race in Japanese F3000, Peter Sauber summoned him for an F1 test. “Peter had stayed in touch with me, and in the late summer [of 1993] he invited me to test his Sauber F1 car at Mugello. Karl Wendlinger would also be testing the car, and I’d have to use JJ Lehto’s seat, which is never ideal, but I did well. I was quick, and Peter offered me a Sauber drive in F1 for 1994.

“As you can imagine, I was super-excited. I mean: just over a year before that I’d been making coffins with my dad, and now I was in F1. It was a dream. But, remember, I hadn’t watched F1 much as a kid, although when I was 12 I’d seen Ayrton Senna race in a World Cup kart race at Nivelles [Belgium]. I’d been standing behind the fence, and it was obvious to me even then that he was outrageously good and just wonderful to watch. So Senna was my hero – then and always – but that was a result of his karting brilliance more than his F1 brilliance. Yes, always, for me he was the man.

“And at the end of a pre-season test day at Estoril in 1994, Josef Leberer [Senna’s friend, physio and confidant] came up to me in the paddock and said, ‘Someone would like to meet you.’ So I went with Josef to the Williams motorhome, and Ayrton was there. He said, ‘Hey, you were looking good out there today.’ We had a nice chat, and that was a big moment for me.

“Then, at Interlagos, which was the first grand prix of the [1994] season, and therefore my F1 debut, Ayrton was on the pole, and I qualified fifth. As I was walking up to the drivers’ briefing room after qualifying, he was walking behind me, and he caught up with me and tripped me up, as a joke. I kind of almost fell into the drivers’ briefing room. It was quite funny actually, and that gave me a big lift, too.

“The next day, in the race, my F1 debut, I spun off [on lap 16], then in my second F1 race, at Aida, I finished fifth, which was obviously not too bad. I think I had a decent F1 rookie season – I was fourth at Magny-Cours and sixth at both Jerez and Suzuka – but it was a tricky year for Peter Sauber because he lost the backing and support of Mercedes to McLaren for 1995. I wasn’t fully aware of the politics at the time – I was an F1 rookie focusing on my driving – but for Peter it must have been super-stressful.”

Loyalty is a quality often praised in sport, albeit rarely practised, and events were soon to prove that Frentzen possessed it in abundance. When Senna was killed at Imola in 1994, Frank Williams offered him the suddenly vacant Williams seat. “I said no – I felt I had to – because I had a strong feeling that I had to be true to Peter, who had given me my F1 chance. But, after that, watching Williams win so many races with Damon Hill and David Coulthard, I was super-keen for Sauber to develop and improve our car. I was pushing the team very hard, wanting progress, and I had a few decent results in 1994, 1995 and 1996, but actually the 1994 Sauber was quite a well-balanced car whereas at first the 1995 Sauber was crazily pitch-sensitive and therefore extremely difficult to drive. But we worked hard to improve that 1995 car, and it was pretty OK by the end of the season. Actually, overall, although 1995 was frustrating at times, I now consider it one of my best years in F1.”

Frentzen’s good form and his remarkable loyalty were both rewarded, because Williams came a-calling once more. “That’s right, and that was great, but, again, it was complicated,” he exclaims, grinning broadly. “When I’d said no to Frank Williams in 1994, I’d added, ‘But I’ll be there for you in three years’ time, in 1997, once I’ve completed my three-year Sauber contract.’ Also, in those first three grands prix of 1994 I’d heard rumours that Ayrton had been recommending me to Frank as an eventual replacement for himself. So, because of that, I stayed in touch with Frank, and he’d obviously remembered our conversation back in 1994, because by 1997 I was a Williams driver alongside Jacques Villeneuve.”

Many F1 drivers would have regarded joining Williams at that time – the mid-to-late 1990s – as a dream finally realised, but Frentzen’s memories are rather more nuanced. “[A pause] I mean, yeah, 1997 and 1998, my two seasons at Williams, were the most horrible years for me. It was a brilliant team, so advanced, with the best car, and winning so much – the mecca of motor sport – but it was also a difficult place to be. Frank told me that I had to understand every nut and every bolt of the car, and that’s just about all the support he ever gave me.

“Also, Damon had been a right-foot braker, like me, but Patrick [Head, technical director] wanted me to do left-foot braking, like Jacques. OK, that was the correct approach, because left-foot braking is quicker than right-foot braking, but it took me a little while to get used to it – and that’s why in Melbourne, the first race of the [1997] season, although I’d qualified on the front row, I went off a couple of laps from the end with brake failure, because I’d been riding the brake pedal a little too much in some of the corners, without meaning to, and it had been enough to make the brakes overheat.

“At Williams there was so much technology – so much extra software – over and above what I’d been used to at Sauber. It was just unbelievable. Jacques had had a year there already [1996], and he enjoyed making set-up changes all the time. The team always allowed him to do it, and they’d just keep changing his car again and again in so many ways. They were prepared to be so flexible in that way, and Jacques loved that, but I ended up being super-confused because I didn’t feel comfortable making so many changes, and as a result I always felt I was lagging behind.”

Even so, there was an early grand prix win – his first – I remind him, at Imola, which was only his fourth outing for Williams. “Yes, but I was nearly four-tenths slower than Jacques in qualifying. He was on the pole. I only won at Imola because I’d worked out a very good fuel-saving strategy that would enable me to jump Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari in our pitstops. I’d practised a fuel-saving driving style in free practice, and it had worked, so I explained to Patrick that I could use it in the race, stay out after Michael had pitted and overcut him that way. ‘No, no, no,’ said Patrick, like a schoolmaster. He said my idea was ’shovelling shit uphill’ – I didn’t even know what that meant. Anyway, I spoke to my race engineer and my data engineer, and we agreed that, if I was on target fuel-wise by the time of the pitstops, we’d try it. Well, we did try it, it worked, I stole two extra laps in clean air after Michael had pitstopped, and I won the race. And I used the same trick quite often at Jordan in 1999.”

If Williams represented education through adversity, Jordan represented liberation through conviviality – and Frentzen’s 1999 season in Eddie Jordan’s hard-working yet easy-going team remains one of F1’s underrated masterpieces. While Mika Häkkinen and Eddie Irvine fought over the F1 Drivers’ World Championship in McLarens and Ferraris, Frentzen carried lowly Jordan into genuine world title contention. “Yes, 1999 was great for me,” says Heinz-Harald now, allowing himself a diffident chortle. “But, you know, although my time at Williams in 1997 and 1998 was tough, it was also extremely important, because it taught me a hell of a lot. As I say, Frank had told me that I had to understand every nut and every bolt of the Williams car, so I worked really hard to do exactly that, and I was exposed to so much sophisticated technology, which really interested me. So, with respect to Sauber, I learned a hell of a lot more in my two years at Williams than I did in my three years at Sauber.

“I mean, 1997 and 1998, my two seasons at Williams, were the most horrible years for me’”

“When I got to Jordan, in 1999, I started working with Sam Michael, my race engineer, and that was really good. I was older than him – I was 31 and he was 28 – and it was clear to me that here was an intelligent and motivated young person, and we developed a really good working relationship. He pushed me hard but our friction was always productive. Also, which was significant, by that time I’d completely mastered left-foot braking, whereas my team-mate [Damon Hill] was still right-foot braking.”

Hill, famously, struggled that year. “Yeah, I guess so,” says Frentzen, with a shrug, “but Damon is a good guy. I don’t see him these days, but we sometimes exchange ideas on X. I’d like him to come and ride motorbikes with me in Spain, where I spend a lot of time now, and he’d like me to come on the F1 podcast he does with Johnny Herbert.”

Both are great ideas, I suggest, and I toy with probing both areas further, but I do not want to divert my interviewee from telling me more about 1999, including its bitter-sweet denouement. “Anyway,” I begin, “going back to 1999, you won brilliantly at Monza, and that win pushed you into contention for the F1 Drivers’ World Championship. Häkkinen and Irvine were both on 60 points, and you were on 50, with three rounds to go. Next up was Nürburgring. You were on the pole; you led at the start; after the first set of pitstops you’d retained your lead, whereas Mika and Eddie had both dropped back; and things were looking very good for you, both race-wise and world championship-wise. Then, on lap 32, your Jordan just stopped, and there are lots of stories about why that happened. So, tell me, why did it happen?”

Frentzen looks down, then he sighs. “It was a horrible situation, and it was avoidable, but we had a software bug, and that software bug was connected to an FIA safety feature that was designed to trigger a stall if the driver was unconscious for example, and it deployed, which it shouldn’t have done, and that basically cost us our outside chance at the world title. Honestly, I was feeling really good at Nürburgring, leading the race, and very confident. The weather that day was my kind of weather – dry then damp – and I’d won at Magny-Cours earlier that year in similar conditions. Oh well…”

He sighs again, then he continues. “Then we were off the pace next time out at Sepang – Irvine won, Häkkinen was third, and I was only sixth – then at Suzuka Häkkinen won, Irvine was third, I was fourth, and I was therefore out of contention for the title. That’s it. That’s what happened. What more can I say?”

It feels like a good time to move on rather than to wallow in the calamity of the missed opportunity. Frentzen continued to race for Jordan the following season, 2000, and again in 2001, so I ask him whether during his Jordan years he felt what other Jordan drivers have told me they felt – Jean Alesi, Giancarlo Fisichella and Jarno Trulli for example – which is that the Jordan team buzzed with a warm, chummy, family atmosphere, which presumably made it an easier environment to work in for a placid man like Heinz-Harald than was the authoritarian regime dictated by Frank and Patrick at Williams?

“Yes, initially, and yes, overall, I felt very comfortable at Jordan. It was a lot smaller than Williams, less sophisticated technically, and certainly friendlier, and Eddie Jordan’s fun, colourful and impulsive character made it possible for everyone to be more open and relaxed. But ultimately a driver always enjoys himself more when his team and his car are working well, and he never enjoys himself when they aren’t. It doesn’t really matter so much what the culture of the team is like, because the level of performance of the car and the team has a bigger influence on a driver’s feelings than anything else.”