Matt Bishop: Conspiracy & 'tragedy' on F1's Vegas weekend of wrongness

The drivers disliked the place, too. McLaren’s John Watson, who was always quick on street circuits and therefore tended to enjoy them, was nonetheless singularly unimpressed. “It’s probably the least appealing F1 circuit I’ve ever raced on,” he said. Laffite called it “unworthy of staging any event calling itself a grand prix”. Jones’ verdict was equally damning but rather more inventive: “It looks as though they dragged a goat path down a mountain and flattened it out.”

In the annals of F1 circuits, Caesars Palace sits alone in its discomfort for drivers, in its distance from any kind of F1 tradition, and in the visceral sense of wrongness that hung over the weekend. Granted, future generations may not remember today’s Las Vegas Strip Circuit fondly; it may be criticised for lack of character, for too many concessions to commercialism, and for being too sterile a backdrop for motor sport’s highest art; but at least it is not squeezed into a car park behind a casino.

Let us now linger for a moment on the mystery and tragedy of Reutemann’s collapse. He was a driver of exquisite talent, albeit rarely hailed as quite the equal of the very greatest of his era – Jackie Stewart, Emerson Fittipaldi, Niki Lauda, Ronnie Peterson, and Gilles Villeneuve – perhaps because he never courted the limelight, and maybe because he seemed always a half-step away from the demigod status that either their prodigious levels of sustained success or their untimely deaths necessarily thrust upon them. Yet throughout the 1981 season he had been right there, consistently: he had led the F1 drivers’ world championship chase since April, and reaching the final round six months later still leading it had placed him a millimetre away from finally grasping the prize for which he had been striving for a decade.

What happened in that accursed car park may not have been a mystery, nor even a misfortune, for there have been suggestions of deeper, darker forces at work: the fog of gearbox issues; the rumours of tyre problems; understeer on right-handers but not left-handers; the suspicion that Frank Williams and Patrick Head could not resist favouring Jones, whose car ran perfectly, whose rough and ready character they warmed to, and who had been with them since 1978; and the allegations of cynical manipulation perpetrated by Bernie Ecclestone, the owner and principal of Piquet’s Brabham team. Or was that all nonsense, and was what we saw merely a gifted but complex man losing his nerve when he needed it most, and consequently relaxing his grip on the treasure that he had coveted all his adult life?

That is feasible — but, even if it were the case, which possibility we cannot discount, the agony of Kyalami hovered still. Back in February, Reutemann had won the South African Grand Prix, which race had originally been scheduled as a round of the 1981 F1 world championship. Had it remained so, he would have been 1981 F1 world champion, his Caesars Palace disaster notwithstanding. But it did not so remain, for it was subsequently downgraded to Formula Libre status when, as a result of a long and fractious dispute between the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA) and the Formula One Constructors’ Association (FOCA), the FISA-aligned teams (Ferrari, Renault, Alfa Romeo, Ligier, and Osella) withdrew from the race. Nonetheless, the starting grid comprised an as-near-as-dammit full field of 19 cars.

“I sent Bernie a message asking him to be honest with my dad and tell him that he was the true world champion of 1981”

Reutemann is no longer with us, so perhaps we will never know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But, even so, and even now, we are entitled to ask why, specifically, did he drift from pole position at the start to eighth place at the finish? As I say, some witnesses insist that he was slowed by gearbox trouble, tyre issues, and/or inconsistent handling: indeed, a few reports suggested that he had lost fourth gear entirely. But, as I also say, there are conspiracy theories, too.

When Ecclestone saw Reutemann talking to a masseur in the pits at one point during the weekend, he waited for their conversation to come to an end, then he approached the masseur. “After a financial discussion, the masseur decided to favour Nelson,” said Ecclestone, menacingly, 41 years later. “We [Brabham] won the championship in 1981, and that was the end for Carlos, who stopped racing soon after. I don’t know if I ever told him that.”

But what does that mean, exactly? Did Ecclestone cross the masseur’s palm, the condition being that his ministrations must somehow undermine Reutemann’s strength or stamina? That is what Bernie’s quote implies, certainly. When she heard the masseur story, Reutemann’s daughter Cora made the following remarks (translated from Spanish) in an interview on the Argentine radio station Cadena 3: “I already knew that. Not only what he [Ecclestone] confessed about the masseur, but also something far more serious, which is that the Brabham was unfit for racing because it had ground effect, which was prohibited. The day before my father died [in 2021], I sent Bernie a message asking him to be honest with my dad and tell him before he passed away that he was the true world champion of 1981. Unfortunately, he died the next day so the matter remained in limbo.”

Whatever the whys and wherefores, we must acknowledge the human cost. While there were no fatalities in Las Vegas in 1981, the word ‘tragedy’ still applies. A driver of Reutemann’s calibre deserved and deserves a fairer legacy. If an 11th-hour defeat had to be his fate — the tragedy — there was still no place for the absurdity or the mystery. The 1981 F1 drivers’ world championship changed hands not via an unanswerably scintillating performance by a wonderful driver on a fabulous racetrack, but via an inexplicable implosion and a welter of scuttlebutt that has lasted 44 years – and counting. Worse, Reutemann’s reputation has been indelibly besmirched by just one deeply unsatisfactory grand prix. Soon after it, he quit racing altogether, but the hole in his record has remained.

All in all, therefore, the Caesars Palace Circuit fully deserves its place in F1’s hall of shame. It is a blemish on the 1981 F1 world championship, and it was a misstep in F1’s global expansion. It is also an example of some important racing truths: F1 world championship glory can be stolen not only on track but also off it (just ask Lewis Hamilton); circuits can be designed not only poorly but also insultingly; and a single point can balance for ever on the tightrope between triumph and tragedy.

So, as the 20 power units fire up in Las Vegas in four days’ time, and the 20 cars assemble on the grid, let the glittering lights not obliterate our memories of that nasty little circuit, or of the tragic disappointment of that always noble, often brilliant, but suddenly bewildered would-be world champion. For in today’s neon lights we can still see the ghosts of a race that was so absurd and so mysterious that it became unforgettable, and so tragic that it remains haunting 44 years later.

The evening before the race Reutemann had stood by the huge Caesars Palace fountain and had told Sam Moses of Sports Illustrated, “At home in Argentina I have a nice book written about my career, and the only page I need to finish is the one on which I tell the story about becoming F1 world champion. The only thing that is important now — for me — is the F1 world championship. But how important is it — really — to win an F1 world championship? I don’t know. I really don’t know. I never win the F1 world championship, so I can’t answer that question.”

He ended up finishing second once, in 1981, and third three times, in 1975, 1978, and 1980. He drove just two F1 grands prix more, in 1982, finishing a superb second in South Africa, the only driver of a car fitted with a naturally aspirated engine able to mix it with the turbocharged Renaults, which were far more powerful than the Cosworth-equipped cars such as Reutemann’s Williams, and even more so at Kyalami’s 1500-metre (nearly 5000 feet) altitude, where the air was thin. He qualified sixth for the next race, at Jacarepaguá, Rio, Brazil, but his race ended after a lap-22 collision with René Arnoux’s Renault.

He then abruptly retired, never to race in F1 again, perhaps concerned that, as a patriotic Argentine with an eye on a career in politics, driving for a British F1 team might be incompatible with the Falklands War, which was brewing and would erupt when Argentina invaded then occupied the Falkland Islands on April 2, 1982, just 12 days after the 1982 Brazilian Grand Prix.

Carlos Alberto Reutemann was my childhood hero. I first saw him race in the 1974 British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, when I was 11, and I fell in love with his beautiful, plain-white, logo-free Brabham BT44. I was at Brands again four years later, in 1978, to see him hurl his gorgeous Ferrari 312 T3 past his arch-rival Niki Lauda’s Brabham BT46 – to victory. In one way or another he has been with me almost all my life. I met him twice, in 1997 and 2006, and I spent quality time with him on both occasions. Never meet your heroes, they say, but I am eternally grateful that I met mine. His memory for the details of his career was as powerful as his charisma was intense. When, on the afternoon of July 7, 2021, scrolling through Twitter/X in the back of an Uber taxi in south London, I saw that he had died, I wept. RIP Lole.