Wurz was too tall and heavy for the Benetton
Grand Prix Photo
Some drivers can be reduced to a stat. Alex Wurz isn’t one of them. BMX world champion at 12. Le Mans winner outright at 22 – still, 30 years on, the youngest to do it. Formula 1 podium finisher for Benetton, McLaren and Williams. GPDA chairman for over a decade. Circuit designer, road safety consultant, broadcaster, and, by his own admission, a considerably better earner now than he ever was in an F1 cockpit.
For all he has done, the strangest moment of his career came in 1999, when the Benetton team he was driving for once drew up a costed proposal to surgically shorten his legs in order to make him lighter for the car.
Speaking in a wide-ranging interview with Motor Sport‘s Matt Bishop, the 1997-2000 Benetton driver spoke about how the team’s technical director at the time, Nick Wirth, tried to convince him to become shorter.
“Nick Wirth created a spreadsheet on which he costed an operation to shorten both my femurs, to make me shorter and lighter,” Wurz said. “When he put it to me, I replied with two words: one began with an ‘f’ and the other began with an ‘o’.
“I mean: I was committed to my racing career, but there are limits, and I wasn’t prepared to allow my team to break my legs to make me shorter.”
Fisichella was 14cm shorter than Wurz
Grand Prix Photo
At 6ft 2in (1.88cm), Wurz says his height and weight left him disadvantaged against team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella in 1999, costing him around half a second a lap, a deficit he says Benetton chose not to disclose publicly.
“If you factor that into my lap times, I was just as quick as he was, but the team didn’t want us to tell anyone that the car was so overweight, so no one knew, and I looked slow,” he said.
“As the season went on, the team managed to make the car lighter, but it took time and it damaged my reputation.”
Wurz, now 52, also detailed a series of near-misses and setbacks across his F1 career with Benetton, McLaren and Williams, including racing five grands prix on a broken rib without telling his team.
“I had a jet-ski accident and broke a rib, which I also kept quiet about… and I did five races with that broken rib, with Sid Watkins secretly injecting me for those five races so as to numb the pain,” he said.
He also revealed he underwent two secret operations on his knee mid-season in 2000 after a motocross crash, again concealed from the team.
“I knew that the team would disapprove of me doing motocross,” he explained.
Wurz expected to race for McLaren in 2002, but the team chose Raikkonen
On his time at McLaren as test and reserve driver, Wurz said he was told by senior figures at the team that he would be racing alongside David Coulthard in 2002, only for the team to sign Kimi Räikkönen instead.
“I was expecting to race for McLaren alongside David Coulthard in 2002 because I’d been told that that was the case by Martin Whitmarsh and Adrian Newey,” he said. “But what they didn’t know was that Ron Dennis had set on the idea of poaching Kimi Räikkönen from Sauber.”
He said a Jaguar race seat for 2004 was also agreed in principle before Dennis intervened.
“At the last minute Ron blocked it because he said I was too important an asset to McLaren,” Wurz said.
A year later, he was left unable to fit properly into McLaren’s 2005 car after the team failed to design the cockpit around his frame, having assumed he would have already left for Jaguar.
“I had so little room in the cockpit that I had to steer one-handed,” he said of the opening race in Bahrain, where Pedro de la Rosa deputised for the injured Juan Pablo Montoya instead of Wurz.
At Williams, Wurz said he was repeatedly denied the team’s lighter, lower centre-of-gravity qualifying car in favour of Fisichella’s successor as his rival, only to be handed it once, for the final race of 2000, after his team-mate complained it was underperforming.
“The team let me have a go in the qualifying car for the first time — and I qualified fifth and Giancarlo qualified 13th,” he said. “By that time I’d lost my Benetton drive for 2001, but at least I’d proved to myself that I was still proper quick.”
Despite this, Wurz said he holds no resentment towards his time in Formula 1.
“All in all, I guess my F1 career can be seen as a bit frustrating in some ways, but I’m not upset about it because… I was fighting against the absolute best drivers in the world, in three legendary F1 teams,” he said.
Wurz went on to win Le Mans outright twice, first with Joest Racing in 1996 aged 22 – still, three decades on, the youngest winner in the race’s history – and again with Peugeot in 2009, a switch he says came after spotting the team’s car testing at Paul Ricard.
“It looked so cool, so I said to my manager at the time, Didier Coton, ‘Get me a test in that car.’
“So he did. We did a deal, the pay was low, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to go back to racing a cool-looking car in which I could compete for wins, at Le Mans and other great circuits, on tyres I could get on with [Michelins]. It worked.”
