Motor Racing: Herbert: racer as well as driver: Richard Williams on a man who has come through a lot to be in contention for today's grand prix

THERE'S ALWAYS a young meteor in Formula One, a new star whose fearlessness and sheer speed suddenly put the wind up the established champions. Last year it was Michael Schumacher, driving with a dashing confidence that brought him his first grand prix victory only a year after his debut. Before him, Mika Hakkinen was the name to watch. Before Hakkinen, Jean Alesi arrived with the look of one who'd been born to the podium. And before Alesi, for a brief but shining moment, there was Johnny Herbert.

Johnny who? Well, moments like that seldom last. Look at Alesi, struggling to display his natural brilliance in a mediocre Ferrari. Hakkinen is McLaren's spare driver, sitting out the early-season races. Even Schumacher is on a plateau, stuck just beneath the eternal duo of Senna and Prost. And Johnny Herbert, the cherubic little blond from Romford, is battling away with the green and yellow Lotus-Ford 107B, trying everything he knows to make people forget that, four years ago, he was chucked on the scrapheap.

The reason for Herbert's presence at Donington Park at all this weekend is the unflagging faith of Peter Collins, a 42-year-old Australian who has loved good racing drivers ever since, as a teenager, he glimpsed another man in a green and yellow Lotus. Captivated by the genius of Jim Clark, Collins came to England in the Seventies, worked for Lotus's founder, Colin Chapman, and went on to manage the Benetton grand prix team. He knew Herbert was the real thing from the day in 1987 when he took the 22-year-old Formula Three driver to Brands Hatch for a trial in a turbocharged Formula One car. 'It was his first time in an F1 car,' Collins recalls. 'He was stepping straight from 200 horsepower to maybe 800. And he was very quick. Quicker than the regular drivers, within 30 laps. That was impressive.'

So impressive that Collins was soon putting his career on the line to get Herbert into the Benetton team for 1989. Unfortunately, at the end of 1988 Herbert had got involved in somebody else's enormous accident in a Formula 3000 race at Brands Hatch and smashed his feet. 'It was a double- impact accident,' Collins says. 'The first impact knocked the front of the car off, so that his feet were sticking out. Then the car went back across the track and hit the barrier head-on, so that his feet took a lot of the impact. He crushed his heels, broke one ankle and dislocated the other.'

The crushed heels cost him about an inch in height. The broken ankle cost him about 15 per cent of the articulation of his right foot. The fused bones of a broken toe gave him a permanent limp and cost him the ability to run. By the start of the next season, though, he was able to climb into a car, so Collins made good a promise and entered him in a Benetton for the Brazilian Grand Prix. He came a brilliant fourth - only a dozen seconds behind the winner, Nigel Mansell. But the subsequent races were a different story. 'We went to circuits where leg-muscle strength became crucial,' Collins says, 'and he simply couldn't brake late or hard. He'd driven in Brazil barely using the brakes at all.' The anti-climax widened a political rift that already existed within the team, leading to a packing of bags - first by Herbert, later by Collins.

A year later, Herbert was still suffering from the after-effects of the crash: his legs would swell and old wounds opened up, spilling out bits of Brands Hatch grass and tarmac. Unwanted in Europe, he went to Japan to rebuild his career and, slowly, it all started to come back. The key year was 1991, when he won at Le Mans with Mazda and Peter Collins bought the ailing Lotus outfit with his partner, Peter Wright, the team's former engineer. Making the plans for a major revival, they paired Herbert with Hakkinen. Results were slow in coming, but last season there were distinct signs of progress, although Herbert suffered in the races from a sequence of bad luck.

Now he is the Lotus team-leader, working with a new colleague, the likeable young Italian Alessandro Zanardi, to bring the nimble 107D up to the front of the grid. The season started poorly, with a mid-race retirement in South Africa, but in Brazil a fortnight ago Herbert finished fourth, after a spirited duel with Schumacher, while Zanardi was sixth.

'That was better,' Herbert said during a break in practice at Donington, 'although I think I should have been third, really. I could have had more of a fight with Schumacher when he passed me, but our team didn't have any points at that stage.' Collins says Herbert told him later that he'd been preparing to repass Schumacher, but had suddenly had 'a vision of himself off the road and a lot of disappointed faces in the pits' - an indication of his maturity. 'He enjoys his racing, and some people interpret that as a lack of seriousness,' Collins says. 'But he's very, very serious about it. He works very hard, he's an excellent test driver, and he keeps everyone working at a problem until it's been solved.'

Herbert has also applied himself to learning the terminology of Formula One in the computer age. Instead of the old jargon of roll-bars and shock absorbers, he talks to his engineers about things called 'K-dyne', 'warp' and 'WCNY'. 'It's completely different,' he says, 'like a whole new language.' 'It's mind-blowing,' Collins says. 'What they're discussing is a philosophy of the dynamics of the vehicle. Doesn't mean a thing to me.'

K-dyne? Philosophies of dynamics? Herbert may be a conscientious test driver, but his real appeal is the fact that he's a thoroughbred racing driver, happiest when he's wheel-to-wheel with someone of similar instincts - men like Alesi, Schumacher or Senna. 'The whole point is to try to win,' he says. 'If you finish second, it's nothing. But the racing is the thing. Imagine being first from lap one to lap 78. It might be nice once, but if you did it every time it'd be bloody boring. I like to have somebody to race against.'

'The harder the race, the better he likes it,' says Collins, who nevertheless points out that Herbert's smoothness in the car reminds him of Prost and Clark. 'I didn't really know Clark well, but I think Johnny has similar qualities - he's very straightforward, very down-to-earth. And there was always an inner confidence.'

In the week of the 25th anniversary of Jim Clark's death, a green and yellow car near the front of today's Grand Prix of Europe wouldn't be a bad salute to the memory of the greatest of all British racing drivers. And it would mark a significant step in the rehabilitation of Johnny Herbert, in pursuit of a promise deferred.

(Photograph omitted)