On Two Wheels

I'm a four wheel man, all told. I've watched the odd Moto GP race, and even took a trip to the Isle of Man for the TT a couple of years back, but fundamentally, my interest lies in cars, rather than bikes, being driven very quickly. I'm not one to turn down a freebie, though and when an old university friend volunteering as a trackside doctor offered me free tickets to last weekend's round of the British Superbike Championship in exchange for a place to crash down, I wasn't going to say no.



It was quite an eye-opener in some ways. I'm only dimly aware of the BSB's existence - the last time I caught a race on television, it was being dominated by some Spanish guy called Lavilla, who wasn't even on the entry list at the weekend. However, it is clear that the sport has a very considerable following - the event attracted by some distance the largest crowd I've ever seen at Knockhill, including those for the BTCC rounds I've caught up there over the past few years. And to judge by the number of people wearing commemorative t-shirts from races all over the world, a good number were hard-core fans.

Me, I didn't really have an opinion on the relative merits of Josh Harris, Leon Camier, Stuart Easton (the local favourite) et al. All I cared about was seeing some good racing. So did I get what I'd come to see? Perhaps not in the Superbike races themselves. Josh Harris had nailed the pole, but Camier, who had won 8 of the previous 10 races, made short work of him in the races, and thereafter, they were a touch processional.

To be fair though, there was action further down the field, and it was noticeable that the bikes have a rather easier time of it actually passing each other around the twisty confines of Knockhill (which is only 1.3 miles in length) than most of the four wheel championships which have raced there recently have. F3, for example, abandoned the place in 2005 as passing was all but impossible, and in recent years, the Formula Renault boys have not come up on BTCC weekends.



The battle for the second Superstock 1000 race, on the other hand, between Alistair Seeley and Steve Brogan (with cameo roles for Richard Cooper and Luke Quigley, who always looked ready to pounce if the lead two put a foot wrong) stands as just possibly one of the best fights I've had the pleasure of seeing at a race track in the nearly 25 years I've been watching motor racing. The two swapped positions back and forth throughout the first 18 laps of the race, rarely more than a few inches between them, but always keeping it clean and fair - at least from where I was standing, down at Butchers. Only an error down at the hairpin 2 laps from home finally settled it in Seeley's favour - enabling him to maintain his 100% victory record for the season so far.



So what did my first taste of circuit bike-racing have going for it? There's certainly a more informal, friendly, feeling to the paddock than I've found at equivalent car racing events, where there can sometimes be a certain preciousness amongst those taking part. Perhaps it's something to do with the sheer amount of money floating around in categories like British F3, I don't know.

It's true, too, that racing a bike around a place like Knockhill looks more difficult than racing a car around it. Maybe it's an illusion brought on by the fact that you see more of the rider at work - throwing his body around to balance the bike through the corners, it looks in some ways more an act of acrobatics. What certainly isn't an illusion is that riders are putting life and limb on the line to a much greater degree than those on four wheels. A quick chat with my doctor friend about the injury rate in superbike racing was quite an eye-opener.



So does this mean that, in future, I'll be watching Moto GP, not the F1? The BSB, not the BTCC? That Motorsports Ramblings will become Motorbike Ramblings? I'm afraid not. In the end, the sight of a car on the limit just does it for me in a way that a bike does not. Probably it's just a matter of what you have grown up with, what you have come to love, but for all I enjoyed my trip to see life on two wheels last weekend, and for all I can certainly see the attraction, it's racing on four wheels that remains my thing.

All photos author's own.

Behind the Scenes

Last week I got an invite from Shell to get up close to the Ferrari team on the Saturday before the British Grand Prix. I couldn't take up their offer, unfortunately, owing to prior, more mundane commitments that weekend. Northampton is a long way from Edinburgh. A shame, because the opportunities for the ordinary race fan to get into the pitlane or paddock these days are very limited.



It wasn't always so. The other day, while clearing out, I stumbled upon some photos I had taken as a 10 year old kid, armed with my first camera, while wandering up and down the pitlane at the British Grands Prix of 1988 and 1989. Officially, the pits and paddock were off-limits to fans even then, with the Paddock Transfer and Pitlane Walkabout ticked having been phased out for no good reason that I can discern. In reality, though, it wasn't too difficult to get in and have a look at the cars up close and watch the preparations being made for Sunday's race. You just waited until the on-track action was over for the day on the Saturday evening and then wandered down the circuit to the pitlane. Nobody tried to stop you, no matter if you had no business being there.



Looking at those photos now, it's striking how much the sport had changed in the intervening couple of decades. There is far less by way of high-tech equipment in the garages, even those of the top teams like Mclaren and Ferrari. No need for banks of computers simply to fire the engine up, no arrays of TV monitors perched on the garage roof, and no bulky refuelling rigs requiring pit crews to be kitted out in expensive helmets and flame-proof overalls. Indeed, some of the smaller teams of the day, Osella and Rial, appear tnot to have crew members kitted out in 'team apparel' at alll. Their garages look like small, provincial car repair shops of the day, aside from the fact that the mechanics are working not on Ford Fiestas or Austin Metros, but on not-quite state of the art F1 cars. I've seen modern Formula Ford teams which appear more 'professionally' kitted out.



Then one Saturday evening, in April at Donington Park, we walked up the hill from the Craner Curves to the pitlane to find security guards at the entrance, demanding to see the passes we didn't have before they would give us access. Since then, I've never managed to get anywhere near the inside of the F1 paddock during race weekend. When I had a look at Spa last year, the security appeared on a par with what I'm used to dealing with at the entrance to Parliament, which at least has rather more reason to fear uninvited guests.



It's a shame, because I think one of the things that drew me towards the sport as a child were those evening walks up and down the paddock, seeing the mechanics burning the midnight oil, watching cars being dismantled and rebuilt, smelling the race fuel as engines were fired up from time to time. It gave the impression of a big, complex battle that was about so much more than running a car around for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon. And it gave a feeling of being up close to the action. When I was 7 years old, the Renault mechanics even invited me to come and sit in Derek Warwick's car while my father took photos - still the closest I've ever become to being an F1 driver!

As I write, I'm reading that the FOTA 'dissidents' have done a deal with the FIA and FOM and the breakaway series is no more. Quite what this deal involves remains unclear. One of the things which FOTA had been emphasising in their press releases on their renegade series was how much more 'fan friendly' they intended it to be - sensibly priced tickets, races at circuits that fans actually want to go to, rather than Grands Prix in countries with no interest in the sport, funded by authoritarian regimes in search of some good PR, that sort of thing. Whether this announcement means that there will be a US Grand Prix and no more wasting time on the Bahrain scalextric track, I rather doubt.

One thing that the sport's organisers could do to make the sport more fan friendly is to allow race-goers to get behind the scenes at races, to get into the paddock and the pitlane and see the work that goes into preparing a Formula 1 car up-close. I've heard it said that, these days, the sport is simply too big and it would be impractical to let the fans anywhere near the paddock. Certainly this is the line given by more than one team boss when pressed. With all due respect, I'm not convinced. The crowds at your average GP now are no larger than they were in the late 1980s - considerably smaller at some of the aforementioned races in countries where nobody's interested anyway. Teams are bigger now, but that means it would be all the easier for them to employ the minimal security needed to ensure that the more light-fingered spectators aren't tempted to try to run off with 'souvenirs'.

The other argument I've heard is that letting us mere race fans in would spoil the 'exclusive' atmosphere of the F1 paddock as a place where the movers and shakers mix - it's status as the sport's inner sanctum. Such an attitude highlights what is wrong with the grudging way in which the sport has treated race-going fans for too long.

Ultimately, the sport is reliant on the fact that people want to come see it, want to watch it on television, want to follow it. Without that, it wouldn't exist, at least not as anything more than a small private members club for the independently wealthy to play at being racing drivers. The corporate sponsors might pay the bills on a day-to-day basis, but those blue-chip companies are only there because the sport has a high media profile with millions of followers across the globe. Setting up the paddock club and barring access to all but wealthy corporate guests will only serve to drive those fans away over the long term. Treat the diehard fans with contempt and eventually they might stop coming through the gates altogether. And their kids probably won't bother watching the sport on TV. And then the paddock really will be an empty place.

Racing on the Radio

Sport isn't suited to radio coverage. It's all about the drama of the moment - the visual impact of moments of sublime skill. The inspired shot at goal, the intense squabble over a set point in tennis, the overtaking manouvre that leaves your heart in your mouth.

Its appeal is essentially visual. Hearing a man shouting "he shoots, he scores" is at best a poor substitute for seeing it happen and at worst, just plain irritating. Hearing Jonathan Legard or Maurice Hamilton, as was then, telling you that Fernando Alonso has just passed Schumacher round the outside at 130R is a poor substitute for seeing it happen.

There's an exception to every rule though. My stepfather enjoys listening to the test cricket coverage on Radio 4 as he works. It's not a sport I've ever really understood, but I can well understand why it might work as well over the radio as on the television. It's a long, drawn out battle that ebbs and flows. Occasionally, someone early in the batting order might go out for a duck, or an LBW might do for a key player, but the drama lies in the fact that it's happened, not, principally in the way its happened. There's long stretches where nothing in particular is happening, providing commentators with time to get diverted into the back story to the game, the characters involved, and reminiscences of past matches.

There's a certain similarity with long distance sportscar racing, something which was not lost on the Radio Le Mans team last weekend, as John Hindhaugh sought to explain to his American co-commentator what 'Leg Before Wicket' actually means. A 24 hour race isn't about wheel-to-wheel dicing and spectacular passing manoeuvres. It's about strategy. Finding a second or two a lap, every lap, for lap after lap. Going an extra lap between fuel stops. Most of all, it's about keeping out of trouble. In consequence, it works just as well, if not better, on the radio, as it does on the television.

From this, you will gather that, in spite of what I said here last year, I once again failed to make the trip to La Sarthe - something which has been on my 'to-do' list for getting on for a decade now. Real life, sadly, getting in the way once more - this time I found myself in Parliament on the day I should really have been on the Eurostar heading south. The Saturday evening, after a day's hillwalking, I stuck Radio Le Mans on in the background and while it isn't like being there (although I've always said that much of the thing about seeing motorsport in the flesh comes in the sound - so maybe I'm not missing much with those silent diesel Audis and Peugeots), it felt much more like being there than my usual experience of watching the racing on the television.

Perhaps it's because it was like listening to the radio commentary at the circuit (for English speakers, Radio Le Mans is the at-circuit commentary, but thanks to the internet, its possible to listen anywhere in the world. The unspoken truth of endurance racing is that relatively little happens on the track much of the time, so the time is not spent telling the listener who is passing who or who has run a touch wide out of Arnage, or whatever, but rather of trying to give the whole story of what is, after all, an immensely complex race - 52 cars, each with 3 drivers, in action for a whole 24 hours.

So we had the diversion of a lengthy debate between Jim Roller and John Hindhaugh regarding whether quick F1 drivers made good endurance drivers - interrupted, amusingly, by an interview with Aston Martin driver and former Super Aguri man Anthony Davidson. As an aside, the fact that the race was eventually won by former-F1 men Alex Wurz, Marc Gene and David Brabham, and that current F1 man - Sebastien Bourdais - seemed to be amongst the very quickest and most consistent drivers in the field and probably would have won the race had that car had an entirely trouble-free race. As it was, they found themselves a lap back and the team decided to instruct the two Peugeots not to race each other.

Aside from that, we had plenty interviews with both those competing in the race and with other characters from the racing world who were along for the weekend, including Indy 500 winner Dario Franchitti, whose brother was competing in the race for the first time. Speculation as to whether the two Franchittis might team up with cousin Paul Di Resta for a combined assault on the 24 hour race was quite intriguing. The Andrettis came close to winning the race with a family team, but so far as I can remember, nobody has actually gone the whole way and won teamed up with a brother or father.

Le Mans a race that is both one of the most intriguing events in motorsport and yet not one which, once the initial novelty of seeing prototype sportscars on the television has worn off, actually provides much in the way of visual spectacle. As such, it is absolutely ideally suited to radio coverage. OK, so I'm sure it's not quite like being there - certainly, the sight of an Audi or Peugeot through the Porsche curves must be quite something these days, even if the sound is decidedly uninspiring - but it left me feeling much closer to the action than I ever do when sat watching a Grand Prix of a Sunday afternoon. Next year maybe I'll finally get down to La Sarthe and see for myself.

Who's Up? Who's Down?

If ever there was any doubt that you need the right machinery to be in with a shout of victory in Formula 1, this season has rammed the point home. Does anyone honestly believe that after 10 years of racing, Jenson Button has suddenly made a quantum leap forward? Or that Lewis Hamilton has simply forgotten how to drive since he won the title last year?

No, the truth is that Button was always a quick driver, he's just rarely had the car to show it, while Hamilton is doing as much as he can with one of the worst cars ever to come out of Woking. It's a reminder that in F1, all you can ever be sure of is how a driver compares to his team mate - the only man on the grid going into battle with exactly the same equipment. The fact that the pecking order among the teams has shifted so radically this season, with Brawn and Red Bull seemingly having produced the quickest cars, only serves to make this more apparent.

With that in mind, though, what is it possible to say of the drivers' form book this year? Who has been doing a really good job and who has been below par. Put another way, if Rubens Barrichello opts to hang up his helmet at the end of the season, who would be top of Ross Brawn's wish-list when it comes to finding a replacement this year?

Perhaps its not a question at the forefront of his mind right now. After all, there can be no doubt that his de facto number one, Jenson Button has been doing a fantastic job with what he has this year. A man who has always seemed best, relative to his team mates, when in a good car, he's won six out of the first seven races and Rubens Barrichello has never really looked like getting on terms with him in terms of pace. Combine the incredible ability to bang in quick lap after quick lap in race conditions (which did for Barrichello in Barcelona) and there can be a little doubt that this is a man who is making up for lost time, seizing an unexpected opportunity which has fallen into his lap at a time when it seemed his career was all but over. The same, sadly, cannot be said for Rubens Barrichello. He's not been much slower than Button, and he's had the lion's share of any problems going Brawn's way, but it can't be denied that he simply hasn't looked as quick as his team mate. In the Autumn of his career, he's finally got hold of a title-winning car without having Michael Schumacher as a team mate, but it still doesn't look like it's enough for him to become world champion.

In fact, if anyone is going to challenge Button for the title, it is more likely to be Red Bull drivers Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber than his team mate. Received opinion would have it that Vettel has been the quicker of the two this year, and he has outqualified Webber 7-0, but I'm not sure it's as simple as that. Vettel has almost always been fueled lighter than his team mate, and their fuel-corrected pace has actually been pretty close. Furthermore, while Button's season has been error-free, Vettel has thrown away points at Monaco, at Melbourne (where he was at least 50% responsible for his collision with Robert Kubica) and, perhaps, with his small slip on the opening lap at Istanbul Park last weekend. I doubt he'd have beaten Button either way, but I wonder whether he might have finished ahead of his team mate. That's not to do Vettel down, he's young, inexperienced, and it's perhaps no surprise that he's still making mistakes under pressure. And let's not forgeet either that he did a fantastic job in very difficult conditions in China. More than that, he's been pretty much the first driver to go up against Mark Webber and not come off second-best. Webber, after all, pretty much finished off the F1 careers of Antonio Pizzonia, Justin Wilson, Christian Klien, and, in a way, David Coulthard. He might not have done enough to establish himself as the next Michael Schumacher, but he has proven those who wondered whether he was really a front-running race driver wrong.

What, though, of those without potentially race winning cars? How, for example, are the three world champions in the field acquitting themselves? Of the three, Kimi Raikkonen has probably got his hands on the most competitive car, but to be honest, he's been the least convincing. In contrast with last year, he's been a shade quicker than team mate Felipe Massa in qualifying, but too often, he's looked rather lacklustre in the race itself. Maybe he's overperforming in qualifying, but in China and in Turkey in particular, he just didn't look interested. Even at Monaco, where he scored Ferrari's only podium finish of the year, I'm not convinced he was as quick as Massa.

Fernando Alonso is an interesting contrast. The 2009 Renault looks pretty hopeless - Piquet has struggled to get the car out of Q1 - and yet Alonso has consistently managed to drag the car into the final top-10 run-off. Of course, one could retort that he has the weakest team mate of the three champions, but perhaps it is only Alonso's pace which makes Piquet appear so out of his depth.... That he has had the least by the way of real results of the three is more a reflection on Enstone than on Alonso.

The reigning champion, Lewis Hamilton, slots somewhere in between the two. There have been occasions when he has really transcended the limitations of the Mclaren - at Bahrain, for example and, until his self-inflicted disqualification, in Australia. The pressures of trying to perform in an uncompetitive car while under fire in the press for his behaviour in the stewards' room at Australia does seem to have got to him from time to time though. He put in a very error-strewn race in the wet in China, and threw away perhaps his best shot at a top-3 finish all year when he went off the road in qualifying at Monaco. There's no doubting, though, that he's still quicker than Heikki Kovalainen.

What of the rest? Jarno Trulli has impressed me this year. He's always had a reputation as a good qualifier, but this year, his race pace has been impressive too, when the Toyota has been on the pace. He might have won in Bahrain had the team called their tyre strategy right, his drive from the pack to score a podium in Melbourne was impressive, and, come to that, he did a solid job on his way to being 'best of the rest' in Turkey. By contrast, I've been a little disappointed by Timo Glock. I'd expected that, in his second full season, he'd carry on his upward momentum and begin to beat Trulli on a regular basis. It hasn't happened though, and only at Monaco, where both Toyotas were hopelessly off the pace anyway, that he appeared the quicker of the two.

He's not been as much of a disappointment as Sebastien Bourdais though. I'd argued for his retention at Toro Rosso here at Motorsports Ramblings earlier this year, but I can't help but think I've called it wrong. Certainly, I didn't expect him to be outpaced by the inexperienced Sebastien Buemi, a man whose junior record didn't exactly suggest he was a future star. Perhaps Buemi is better than his GP2 record had led me to think, but I can't help but feel that Bourdais ought to be beating the new boy on a more regular basis than he is.

Over at BMW, Robert Kubica has done a good job of keeping a lid on his frustration at the uncompetitiveness of this year's BMW. Had he been a touch more patient, he might have taken a lucky win on strategy in Australia, but since then he has largely had to be content with beating team mate Heidfeld more often than not. One can't help but wonder whether he's on the phone to Ross Brawn right now, asking if there might be a seat at his team next year.

Perhaps the hardest drivers to assess are Kazuki Nakajima and Nico Rosberg. That Rosberg is quicker than Nakajima is fairly straightforward to ascertain - but whether Rosberg is transcending a very average Williams, or whether Frank's team is being held back by an average number-one driver and a number two who has no real business being there is very hard to tell. Rosberg demolished Alex Wurz in terms of pace when they were teamed up together a couple of years back, but by that time, Wurz was perhaps so race rusty that it's hard to know how much that really meant. After all, there were rumours circulating that Rosberg was offered a seat alongside Hamilton at Mclaren at the end of 2007, but turned it down on his father's counsel because he didn't believe that Rosberg Jr. could match the Briton. What Williams need to do, of course, is find someone else to place alongside Rosberg, but that will be difficult for as long as they are reliant on Toyota to provide cheap engines...

Of course, I'm hoping that someone, maybe Red Bull, maybe Ferrari, maybe Toyota, develop a car over the course of the season which is capable of giving the Brawn of Button pause for thought, but if they don't, there are still plenty intra-team rivalries to keep an eye on.

Formula 2: The way ahead, or a dead end?

After a break of a quarter of a century, the Formula 2 Championship sprung back into life last weekend at Valencia. The new formula doesn't really bear much resemblance to the old Formula 2. Where the old F2 was an open chassis and engine formula, in essence, Formula 1 with less horsepower, the new Formula 2 takes the 'spec formula' concept further than it has been pushed before and is the first serious 'arrive and drive' racing formula.

Gp2, which it is fair to say is the 'real' spiritual successor to the old F2, as the single seater formula sitting immediately below F1, has a spec chassis and engine, with individual teams having little freedom to modify the basic Dallara-Mecachrome design. Nonetheless, it is a competition between independent teams and the technical know-how required to run a GP2 car competitively is considerable. Even the most cursory comparison of the results of established front-runners like Barwa-Campos, ISport, ART and Racing Engineering with backmarkers like DPR, Durango and Trident shows that for all that they are all running the same basic car, there is a considerable role is played by the team.

The FIA's new F2 concept, heavily pushed by Max Mosley (much to the irritation of his supposed ally, Bernie Ecclestone, who part-owns GP2) does away with the concept of independent teams altogether. All the cars are prepared and run centrally by Jonathan Palmer's Motorsport Vision operation - the people behind the 'Formula Palmer Audi' category, which runs along similar lines. In this it differs, from virtually every other serious junior single-seater category in existence. GP2 and the Renault World Series might have standardised engines and chassis, but the cars are run by independent teams with dedicated race engineers. F3 is perhaps the formula most directly comparable with F2. The lap times of the cars are very similar - the F2 cars having a bit more power and the F3 cars being aerodynamically superior, but F3 is an open chassis and engine formula. For all that Dallara have all but cornered the market, it is open to anyone to try, and Mygale and Lola have both built cars which have won the odd race. Within an admittedly tight rule book, it is also open to the teams to develop their cars independently, too.

So is the Formula 2 concept a good or bad thing? The future of sub-F1 level single seater racing or a a dilution of the very essence of what the sport is meant to be about? I'm in two minds myself. Let's look first at the case for the new Formula 2. The first big mark in its favour is that, by running the cars centrally and doing away with the arms-race between independent teams, costs have been brought down dramatically. While a season of GP2 costs as much as £1m, and even a year in F3 is reckoned to set a driver back more than £500k these days, a season in F2 costs around £200k.

That's still an awful lot of money - vastly more than the average early 20-something is likely to be able to lay his hands on, it is at least a slightly less daunting figure for a promising youngster to attempt to raise from sponsors and backers. Still more than an awful lot of very promising youngsters in karting are ever going to be able to lay their hands on, but probably less than the cost of running competitively in, for example, the British Touring Car Championship. It should to help to open up the sport to a few more people who don't have the backing of lavish driver development schemes, vast family wealth, or the ability to call favours in the business world.

For the money, a driver knows he's getting the same equipment, prepared to the same standard, as everyone else. And that's good news for the driver, or at least for any young driver with the self-confidence to believe that he needs only a level playing field to emerge on top. My hunch is that most aspiring would-be F1 drivers believe they have what it takes and they need no unfair advantage, even if, almost by definition, most of them must be wrong. Compare that with GP2. Is Romain Grosjean the stand-out driver in that championship right now? Certainly he appears to be doing a good job, but it's hard to know for sure. Perhaps Barwa-Addax-Campos, or whatever they're called this week, are just making their driver look quicker than he is. Maybe Nico Hulkenberg, or Lucas Di Grassi, or who knows who else, might have won in the Barwa car. All we really know for sure is that Grosjean is quicker than Vitaly Petrov... The same is true, to a greater or lesser extent in all the junior formulae. Try to recall the last time that anyone won the F3 Euroseries in anything other than an ASM/ART car...

In one important way, Formula 2 promises to be much more interesting than its rival series. Thanks to the way it is run, we should know with reasonable certainty that the guys at the front reallty are the quickest drivers in the field, and not simply those with the best prepared cars, the smartest race engineers and the cheque books to procure access to them.

And yet there's a part of me that really doesn't like what the new F2 represents, an insistent voice in the back of my head telling me that it is the logical end-point of what is said to be Max Mosley's desire to turn F1 into a single-chassis formula. Motorsport, for me, has only ever been partly about the drivers. It's about the teams, about the cars, too.

The old F2 gave teams considerably scope to develop their cars. Some teams went so far as to build their own chassis. It was a valuable training ground, not only for drivers, but for designers, engineers, mechanics and team managers wanting to make the step into F1. A number of F2 teams went on to F1 having begun building their own cars in F2. AGS, Minardi, Osella and Toleman all started out as F2 constructor-teams (though of those, only Toleman, which would eventually become today's Renault F1 team, found any long-term success).

By contrast, the latter-day F3000 series with it's single chassis and engine (the uninspiring Lola Zytek) and the current GP2 championship simply don't provide the kind of technical challenge required to enable teams to progress on to F1, and with the teams solely concerned with running, and not designing, the cars, it doesn't provide an opportunity for budding designers and engineers either. To be fair, there's an argument that F1 is in any case now so expensive and so far removed from any junior category that it wouldn't matter what the rules are for GP2 - the last team to make the leap from F3000 to F1 were the Italian Forti team, and their experience appears to have deterred anyone else from having a go in the last 10 years, but a more technically free formula might at least have served as a place in which individual engineers and designers could gain experience which could prove useful in F1.
To some extent, that is still the case, at least for race engineers and mechanics. It's far less clear how the new F2 will do any of this.

There is a related problem - one F3 team bosses were keen to emphasise in a recent Autosport article. The new series, with its' pooled race engineers, limited scope for set-up changes and centrally-run cars provides little opportunity for a driver to learn the art of developing a car - of working with engineers to identify and solve handling and set-up problems and work as part of a team to optimise a car's performance. Motorsport, at the top level, is about more than simply the ability to take a well-honed car and lap quicker than anyone else can - a driver needs to be able to work with a team to develop a car over a season. How interesting will F1 or Indycar teams be in drivers who have never learned this black art? To be fair, F2 is unlikely to be anyone's last stop before F1 anyway, but if that is the case, then to what extent does the reduced budget really help young drivers?

In the end, the question of whether the new Formula 2 championship will prove to be a success will depend much on where the champion and other front-runners go in 2010. Will it prove to be a launch-pad for those seeking to establish a professional racing career, or is it little more really than a slightly faster Formula Master with only the cachet of the F2 name to recommend it? I don't know whether it will succeed, and I can't even make up my mind whether it would be a good thing if it did. I've seen what appear to me to be talented drivers whose careers have stalled for lack of funds to get a seat in a top team in GP2 or similar, and it will be good to see who comes out on top in a championship where the equipment really is equal. On the other hand though, motorsport for me has always been about more than just the drivers - and that certainly isn't true of the new F2. I suppose we'll see how it turns out...

Street Fighting Men

Normally, a race at a circuit where overtaking is all but impossible is hardly a mouth-watering prospect. I wasn’t exactly eagerly awaiting the Spanish Grand Prix at Barcelona last weekend. Yes, I was hoping that the new rules – the introduction of KERS, for example, might make it a little less processional. But not expecting much. Which was for the best, as it would appear that the main effect of KERS is to prevent overtaking (see Massa and Vettel or Hamilton and Vettel in Bahrain) rather than to promote it. Writing ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix this weekend, I already know that, barring an act of god, on track passes are out of the question, at least after the cars have rounded the Mirabeau on lap one. Yet, in spite of that, it’s a race I look forward to, one I’d be sad to see leave the calendar, no matter how much of an anachronism it may now be.

Why? In part it’s simply the novelty of seeing brutally powerful racing cars being threaded along the narrow roads that wind through the immensely built-up Principality. In 25 years of following the sport, it’s still not entirely worn off. It’s no longer exactly picturesque. Yes, the harbour looks a little more impressive on TV than the docks at the Valencia street circuit which F1 visited for the first time last year, but densely packed tower blocks, whose sole purpose appears to be to maximise the ratio of tax exiles to square feet hve long ago replaced most of the Belle Époque French architecture which provided the charming backdrop to the races which took place there in the 50s and 60s.

More important than that, though, is that it’s a circuit where the driver can make more of a difference than perhaps anywhere else on the calendar. As Mark Hughes put it in Autosport last week, it’s a place where the art of driving a racing car on the limit can still count for more than the science of aerodynamics. Nelson Piquet might have compared it to riding a bicycle in your living room, but still, threading an 800BHP racing car round Casino Square and the Massanet is a stern test of a driver’s feel and nerve.

Partly because the races can be so processional, Saturday afternoon qualifying is never more crucial – the ability to wring a single lap on the absolute limit without going over it never counts for more.

It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that the race has been dominated by the acknowledged greats of their era. When I first started following the sport in the mid 1980s, Alain Prost was the generally acknowledged master of Monaco.

Already though, a young Brazilian by the name of Ayrton Senna was serving notice of his talents, coming remarkably close to winning the rain-shorted 1984 race in a Toleman Hart. Not, in all truth, a car which normally troubled the podium. Senna would go on to make the place his own, winning 6 times between 1987 and 1993 – the only gap in that record being the 1988 race, which he had absolutely dominated. He lapped nearly two seconds quicker than his team mate Prost in qualifying, and talked of experiencing something approaching a transcendental experience that year – of no longer consciously driving the car. Then he went off into the wall 12 laps from the end as a result of a trivial lapse of concentration, while leading by nearly a minute. Monaco is a harsh mistress that way.

Michael Schumacher, in turn, made the world stand up and pay attention when he outpaced Senna in the 1993 race before his Benetton expired around mid-distance, enabling Senna to beat Graham Hill’s all time record of 5 wins around the streets. Schumacher would go on to win the race 5 times himself and while, like Senna, he threw away wins through silly errors (crashing on the formation lap in the rain in 1998 for example…) the truth is that Schumacher was a devastating combination of the particular talents of Senna and Prost, it’s only a shame that Senna’s death in 1994 robbed us of further contests between the two men around the streets of Monaco. For many, it was Lewis Hamilton’s sheer pace at Monaco in 2007 and 2008 which confirmed the arrival of another of the sport’s outstanding talents. Writing on Friday afternoon, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see him on the podium come Sunday, and no matter how uncompetitive the Mclaren may be right now, I wouldn’t be completely taken aback if he’s spraying the champagne from the top step. Not the way I’d bet, but not beyond the bounds of possibility…

In some ways more fascinating is the way in which certain drivers not generally considered to be from the very top drawer have shown themselves capable of incredible feats at there. Alex Caffi is not a name which would figure prominently in any history of the sport, and yet in sundry Dallaras and Footworks, and even the awful 1987 Osella, the Italian driver could be relied upon to perform well round the streets of the Principality. In 1987, he got the Osella as high as 15^th on the grid and would go on to score points there both in the 1989 Dallara and the 1990 Footwork. A sign of a sadly overlooked, under-rated talent? On balance, probably not, although it’s always very hard to know for sure. If that were the case, he ought to have been quicker relative to his team mates elsewhere. More likely, his driving style just happened to gel with the tight, low-speed confines of the circuit – he ran very quickly at Phoenix in 1989 too, only to be run off the road by his (lapped) team mate. Perhaps the absolute requirement for concentration forced him to focus in a way that other circuits did not.

The same was surely even truer of his compatriot Stefano Modena. The wealthy Italian had starred in F3000 in 1987, but never entirely succeeded in convincing the F1 world of his talents. In his first race, for Brabham in Australia that year, he retired before half distance, suffering from exhaustion. As Keke Rosberg observed at the time, a driver who gave up so easily was unlikely ever to make it to the top of a sport as fiercely competitive as F1.

And yet, the man always starred at Monaco, a circuit as demanding as they come. He scored his only podium finish there with the temporarily reanimated Brabham team in 1989, and stuck his unwieldy Tyrrell Honda on the front row two years later. The 1990 Tyrrell 019 might have been a fantastically balanced car, but the consensus is that it’s successor, the 020 was ruined by the overweight Honda V10 engine it ran, and the results seem to bear this out –other than at Monaco, the car was never near the front. A possible career-best 2^nd place slipped through his hands when the Honda engine went bang at around half distance.

Modena, I think, was a classic example of a driver who had the natural talent, the fundamental car control to be a great Grand Prix driver, but who lacked something, perhaps the motivation, perhaps the discipline, perhaps the ability to consistently unlock that talent. You could argue that he simply never got himself into a top car, but to my mind, he never quite did enough to suggest he was deserving of a ride in one of the top teams. As Martina Navratilova once observed after one of her countless Wimbledon victories, “What matters”, she said, “isn’t how well you play when you’re playing well. What matters is how well you play when you’re playing badly.” When Modena was good, he was very good indeed, but when he was bad....

In recent years, perhaps the standout ‘Monaco specialist’ has been another Italian, Jarno Trulli. The comparison is not entirely apt, Trulli is a much more consistent front-running driver than either Modena or Caffi ever were, and, I think, not only because he has more often had the car with which to do the job. Nonetheless, his standout performances have come at Monte Carlo – most notably his sole win, in 2004, in a car that was not truly the equal of, say, the Ferraris or perhaps even the Williams and against no less a team mate than Fernando Alonso. Why? It’s hard to say – his qualifying pace is certainly a help.

Again, though, I wonder if it comes down to the fact that the circuit rewards concentration and precision – something which Trulli’s one lap abilities indicate he has in spades when the occasion requires.

So, anachronism it may be, and certainly it never produces much in the way of racing - in the wheel-to-wheel sense, as opposed to Max Mosley's favoured "high speed chess", but as a test of a driver's art, there's nothing and nowhere quite like it.

The Ghost of ProCar

At any time, hundred of young racing drivers are plugging away in categories like Formula Renault, Formula BMW and Formula Ford, taking the first steps towards becoming professional racing drivers. In their early years, at least, most will be dreaming of F1 stardom. Most of them will fail. Despite the economic recession, there were 29 drivers on the grid at the last round of the Formula Renault championship at Donington. The odds are that, at most, maybe one of those 29 will ever make it as far as F1. Of the 20 champions that the British series has produced since 1989, just four have gone on to become Grand Prix drivers.

What, then, are the options for those convinced they have what it takes to pursue a life as a paid professional racing driver, but who has found the road to F1 closed off to them? While Formula 1 may be far and away the best paid field of motorsport apart, perhaps, from NASCAR, it is not the only way a racing driver can hope to be paid for plying his trade. There's the Indy Racing League, though it remains predominantly an oval series which perhaps isn't best suited to drivers who learned their craft on the road courses of Europe. There's sports car racing, but with the bulk of the field in both the European and American series made up of private teams backed by wealthy individuals, many of whom are to be found behind the wheel, the scope to find paid drives is limited. Audi, Peugeot and, probably Acura, will most likely be paying their drivers, but the vast majority of entrants in, for example, last weekend's Spa 1000kms, were probably paying for the privilege of being there.

There's always touring cars, although the days when the British Touring Car Championship consisted of major car manufacturers paying F1 veterans substantial money are now long gone. The World Touring Car Championship has a number of works teams and both longtime tintop specialists like Rickard Rydell, Alain Menu and Yvan Muller and ex-F1 men like Nicola Larini, Gabriele Tarquini and Tiago Monteiro. In the end, though, racing 270BHP Super2000 spec touring cars seems a terrible waste of a professional racing driver's talents. The cars have too much grip, too little power, and the results are often determined by a hideously overcomplicated equivalency formula designed to enable petrol and diesel, front wheel drive and rear wheel drive cars to compete on an equal footing.

A far more appealing option, surely, must be the DTM series, which kicked off at Hockenheim last year. Big 4 litre V8 Audis and Mercedes with nearly 500BHP on tap, which can lap a shade quicker than an F3 car, these are proper racing cars. Ex-F1 men, Mika Hakkinen, Jean Alesi and Heinz-Harald Frentzen all found a lucrative second career here, and while they have all now left, the younger Schumacher brother, Ralf, is plying his trade in a year-old Mercedes.

Among the front-runners in the series are a number of former single-seater stars whose path to F1 ran up against the buffers. Paul Di Resta, who nearly took the title last year, was the man who beat Sebastian Vettel to the F3 Euroseries Crown in 2006. Jamie Green is another former Euroseries champion who never quite managed to line up a GP2 drive. Alexandre Premat wound up at Audi after winning in GP2 while Gary Paffett is yet another former F3 champion who couldn't get the backing together to carry on in single seaters. Reigning champion Timo Scheider has been a touring car man for a long time, but he too started out as a race winner in F3 and Formula Renault in the late 1990s. Compared to any other national touring car series in the world, both the quality and international flavour of the driver lineup is remarkable (there are almost as many British drivers in the series as Germans!) Tom Kristensen, who won on Sunday, has had a sportscar career which rivals that of Jackie Ickx.

And why? Because, in a way, it's not really a touring car championship at all. The series owes more than a little to the old ProCar concept. ProCar was originally a Grand Prix support-event which ran in 1979 and 1980. A single-make series for a grid full of BMW's M1s which attracted a grid full of current and recently retired F1 drivers. It is the later, stillborn late 1980s which the DTM most closely resembles, however. Bernie Ecclestone's brainchild, it involved 'silhouette' racers, with F1-derived V10 3.5l engines and carbon fibre chassis with saloon car bodywork. A single Alfa Romeo 164 Procar was built and lapped Monza very quickly, but the championship never saw the light of day.

The modern DTM race cars are, according to those who drive them, more like single seaters than conventional touring cars. As with the old ProCar concept, the saloon-car bodyshape masks a carbon fibre chassis and brakes, suspension and transmission which is much more thoroughbred racing car than modified saloon car. The championship is even, to a fair degree, international, with races in the UK, Italy, Spain and France. How much that has to do with the lack of decent racetracks in Germany is a matter for speculation...

The DTM has all the ingredients for a great race series and yet, watching the opening race at Hockenheim last weekend, I was not convinced. Yes, it didn't help that it happened to be a rather processional race. That can happen in any series, at least any where the rules are not deliberately manipulated to keep things artificially close. There was more to it than that, though. I couldn't help thinking I was watching, in essence, a high speed car advert for Mercedes and Audi.

The teams are all ultimately funded by, and operating at the behest of, these two manufacturers. When the race turned out to be something of an Audi benefit, one wondered whether the Audi drivers would really race each other as hard as they might race their Mercedes rivals. Timo Scheider tailed Tom Kristensen all race long (though Matthias Ekstrom had the race in the bag until the last moment) but never really looked like he would get past. Had Kristensen been a Mercedes man, might he have tried a little harder? Drivers with an eye on their long-term employment prospects don't risk taking their team mates off the road, and that's true across the racing world. In a series which consists, essentially, of two teams of 10 drivers, however, that can significantly stifle the racing.

My other problemwith the DTM is its use of mandatory pit stips. I know I'm beginning to sound like a stuck record on this subject, but pit stops are not, in and of themselves, interesting to watch. They break up the flow of races, make it difficult for those watching track-side to work out quite what is going on, and throw an unnecessary random element into proceedings. In A1GP, in particular, too many races have been decided by a botched wheel-change or a car that wouldn't fire up again. DTM seems not to have quite such problems on this score, but on the other hand, insisting on two mandatory pit stops over the course of a race of not much over an hour is absurd.

The problem of the racing being subservient to the interests of the manufacturers entering the cars can't easily be dealt with - he who pays the piper calls the tune after all. The pit stops, on the other hand.... Why not dump them. And howabout two half an hour races instead of a single hour long race?