Old Age And Experience...

How does it stand up against youth and enthusiasm? When old sportsmen retire, it is usually because they have achieved all that they set out to do, or because they know that they are past their best, and never likely to achieve their ambitions. In motorsport, especially at the very top level, the decision is often made by others. F1, in particular, is a harshly competitive world and human nature being what it is, team bosses are often quicker to spot when a driver is no longer as quick as he once was than the driver himself.

I've occasionally found myself wondering, how would Boris Becker or Steffi Graf do if they were to enter a minor tennis tournament? Could Eddie Lawson still win club level motorbike races? Would Gary Linekar be racking up the goals these days if he went up against young players outside of the football league?

As a motorsports fan though, the most intriguing question to me is: How would a retired F1 driver get on in, say a Formula Ford or Formula BMW race? Would the fact that said F1 driver had reached the very top of the tree be enough to ensure that he could see off the vast majority of the drivers in the junior ranks? Or is the gap between the great and the merely good so small that, after a few years away from the sport, he'd be left tooling around at the rear of the pack?

Until now, it's been no more than a matter of speculation. Retired F1 drivers, whose careers were in full flow around the time I first started following the sport in the mid-1980s might be interested in coming together to compete against each other as a number of them did with the now defunct Grand Prix Masters series (echoes perhaps of the seniors tennis and golf tours) and several of them continue to make a good living as endurance racers. None, though, have shown any inclination to try their luck against today's up and coming drivers (at least if one takes with a huge pinch of salt the reports a few years back that Nelson Piquet Sr. was considering driving alongside his son in GP2).

That changed last weekend when former F1 driver and current ITV commentator Martin Brundle stepped behind the wheel of a Formula Palmer-Audi to take on his son Alex, among others around Spa Francorchamps. In his words - "an early 49th Birthday present to myself" though the fact that the time when he could race directly against his son, Alex was fast running out must have been a factor too. The FPA series may not be as intensely competitive as, for instance, the British F3 or Formula Renault series are, but on the other hand, it has in the past served as a training ground for drivers such as Justin Wilson, Giorgio Pantano and multiple World Touring Car champion Andy Priaulx. Whether any of the current front runners, such as Jonathan Moore, series-boss's son Jolyon Palmer and Ivan Lukashevich will follow in their footsteps remains to be seen. There's no doubting, though, that this is rather more of a serious race series for junior drivers than it was a few years back when half the field consisted of cash-rich middle-aged guys indulging their hobby at the weekend.

So how was Brundle going to fare? On the one hand, he was a man who had been a thoroughly competitive F1 driver - not quite from the very top drawer, but more than decently quick. For much of his F1 career, he struggled with uncompetitive cars, such as the Cosworth powered Tyrrell, the truly awful Zakspeed and the unreliable and difficult Brabham Yamaha. When he finally got himself a really competitive car, in the form of the 1992 Benetton Ford, he had the misfortune to find himself paired up with one Michael Schumacher - and that before anyone knew just how good the young German was. A couple of years later, he picked up a drive at Mclaren only to find himself driving alongside a relatively unknown Finnish guy called...Mika Hakkinen. All the same, he showed pretty well against these future F1 champions, so surely against a group of youngsters of whom few, if any, surely, have the same ultimate potential things would not be too difficult? Add to that experience from competing in 11 Grands Prix and numerous Group C sportscar races at Spa and surely he would have things all his own way...

Or perhaps not. On the other hand, here he was up against a group of determined young racers with everything to prove - a man nearing 50 years old, who last raced a car in anger back in 2001, and who hadn't raced a single seater competitively for over 12 years. Unlike the rest of the field, who had extensive experience of the Formula Palmer Audi car, he had done just a bare minimum of testing. He was more than twice the age and probably considerably heavier than most of the rest of the grid. Surely there was a real danger that he would trail embarrassingly around a the back of the field? Brundle himself remarked "a few people said to me 'you're crazy, what are you doing'...

In the end, he neither dominated nor was he humiliated. He beat his son in two of the three races, and finished in the top eight (of a 22 car field) every time. After all that time away, he was still on the pace, and still quicker than most of the field, but no longer able to dominate in the way that one suspects he might have been able to at the very height of his powers. Interestingly, for a man reckoned by Nigel Roebuck to be amongst the most intelligent ever to sit behind the wheel of a racing car, and who might reasonably be expected to take advantage of his greater understanding of getting the most out of the car, he reckoned it was his technique through the slow corners which was losing him time, and not his 'bottle' through Spa's fast stuff.

All in all, quite an interesting result - and I'm glad that Martin Brundle, whom I reckon is about the best 'expert' co-commentator the sport has ever seen (let's hope that reports on Pitpass are wide of the mark and he'll make the jump over to the BBC) provided the answer to our question. Now, wouldn't it be great if Michael Schumacher decided to enliven his retirement with a GP2 race or two...

Iconic Cars - The first in an occasional series

Iconic racing cars? For people of my father’s generation, it might be the Lotus 49, The Ford GT40, the Maserati 250F or the Jaguar E-Type. I, on the other hand, am a child of the 1980s, the sort of person for whom the recent film Son of Rambow (if you only ever see one Rambo film, this is the one…) is a full-on nostalgia trip.

Maybe it’s inevitable that everyone looks back on their youth as a golden age. Maybe every motorsports fan is most entranced by the sport as it was when they happened first to become hooked. For me, it is the racing and rally cars of the 1980s which first come to mind when I think of truly iconic machines. I’ve chosen three such cars for what will be a short series of articles. The first of these is something of an eccentric choice. A car that was by no means especially successful, nor even particularly pretty to look at. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, Williams Grand Prix engineering’s very own Group B Rally Car – the Metro 6R4.

On the whole, Formula One teams keep to the business of building Formula One cars. For sure there have been exceptions. McLaren built their F1 Road car, of course, and a whole host of entirely ordinary production cars have had the names "Williams" or "Jordan" bolted on in the hope of shifting a few more units.

Back in the early eighties, however, the very future of the sport was looking decidedly shaky. The FISA/FOCA wars looked like they might result in the F1 series being split into two competing, weaker championships. There was every possibility that the sport wouldn't survive such a damaging split.

At around the same time, the board at Austin Rover were toying around with the idea of restoring their once highly successful competitions department. Back in the 1960s they had had a great deal of success with their lightweight Mini Cooper rally cars. Since then, there had been, to put it kindly, more mixed results with Triumph TRs, Rover SD1s and even an Austin Allegro.

In 1980, Rover's competitions department approached Williams Grand Prix Engineering with the idea of mounting a 3 litre V6 engine (essentially a Rover V8 with two cylinders lopped off) into their recently launched small hatchback, the Austin Metro, to turn it into a potential Rally contender. With the uncertainty hanging over the future of F1 at the time, Patrick Head agreed to take on the task. It may have been difficult to design a rally car at the same time as running an F1 team, but Head had the long term future of Williams as an engineering firm to think about.

A year later, the first prototype was complete. Williams had created for Rover a 220BHP rear engined Metro. Unfortunately, by the time that Rover were ready to commit to a full blown world rally program, this car was woefully inadequate for the job. The Group B era had arrived, and four wheel drive was a prerequisite for success, as well as around double the Horsepower the Metro was producing.

So the concept went back to Williams. They hard-tuned the engine so it was producing a whopping 410BHP, and added the by now obligatory four wheel drive. The car that resulted was a striking beast indeed. In order to accommodate new regulation wide tyres, the car had the most flared wheel arches ever seen on a production car. Spoilers popped out all over the place. It puts the sort of boy-racerish nonsense of Fast & Modified and the Cruise crowd to shame. Certainly, it was one of the most distinctive cars ever to grace the world of rallying.

A question remained though. Could a non-turbo charged car live with the
latest generation of Group B Rally cars? The Metro would be up against stiff competition from Lancias Delta S4, Peugeot's 205T16, Audi's Quattro Evo and Ford's new RS200. There was a chance it might. Turbo lag was a tremendous problem on the early Group B cars, rendering some of them all but undriveable. The Metro might have a much heavier engine, but, so the thinking went, it would be a lot more driveable.

The car made its world rally debut at the RAC Rally in 1985, some half a decade after its' initial conception. The late Tony Pond and Malcolm Wilson were enlisted as drivers. Malcolm Wilson was not to last long before his engine gave out, but Tony Pond was mixing it with the best of them. As the rally progressed there were only the brand new Lancia Delta S4s separating him from a debut win. Received wisdom held that the Lancias wouldn't go the distance anyway. Half the team were booked on an early flight home, and nobody expected the horribly complicated Italian cars to stand up to the rigours of the British forests in winter.

Survive they did, however, and though Tony Pond racked up eleven fastest stage times, he was unable to catch them and record a debut win for the works Metro. Nonetheless, it was a promising debut and it boded well for the works team's first full year in 1986.

Sadly, it was the best result the car would ever record on a world rally. Whether it was because a normally aspirated car, for all the advantages it had in terms of driveability over the Turbo Group B cars, simply didn't have the power, or whether it was that the team didn't have the money to do the job properly is an open question.

A year later, at the final World Rally for Group B cars, the RAC Rally of 1986, the best Metro 6R4 was only eighth. The car was ultimately, in competition terms, something of a failure. Rather than a Rallying legend, it remains something of a curio. Unkind souls might describe it as the ugliest of the Group B cars. It certainly wasn't the most competitive.

Yet the car would go on to prove a success at club level for many years. In the hands of amateur rally drivers, it remains more than the equal of other, much more recent machinery. Like many Group B cars, it also found a home as a rallycross car for many years. The engine, meanwhile, gained a couple of turbochargers and ended up in the back of Jaguar's XJ220 supercar.

A British success story it was not. In fact one might view it as an appropriate symbol of the mess that the British car industry, and Rover in particular was in. Whatever the truth of the matter, it was a truly iconic car, and an intriguing chapter in the tale of one of the most important and successful F1 teams of the last 30 years.

The End Of The Road

In the end, it was no surprise when the announcement was made that Super Aguri F1 are no more. It had been clear for some months that the team existed only thanks to the willingness of the Honda Motor Company's willingness to provide a line of credit to Aguri Suzuki's men, and that the Japanese manufacturer were becoming disillusioned with the idea of running two F1 teams. When Honda made clear they would not provide the financial support needed to keep the team afloat, their demise was inevitable. And so Super Aguri join a long list of teams - Arrows, Prost, Lola, Forti, Simtek, Pacific, and Lotus, who have fallen victim to the financial realities of F1.

It would be easy to write off the disappearance of Super Aguri as largely irrelevant. They were, in their last days especially, tail end stragglers who had no realistic expectation of doing anything more than making up the numbers. Me? I'll miss them. For one thing, they provided drives for two exciting, if not perhaps truly first-rate drivers in Takuma Sato and Anthony Davidson. More than that, though, they appeared to be a very down-to-earth squad of real racers - made up of people determined to do the best with what they could, and not simply there to cruise around at the back. As an F1 fan, though, what was most interesting about the Super Aguri story was what it told us about what is, and is not, important in determining the overall competitiveness of an F1 team.

When the team first emerged, rather hurriedly, at the beginning of the 2006 season, as part of a Honda PR-effort to find employment for Japanese driver Takuma Sato, whom they had recently fired from the works team, they seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. The news that they would be running a modified 2002 Arrows chassis, hurriedly adapted to take the 2.4 litre Honda V8 engine (it had been built around a 3.0 litre V10 Cosworth block) and further modified to bring it into line with 2006 aerodynamic regulations and crash-test rules did little to inspire confidence. What hope did a new team have running a hurriedly modified 3 year old chassis which, even at the time it had been built, rarely made it out of the bottom third of the grid? I, for one, wondered if we had another disaster of Andrea Moda or Life Racing Engines proportions on our hands.

At the opening race, in Bahrain, Takuma Sato was six seconds away from Michael Schumacher's pole time. It was hardly encouraging, but given they were using an almost untested and hastily constructed car, built around a 3 year old monocoque, it could have been a lot worse. Sato was around 1.5s off the pace of Tiago Monteiro's Midland-Toyota, which was not much worse than Minardi had been doing the year before. Sato's team mate, Yuji Ide, it quickly became apparent, had no business being in F1, and was a further 3 seconds back. He did not last long, and was dropped in favour of Toyota tester Franck Montagny.

Faced with such an apparently impossibly task, it would have been easy for the new team to sink into a mire, and slip further and further back as the season went on. It quickly became clear, though, that the team were determined to do what they could with the tools they had to hand. The team produced several updates to the basic Arrows package through the year, and by the time of the season-closing Brazilian Grand Prix, they had come a long way from the inauspicious debut at Bahrain. They may still have made up the back row at Interlagos, but this time Takuma Sato and team mate Sakon Yamamoto were both within 3 seconds of Felipe Massa's pole time - a dramatic leap from the 6+ seconds the team were giving away at the beginning of the season. Aided by the fact that Bridgestone had very much the better tyres in race conditions, Sato ended up finishing ahead of both Toro Rossos, both Midlands and a Red Bull on race day, too.

One statistic which proves particularly telling is that Sato's qualifying lap in 2006 was just 0.3s
slower than Montoya's pole lap in 2002. That, despite the fact that in 2002, the cars had larger wings, 3 litre V10 engines and, to be blunt, Montoya's Williams was a good deal quicker than the Arrows driven by Verstappen and Frentzen. What this demonstrates, firstly, is that the Super Aguri team did a very good job of adapting and improving the basic Arrows design, but more than that, it shows just how important factors other than the basic chassis design are in determining the performance of an F1 car. In particular, 2006 was the zenith of the very hard-fought tyre war between Bridgestone and Michelin (before the FIA called time on that by insisting on a single tyre supplier and control rubber for 2007). The Honda V8 and the gearbox, which the team also appropriated from the works team, were undoubtedly very well-engineered pieces of kit, but one can't help feeling that tyre development alone was probably responsible for as much as 2-3 seconds performance improvement a lap between 2002 and 2006.

The other thing that Super Aguri's performance in 2006 demonstrated is something which would already be apparent to anyone who has followed serious one-make formulae (like GP2, Champ Car, IRL) is that the basic chassis itself is only one factor among many in determining the outright competitiveness of a team. BCN Competicion and ART both work with the same basic Dallara-Renault chassis in GP2 and yet there is a very noticeable performance difference between the two teams which cannot be entirely accounted for by the relative merits of their drivers. Comparing, for instance, Dale Coyne Racing and Newman Haas in last year's Champ Car series leads one towards the same conclusion. Knowing how to engineer a car, how to dial it in to each track, can be every bit as important as having an outright quick car in the first place. To my mind, what the Super Aguri squad demonstrated in 2006, was that they got the very most out of a very basic (in F1 terms) underlying design. Enough to occasionally frighten teams with vastly greater resources and much more modern cars.

2007 was meant to be very different for the tiny Anglo-Japanese team. The team took advantage of the FIA's warming towards the concept of 'customer' chassis in F1 to run Honda's race-winning 2006 chassis, complete with minor aerodynamic updates and other modifications required to get it through the more stringent crash-test requirements. And so we were left with the question: Could the team who worked small wonders with an ancient Arrows in 2006 really frighten the big boys with access to a much more modern design and a serious driver line up?

In the end, the answer was inconclusive. The modified 2006 Honda was enough to ensure that the Super Aguri team no longer routinely propped up the rear of the grid. At the first race in Australia, both Sato and Davidson made it through into the second round of the knock-out qualifying system (something Super Aguri never threatened to do in 2006) and through the first half of the season, the team regularly ran in the midfield. In doing so, they more often that not outpaced the works Honda team, and conclusively demonstrated that sometimes, a team can take a step backwards in absolute, rather than merely relative, terms. Undoubtedly the highlight of the team's brief existence, though, was the Canadian Grand Prix of 2007, where Takuma Sato overtook reigning World Champion Fernando Alonso's Mclaren on the track going into the final chicane to snatch 5th place. OK, so he was only within striking range of Alonso because of a safety car, and he was only quicker because he was on the better tyre compound, and Alonso was nursing damage to his car from an earlier trip across the dirt. But still, a Super Aguri passing a Mclaren in a straight fight for a points position! Who would have predicted that when the team made its shambolic debut at Bahrain just 15 months before?

In retrospect, though, the nails were already being hammered into Aguri's coffin as the 2007 season went on. The team's new title sponsor, SS Oil and Gas, reneged on their deal and left
the team having to go to Honda for a bail-out, which is unlikely to have helped relations between the satellite team and the parent company. Cynics have suggested that the Honda team bosses were far from happy that a small team using their old car were outpacing the works squad (until a late season run of form for Jenson Button, Super Aguri led Honda in the constructors championship) and that perversely, their very competitiveness harmed their long-term future.

Myself, I rather doubt that explanation. I expect that Honda were simply relieved that something with a Honda engine and Honda stickers on the side, was running in the points from time to time. No, the real reason for Honda's change of heart about the support they were providing to Super Aguri was the FIA's volte-face over the legality of customer cars. It became quite clear that, in the long term, Super Aguri would have to develop their own chassis to remain in the sport. For as long as Honda had open the option of running two teams with the same chassis, the Super Aguri team was a sensible investment. Having access to four cars and the testing-mileage allowance for 2 teams instead of one could buy significant advantage. A similar logic lay behind Red Bull's decision to buy out Minardi and create Scuderia Toro Rosso, and the Prodrive/Mclaren link up that never happened.

When the FIA decided that it was not in the long-term interest of the sport to open up the possibility of customer F1 teams, with no car design or manufacturing facilities of their own (or, if you prefer, when the FIA were cornered by the smaller independent teams like Williams and Force India) these satellite teams no longer made sense. And so it is that Prodrive's F1 effort ended up stillborn, Toro Rosso is for sale, and Super Aguri have, this week, reached the end of the road.

Reading the Runes

If this year's Spanish Grand Prix was in any way interesting, it certainly wasn't because of anything that was happening on the track. The Circuit De Catalunya is not a place at which modern Formula 1 cars can overtake each other, unless the car behind is several seconds a lap faster than the car in front. Hence, after the first lap was done, the only passing manoeuvres came when the delayed Nick Heidfeld came upon Giancarlo Fisichella's Force India, and a similarly out-of-position David Coulthard found himself behind Takuma Sato's Super Aguri. Towards the end of the race, we had Kubica, Hamilton, Massa and Raikkonen all circulating in fairly close proximity, but it was hard to get excited when one knew there was no chance of any of them actually swapping positions. As Keith Collantine pointed out recently over at F1-Pitlane, it's as much about the cars as about the track. We can only hope that the new-for-2009 aerodynamics and tyre regulations do something to address the problem.

If the Spanish Grand Prix was in any way significant, it was for what it seems to tell us about the rest of the season. One of the ongoing question marks about 2008 is just what the extent of Ferrari's advantage actually is. Everyone, it seems, is in agreement that Maranello have produced the best car on the grid. What is much harder to determine is just what margin of superiority they enjoy over the opposition. Winter testing suggested it might be huge. The Australian Grand Prix, on the other hand, left us wondering whether they had the quickest car at all. Bahrain, and in particular, Malaysia, will have reassured them on that score.

Those are odd races, though. Australia is a street circuit, and the track was unexpectedly 'green' owing to overnight rain. Malaysia and Bahrain are undoubtedly affected by the heat, while the latter was Ferrari's testing destination of choice over the winter. The Spanish Grand Prix perhaps gives us the most accurate picture we have yet had of where the teams stand relative to each other.

It's a circuit which all the teams test at constantly. Everyone on the grid will have a reasonable working set-up, and the drivers know the place like the back of their hand. On top of that, it's fairly typical circuit - not a Monza, a Monaco or a Montreal. If you're quick here, you really should be on the pace almost everywhere. It is as close as we get all year to a simple test of the relative out-and-out pace of each of the teams.

So what did it tell us? Well, it would seem that Ferrari are indeed a step ahead of their main rivals, but there isn't nearly as much in it as we might have thought. In qualifying, the Ferraris were a shade quicker than the Mclarens and the BMWs, but then they were also fueled a lap or two lighter than Hamilton or Kubica (Kovalainen's shunt leaving us unsure as to how much heavier Heidfeld and Kovalainen himself were, as a safety car intervened). Although the question of just how good a lap each of Hamilton, Raikkonen and Kubica strung together remains unanswered, the times tend to suggest that, on qualifying pace, the Mclaren and the BMW are much of a muchness, and within about 0.2s of the Ferrari.

Now a margin of 0.2s is interesting, because it suggests that, while Ferrari may be the team to beat, Mclaren and BMW are close enough that, should the Scuderia stumble, or should the track simply not suit their car, any of Kovalainen, Hamilton, Kubica and Hamilton might be in a position to take advantage. It may be Maranello's year, but we are not looking at a repeat of 2002 or 2004. A margin of a couple of tenths a lap is also the kind of gap that a particularly inspired bit of driving might be sufficient to overcome - especially when qualifying and track position are so crucial to the outcome of the race. In the modern era, it might be hard for even the best driver to overcome a performance deficit in their car, but if the car disadvantage is small enough, it is not impossible (just look at the variations in pace between team mates, which can easily exceed 0.2s).

All this, of course, counts for little if Ferrari's race pace advantage greatly exceeds their qualifying pace advantage. It has been suggested that, while the Ferrari F2008 struggles to generate sufficient heat in its tyres over a single lap, it is much much kinder to its rubber over a whole stint than the Mclaren and, especially, the BMW. Before the Spanish Grand Prix, I would have been inclined to agree, but I'm no longer so sure. After all, the Ferraris of Massa and Raikkonen were rarely more than 5 seconds or so up the road from Hamilton's Mclaren, and the BMW of Kubica had no difficulty staying on in touch either (that despite the fact that the BMW, in particular, had a reputation early in the season for eating its tyres). Now it could be that the Ferrari pair were taking it easy - not pushing as hard as they could have done - and certainly Kimi Raikkonen's fastest lap at the very end of the race hints that this was in fact the case. On the other hand, if the Ferrari duo were pushing only as hard as they needed to, wouldn't they have built up a slightly larger margin than they did. A five second lead, after all, is not going to be enough to allow a driver to stay in front in the event of even a brief off-track moment (and let's face it, Felipe Massa has had a few of those this year). If Massa and Raikkonen could have done so, surely they would have stretched the gap to a more comfortable 10 or 20 seconds?

The other major point of interest last weekend was, of course, the pace of former World Champion Fernando Alonso's Renault at his home race. After struggling to make the top 10 in Bahrain (despite a bit of attrition up ahead) Alonso shocked everyone by getting the Renault onto the front row, just a tenth of a second slower than Raikkonen's pole-winning Ferrari. OK, so he was fueled light (Joe Saward was particularly scathing of Renault's approach over at grandprix.com) but he wasn't fueled as much lighter than his rivals as we might have feared. He pitted three laps before Massa and four before Raikkonen. Enough to explain how he was able to get ahead of the Mclarens and split the Ferraris, but not enough to explain the massive leap he and the team appear to have made since Bahrain, when he was 2 seconds away from the pole. On the admittedly very rough assumption that each extra lap of fuel slows a car by around a tenth of a second, it appears that Renault, at least when Alonso is behind the wheel, are about two or three tenths of a second a lap off the pace of BMW and Mclaren, perhaps even a little less.

It's hard to know if the Enstone team, whose budget is not in the same league as the three teams up at the very front, can keep up this rate of progress. On the other hand, in Fernando Alonso, they have, to my mind, probably the best all-rounder in F1 today, and there is little doubt that Renault is one of the most closely knit teams on the grid - a group of real racers who are able to go about their business with relatively little interference from the parent company. It will be a tall order for them to find race winning pace, but I wouldn't quite rule out the possibility.

We may not be on course for the epic season-long battle we saw last year between Ferrari and Mclaren. I can't help thinking that, over the balance of the season, Ferrari will prove to be a little too far ahead for that. On the other hand, when it comes to individual races, things could be a good deal more interesting this year. BMW's pace suggests that they really are close enough to the pace to pick up a victory if the cards fall right for either Heidfeld of Kubica this year. Mclaren certainly have race-winning pace, if the circuit suits them, and with Alonso at the wheel, Renault might at least be quick enough to crash the party whenever any of the big three teams stumble. I'm not sure we're in for a classic F1 title battle of the kind we saw last year, but, however dull the Spanish Grand Prix might have been as a race, it hints that we could still be in for an interesting season.

GP2 2008 Preview - Winning down to an ART?

It struck me the other day that there probably really aren't going to be many seats available for young F1 aspirants come the end of the season. OK, so Rubens Barrichello might call it a day and create a vacancy at Honda, and his near-contemporary David Coulthard is tipped to vacate the Red Bull seat after 15 years in the sport - but nobody else really looks like they are coming up on retirement. Of course, it's more than possible that some of this year's grid will be given the heave-ho come season's end - Nakajima and Sutil might justifiably be feeling a little nervous right now - but certainly we are not looking at an awful lot of vacancies appearing. And certainly not at the business end of the grid.

All of which might well be weighing on the minds of this year's GP2 competitors. More and more of late, it is from the GP2 series that drivers have made the leap to Formula 1, and with the demise of Champ Car, not to mention the seemingly waning significance of the Renault World Series, that's the way we can expect it to stay. The odd F1 team might continue to take a chance on an F3 hotshot - as happened with Sebastien Vettel and Adrian Sutil, but for the most part, what opportunities do come up will go to the GP2 front runners.

All of which is one very good reason for F1 fans to keep close tabs on GP2 this year. Not the only good reason, though. The main reason to watch GP2 is that it has consistently provided the most exciting, close-fought single seater racing around. The cars have almost as much power as current Grand Prix cars, a touch less grip, and rely to a much greater extent on under-body aerodynamics to generate downforce, which enables the cars to run much closer together through corners than F1 cars can. The result is that overtaking is a much more regular occurrence than it is either F3 or Grand Prix racing.

Perhaps the most pertinent question, though, is whether there is anyone on this year's GP2 grid who might have what it takes to follow in the footsteps of Rosberg, Kovalainen, Hamilton, Piquet Jr and Glock. On the evidence of the new GP2 Asia winter series, it just might be that ART man Romain Grosjean does have it. Without any previous GP2 experience, he went up against several second and third year drivers and dominated the championship.

In past years, there has always been at least the semblance of a title battle in GP2. Nico Rosberg and Heikki Kovalainen fought it out to the very last round in 2005. Lewis Hamilton always looked the favourite in 2006, but Nelson Piquet Jr. made sure he didn't have it all entirely his own way. Timo Glock was very much the frontrunner last year, but Lucas Di Grassi nonetheless took the title down to the wire - aided by a healthy dose of luck.

If somebody is going to take the fight to Grosjean, who will it be? My hunch is we may need look no further than his ART team mate Luca Filippi. Filippi endured a rather lacklustre start to his GP2 career with FMS in 2006, but began to look much more convincing last year with SuperNova. Now in his third year, and in one of the very top teams, it's very much make-or-break for the Italian, and the ART intra-team battle could be intriguing indeed.

It's easy to forget that last year, ART didn't actually win the title. ISport's new lineup doesn't really have anyone of Timo Glock's calibre, but Bruno Senna and Karun Chandhok are both proven race winners. Senna remains something of an enigma: blindingly quick one weekend, and utterly hopeless and adrift the next. A season's experience and familiarity with the tracks may make the difference, or may not. Karun Chandhok came seemingly from nowhere to score some very impressive winners with the unfancied Durango team last year. If GP2 Asia is any guide, he has the pace, but will really need to work to iron out the errors which cost him a number of good results.

Who else might have it within them to make a challenge for the title? Well, it would seem foolish to write off Arden - they may not ever have won a GP2 title, but they have been consistent front-runners and were the team to beat in the last years of F3000. Lead driver Sebastien Buemi was the man who came closest to Romain Grosjean in the F3 Euroseries last year. In his sporadic GP2 outings last year, he seemed hindered by the fact he was constantly jumping from one single seater series to another, but that might work in his favour this year - as he'll at least know the tracks.

Italian veteran Giorgio Pantano will be back for a fourth year of GP2, and should provide a decent barometer for the overall quality of the field. It seems that the former Jordan Grand Prix driver has the pace to win races, but lacks what is required to challenge for the title. This year, he's paired up with Javier Villa at Racing Engineering. If the field really isn't as strong as in past years, perhaps he'll finally get another single seater title to add to his 2000 German F3 trophy.

I'd be surprised if anyone I haven't already mentioned wins the title this year, but there's plenty more drivers in the field who are worth watching, and might well win races. I've always reckoned Alvaro Parente to have been one of the more cruelly under-rated single seater drivers of the last few years, and the reigning Renault World Series champion finally gets a GP2 shot with SuperNova. The man who ran him close to the title last year, Ben Hanley, is also making the switch and is partnered with Vitaly Petrov, who is doing a fine job of dispelling the notion that Russian single seater drivers are always out of their depth on the world stage.

I was more convinced of Fisichella Motorsport's prospects when they add Andy Soucek on the books. News that his place is to be taken by Roldan Rodriguez doesn't exactly inspire optimism. On the other hand, Adrian Valles has shown well in the GP2 Asia series after a somewhat inconclusive initial period in GP2. Certainly the Force India driver's squad will benefit from the fact that they no longer need waste a seat on Jason Tahinci now that Petrol Ofisi money has been replaced by cash from Force India owner Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher brand.

After a year of anonymity with rather second-rate drivers, Piquet Minardi Sports have been flying in testing with the mercurial Pastor Maldonado and team mate Andreas Zuber, lest we forget, was really not all that far behind Timo Glock on outright pace when they were team mates at ISport last year. All the same, the Austrian driver must know that, going into his third year, he really has to get the job done this year if he is to stand a chance of progressing.

Others worth watching? Well Kamui Kobayashi does rather blow hot and cold, but he picked up two wins in the GP2 Asia series, so might be a good bet for a sprint race win or two. Team mate Jerome D'Ambrosio looked initially out of his depth in the Asia series, but he won the Formula Master championship against a very full field last year, and Former British F3 champion Mike Conway has switched to Trident Racing, and while his 2007 season yielded little in the way of results, he wasn't so very far off the pace of his old team mate Filippi in race conditions. Another man I wouldn't expect to be in the running for the title, but who might well win races. He was devastatingly quick at Silverstone last year - and this time round, he knows all the tracks.

In summary, while I can't help thinking the title race may not be as close as in past years, there's enough good, serious runners to ensure that the GP2 series will be worth watching. I'll certainly be tuning in to the racing this weekend. A final piece of news (at least for those of you in the UK) - good or bad, depending on how you look at it - is that ITV now have the rights to the GP2 series and will be broadcasting on ITV4. For those, like me, who came to love the commentary provided by Martin Haven and Gareth Rees on Eurosport, this is a shame in a way. But on the other hand, ITV has much greater potential reach, and it would be good to see the championship pick up the kind of audience that it really deserves to.

Grand Touring

Back in the early 1990s, when the fantastic Group C sportscar category imploded thanks to a combination of spiralling costs and the 3.5 litre engine regulations which rendered many of the good, serious privateer entries obsolete overnight, there was much talk of how the future of sports car racing would revolve around racing versions of recognisable high performance road going sportscars from manufacturers like Ferrari, Porsche and Lotus.

Initially, this prediction seemed to be spot-on. Le Mans, the blue riband event of the sportscar world, was won by a nominally road-going Porsche 962 in 1994, and the following year, former F1 drivers JJ Lehto and Yannick Dalmas took victory at the wheel of a Mclaren F1 GTR, the very apogee of the road-going supercar. In the years that followed though, the thoroughbred sports prototype emerged once more into the ascendancy at the very top level of sportscar racing. It has been 10 years since a 'GT' car won at Le Mans, and that was the very heavily modified Porsche 911 that was so devastatingly fast it effectively killed off the FIA's first attempt at a World GT Championship.

GTs continue to form a class in the top level Le Mans Endurance and American Le Mans Series, but there they are really something of a sideshow to the Audi/Peugeot and Audi/Porsche/Acura battles in the prototype categories. The FIA GT series, though, has become a significant championship in its own right, attracting a mix of wealthy amateurs and jobbing professionals in Maseratis, Ferraris, Aston Martins, Corvettes and Lamborghinis. The racing is often close fought (thanks in part to deliberate attempts to balance any inherent differences in the machinery through weight penalties and engine restrictors) and the cars look and sound fantastic. If the series has a problem, it is that it has often struggled to attract full grids. Just as Group C racing eventually got to be too expensive, the same now seems to be happening with the powerful GT1 category in the FIA's GT Series.

Until last weekend, I've never actually seen GT racing up close though. It's a category that took off in the mid-90s, around the time that I moved away from the racing heartland of the North Midlands (Silverstone, Oulton Park and Donington Park were all within reasonable reach) to the motorsports backwater of Scotland. These days, though, the British GT series makes an annual trip up to Knockhill, my local circuit, and this year, I finally got round to attending the race.



I was quite impressed with what I saw. I had always assumed that national level GT racing would consist of a tiny number of seriously competitive entries, and an awful lot of makeweights who would be there only to make up the numbers. In the days when the category ran to the same GT1 rules as the FIA GT series, that might have been the case. However, these days, under the watchful eye of series boss Stephane Ratel, the category runs to the same GT3 rules as used by the heavily oversubscribed European GT3 series. The result is a solid field with up to a dozen entries with a realistic chance of winning if the cards happen to fall their way.



There was also a good variety of machinery: Ferrari F430s, Lamborghini Gallardos, Porsche 997s, Dodge Vipers, Aston Martin DBR9s and, most unusual of all, one of Klaas Zwaart's Ascari KZ1R sportscars. The mouthwateringly exotic race cars is one of the category's big strengths. The British Touring Car Championship might have more wheel-to-wheel racing, but I somehow doubt that SEATs and Vauxhall Vectras capture the imagination of your average 10 year old schoolboy in the way that the Italian exotica of the GT series does. For those who think such things unimportant, it's worth remembering that it is those 10 year old schoolboys who will end up the race fans of the future.

The field is largely made up of wealthy amateurs of varying ability, though the odd hired-gun and the occasional semi-professional driver add spice to proceedings. All too often, such a mix of drivers can be to the detriment of the racing, but the British GT series organisers have hit upon an ingenious solution to the problem. Entries in the FIA GT series must have two drivers, and each driver must qualify for and start one of the two races held on each weekend. Likewise, the driver change must take place between 23 and 37 minutes into the race. Therefore, any team running a professional or semi-professional driver may only use him to qualify for one of the races, and may not let him take more than about two thirds of the track time.

The impact of this was amply demonstrated at Knockhill last weekend. There was no doubt that the out and out fastest car and driver combination was Australian-domiciled Dane Allan Simonsen in the #23 Christians In Motorsport Ferrari F430. Sure enough, he took pole for Sunday's race by a tenth of a second from the #4 Chad Peninsula Racing Ferrari of Matt Griffin. The Saturday qualifying session, by contrast had seen Simonsen's team mate, car owner Hector Lester 0.7s away from pole and down in 5th. Griffin's team mate Peter Bamford had his time disallowed but would probably have been similarly off the pace.



Come the race, Simonsen and Griffin streaked away into the distance, but all the while, there was the thought in the back of my head - what will happen when they hand over to their team mates? As it happened, a collision between the Modena Team Lamborghini Tech9 Lamborghinis led to a safety car at around the half distance mark, and the entire field came in for their driver changes simultaneously. The Simonsen/Lester Ferrari remained at the front of the field, but with the lead that Simonsen, a former Aussie V8 driver with extensive GT experience, had built up now eliminated.



When the safety car came in, it was the white Chad Peninsula racing Ferrari which began to fall backwards at a rapid rate, but in the hands of Lester, the Christians In Motorsport Ferrari was no longer the class of the field, and a hefty queue of cars began to build up behind the red #23 Ferrari. In the end, it was not the 22GT Aston Martin or one of the CR Scuderia Ferraris which emerged to challenge Lester, but rather the lone Ascari in the field, in the hands of the veteran Jones brothers, David and Godfrey. Towards the end of the hour long race, David Jones pulled out from the slipstream of the Ferrari under braking for turn 1 and swept into a lead he would not lose. The Jones brothers, who have been involved in racing since the early 1970s, had won their first GT race in many years, and, as far as I am aware, the first ever British GT victory for Klaas Zwaart's Ascari marque.



It may be a category primarily aimed at wealthy amateurs rather than professional racing drivers, but I do recommend checking out the British GT series if it visits a venue near you. As a purist, I do prefer to watch racing drivers skilled enough to make a living from what they do, but to be fair, some of the moneyed weekend racers of the GT series have been around long enough to have matured into decently competitive racing drivers. Come to that, the British GT series is simply not sufficiently high profile to attract the kind of sponsorship and manufacturer interest to fund teams made up entirely of paid drivers. Nonetheless, its a category with an interesting and varied entry list, some close racing, and a rule book which helps to ensure that there are plenty of potential contenders for victory.

Romain Conquest

For the first time in the short history of the GP2 series, we have a champion before the final round. Romain Grosjean clinched the title after 8 of 10 rounds on Sunday, despite retiring from the lead of the sprint race. Of course, it was only the GP2 Asia series, and it seems fair to say that the new championship is of the same standing, relative to the GP2 series proper, as the sundry 'winter' junior single seater series are to their Summer equivalents.

Romain Grosjean may only have won 3 of the 8 rounds which have taken place so far, but in all honesty, he looked far and away the quickest man at every race save the chaotic Indonesian round held at the crumbling Sentul track. Even there, where he was inexplicably lacklustre, he picked up a pair of solid 4th places.

It would be easy to point out that he was with the best team, but it is worth remembering that his team mate, Stephen Jelley, has so far failed to score a single point in the other ART car. Contrary to what some cynics would have you believe, motorsport is still about the driver as well as the car.

The cynics would be on firmer ground, though, in asking whether Grosjean really faced much in the way of serious opposition. The major players in last year's GP2 series, itself not the strongest field the category has even seen, have either moved on as Glock, Di Grassi, Pantano and Carroll have done, or fallen to an almost surreal combination of bad luck and silly errors. Luca Filippi, for instance, was a regular frontrunner for Supernova last year, but driving for new team QI Meritus, he looked quick in Dubai only to go out with car failure, was disqualified for a tyre infringement after winning in Indonesia, got caught up in someone else's accident in Malaysia and then triggered his own accident in Bahrain.

Karun Chandhok and Bruno Senna, driving for reigning champions ISport looked to have the pace to run near the front, though not necessarily to take the fight to Grosjean, but Chandhok made too many silly errors and Senna was all too often the victim of mechanical problems.

All of this left Kamui Kobayashi, who had not covered himself in glory in his two previous seasons in the F3 Euroseries, the winner of two sprint races. Of course, sprint races, with their reverse grids don't mean as much as feature race wins, but all the same, one wonders if perhaps he's another driver who comes into his own when given a really powerful single seater to play with.

Perhaps more surprising still is that former GP2 backmarker Fairuz Fauzy returned to the series and began winning races. OK, like Kobayashi, it was only a sprint race win, but on the other hand, he was a regular points scorer, and picked up a second place in the feature race in his home race at Malaysia - far and away his best result in a GP2 car. Enough to establish him as a serious F1 prospect? No, but probably sufficient to earn him the title of the best driver to come out of Malaysia so far. It was all so disorienting that it was almost a relief to see that at least Jason Tahinci was as hopeless as ever

The last man to stand a chance of wresting the title from Grosjean was Russian Campos driver Vitaly Petrov. After initially looking rather out of his depth in GP2, he gradually emerged over the course of last year as a fairly serious single seater driver. If Alex Shnaider still owned an F1 team, he might have been in there... All joking aside, he was, along with Adrian Valles, the closest thing the series had to an unexpected success story this winter. Sebastien Buemi perhaps also deserves honourable mention for his win in difficult conditions in the Indonesian Feature race, though one can't help feeling he's yet another Red Bull Junior driver who doesn't quite have it.

Further down the grid, Armaan Ebrahim, Michael Herck, Harald Schegelmilch, Alberto Valerio and Yelmer Buurman were all unremarkable. One had the nagging suspicion that given a decent car, Milos Pavlovic might have shown a good deal better, but BCN Competicion increasingly look like GP2's own Super Aguri and he got nowhere. David Valsecchi showed odd flashes of form, as did Diego Nunes in the usually uncompetitive DPR machine. And that was about it.

Come the summer, Romain Grosjean may face a rather sterner test. Andy Soucek, who was quick in the opening round ar Dubai before giving up his place at DPR will be back with the rather more competitive Fisichella Motorsport Team. Luca Filippi will be in his third season, and will be competing in another ART machine, rather than a QI Meritus car. Karun Chandhok and Bruno Senna are both proven race winners and will be driving for last year's champions. Giorgio Pantano, who almost uniquely has carved out a career as a paid GP2 driver, will be back yet again, this time with Racing Engineering, and might finally go from occasional race winner to genuine title protagonist. And crucially, while the circuits in the GP2 Asia series were new to almost everyone, all of those potential front runners will have at least a year's more GP2 experience on the circuits they will visit when the GP2 series proper starts in 3 weeks time. It'll be well worth watching.