Motorsports Ramblings

Signing Off...

2010-12-01T13:32:00.001-08:00

When I started this blog, in January of 2006, the idea I had was to document one year in motorsport from a fan's perspective. I had recently finished Tim Park's A Season With Verona, possibly the best book about sport, and specifically, about being a sports fan, that I've ever read, and it made me think that it would be interesting to give a fan's eye account of a year in the sport. I was aiming for something along the lines of Mark Hughes' weekly column in Autosport and its equally interesting predecessor, Nigel Roebuck's Fifth Column. And as it turned out, I kept at it a little longer than I had really intended.

I'm calling it a day now, though. For one thing, there have been times over the last year or so when it has felt like a bit of a chore. Besides which, I have begun to feel like I'm repeating myself a little too often for my own good. Certainly, the experience has given me an increased appreciation for those who can turn out worthwhile content on a weekly basis year after year.

The other reason I'm calling time on the site is that it simply isn't being read as much as it once was. Perhaps people have begun to notice I'm repeating myself. But more likely, the fact that an increasing number of professional F1 journalists have taken up blogging over the last year (Joe Saward, Adam Cooper and James Allen to name but three) means that the potential readership for the ramblings of someone with no inside knowledge of what is going on, who is simply watching events on television and giving his two cents, is shrinking somewhat. After all, most of us only have time to read so many websites, and if I no longer feel that I can keep up with all those writing professionally about F1, then the readership for what is purely a fan blog is not going to be huge.

It's been fun though. And for the record, here are some of the posts I've been proudest of over the last five years.

Rossi: The Real Deal - Wherein I refuse to be over-excited by the performance of a certain motorcycle star in a Ferrari F2005.

Monty This Seems Strange To Me I remember writing this in a hotel room in Bordeaux just after hearing that Montoya had walked out on Mclaren to go stock car racing. Nearly 5 years later, he's still to win on an oval.

The Write Stuff - Writing about writing about motorsport

A Dose of Unreality - Simulators were perhaps not quite so ubiquitous as they are now, but here's what I thought about them at the tail end of 2006.

The March of Time - The long view of how F1 has changed over the last six decades.

C'est La Guerre - Some thoughts on the falling out between Alonso and Hamilton during their time together at Mclaren.

The Damage Done - The saddest racing story of the last decade or so - the mutually assured destruction of the Champ Car/IRL war.

Being There... - Wherein, for once, I'm not just an armchair correspondent...

A Golden Age? - Irking the purists, by suggesting that the grid of 2008 might just have been the most talented the sport has ever seen.

Last Chance Saloon - One or two of you may know I write fiction in my spare time. Here's a bit of writerly self-indulgence, in which I enter inside Mark Webber's skull, just before qualifying for the 2009 German GP

Received Wisdom - I don't know how many times I've read that aerodynamic downforce is the reason F1 cars can no longer pass each other. But is it the case?

Mid Life Crisis? - Why, exactly, did Michael Schumacher decide to get back in the ring?

Worth A Thousand Words - Cuttings from my photo albums...

Teen Spirit - Teenage F1 drivers down the decades.

I might not be gone for good. Motor racing takes a break over the winter, and perhaps I could learn something from that. Maybe I'll come back feeling newly enthusiastic about all this come March of next year. If you're a regular reader, I hope you've liked some of what I've written over the last few years.

Thanks,

Patrick.

The Motorsports Ramblings Top 10 - 2010

2010-11-22T11:22:00.000-08:00

A more difficult year in which to make this assessment than many, I think. It may be less authoritative than the Autocourse list, but on the other hand, I'm getting my top ten in first. Feel free to argue...

1.Sebastian Vettel

Last year, Sebastian Vettel might have been a title contender, but errors, both his own and those of his team, meant that he was never really a serious threat to Jenson Button and Brawn. This year was not free of mistakes either: Running into the back of Button at Spa, and into the side of Webber at Istanbul; Falling asleep behind the safety car at Hungary and picking up a penalty which cost him a near certain victory. That, though, was not enough to stop Vettel from claiming the title. Even those mistakes aside, his was not a perfect year. After starting the season with a bang, (but for engine and wheel-bearing woes, he would have won all three of the opening Grands Prix) he appeared to go off the boil in the following races. At Spain and at Monaco, team mate Webber appeared to have established the upper hand. This was followed by their clash at Istanbul. With most impartial observers placing the lion's share of the blame in Vettel's quarter, and with Webber recovering to finish 3^rd, this might have marked the end of Vettel's championship challenge.

Instead, however, it marked something of a positive turning point for Vettel. He chalked up his second win of the season at Valencia and in the following races at Silverstone, Hockenheim and Hungary, he appeared the quicker of the two Red Bull drivers – though misfortune and unforced errors meant that Webber won two of the three races and appeared to be heading out of Vettel's reach in the points table.

It was his drives at the end of the year which secured him the title, though. After clattering into Button at Spa, he really got his stuff together. But for an engine failure while leading in South Korea, he would have won all of the last four races that season, and established at last a clear upper hand over Mark Webber. When the team didn't order him aside for Webber in Interlagos, despite the latter's apparently much stronger position in the title fight, it seemed at the time that Red Bull were about to sacrifice the driver's title to keep their long-term number one driver on side. As it turned out, Vettel repaid their faith in spades. Where Webber crumpled under the pressure, and Ferrari were panicked into a poor pit call in Abu Dhabi, Vettel finally took the head of the driver's points table at the only point where it really mattered. A worthy addition to the pantheon of champions.

2. Fernando Alonso

Was the Ferrari F10 really a title contending car? There were times, most notably at Silverstone and at Istanbul, fast courses which put a premium on aerodynamic efficiency as the fifth gear corners require as much downforce as can be mustered, when the car looked a very long way from contention indeed. No match for Mercedes or even Renault, never mind Mclaren or Red Bull.

Whenever the Ferrari was anywhere close to being in contention though, Alonso got the most out of it. Five wins was about as much as anyone could ask from a driver in the F10 this year. At least when he was up against Red Bull's RB6. The Singapore victory, in particular, stood out on a weekend when the Red Bull was surely the quickest car on the circuit. At Monza, he was calm and error-free, not allowing himself to get spooked when Jenson Button got ahead at the start, and in tricky conditions at South Korea, he was in the pound seats when the Red Bulls ran into trouble. Remember, Felipe Massa didn't pick up a single victory all year (although one might argue that the German Grand Prix was by rights his).

That said, he does to some extent have only himself to blame for not claiming the title this year. The penalty for the uncharacteristic jump-start at Shanghai, writing off his car in a practice shunt in Monaco that forced him to start from the back, and crashing out of the Belgian Grand Prix all cost him points, although it must be said that his recovery drive to 6^th from the back row at Monaco was as good a drive as any put in by the frontrunners.

In Alonso, Ferrari have perhaps found their new Schumacher. A man whom the team can unite around in a way that they were never able to do around Raikkonen. If this is unlikely to result in a period of dominance for Alonso and Ferrari in the manner that Schumacher managed in the early part of the last decade, that is, I would argue, more of a reflection on the sheer quality of the opposition than anything else.

3. Lewis Hamilton

There were times when the man who had until a fortnight ago been the sport's youngest ever champion, and who is still only 25, seemed able to conjure a magic which saw him drag a far from perfect Mclaren far further up the field than it really had any business being. Did a Mclaren, which Button could only qualify 14th, really have any business finishing up second in the British Grand Prix? And what about Hungary? Unlike recent cars from the Woking team, the MP4/25 never looked happy in the slow, twisty stuff, and yet Hamilton dragged the car up into fourth and, in the light of Vettel's penalty, might have got it on the podium had his gearbox not packed up.

His win at Istanbul might have owed much to luck - and specifically the Red Bull drivers' self-destruction, but his other two victories - at a Canadian Grand Prix where the new surface kept destroying the tyres, and at a wet Spa, making up for the travesty of the 'stolen' win of 2008, were classic Hamilton. Taking a car which was not the fastest on the day by the scruff of the neck, and keeping ahead through sheer force of will.

Unfortunately, there were classic Hamilton errors as well. He over-drove at Shanghai in the wet, and might have won had he been a touch calmer. That, though, was understandable. Spearing into the side of Felipe Massa on the opening lap at Monza was just silly, and might well have cost him a realistic chance at the title. Likewise, his move on Webber at Singapore was foolhardy. Arguably, had he left the Aussie a touch more space, he not only would have avoided a race-ending collision, but would have comfortably sailed past to boot. If the accidents at Monza and Singapore were his own fault, like all the other title contenders, he could point to instances of sheer bad fortune. The timing of his qualifying run at Sepang that left him stuck 20th on the grid. The gearbox failure in Hungary, and the exploding tyre that took him out of an impressive second in the Spanish Grand Prix.

There's a reasonable argument that Hamilton had to drive at ten tenths, to take every 50/50 chance that came his way, because his Mclaren was no match for the Red Bulls, or even, in the latter part of the season, for the Ferraris. And that being so, one fears for his rivals if Woking turn out a car the equal of their 2007 or 2008 chassis next year.

4. Robert Kubica

How good a job did Robert Kubica do for Renault this year? With rookie Vitaly Petrov, an unknown quantity, in the other car, it was hard to know for sure. In the hands of Petrov, at no time did the car ever appear the equal to those of Red Bull, Mclaren, Ferrari or even Mercedes.

On occasion, though, it was a real front-runner in Kubica's hands. No other driver had quite such a margin over his team mate. Comparing each driver's fastest lap of the weekend, Kubica was nearly a second a lap faster than his team mate over the season as a whole, and outqualified him 17-2. That, on its own, might be no more than would be expected of a man rated as a potential future champion, paired up with a rookie of uncertain provenance. Scoring three podiums with only the fifth quickest car in the field, in an intensely competitive season, however, confirmed to many of us after the blip at BMW last year, that Kubica really is something special. Is there another driver who could have got the Renault on the front row at Monaco? Perhaps, but if there is, I would hazard that said driver's name is Hamilton or Alonso, and that's compliment enough. And then there was that stunning performance in qualifying at Suzuka. Had he not lost a wheel on the opening laps, he might have caused Webber a lot of grief that afternoon. Podiums in mixed conditions at Spa and at Albert Park showed that, while the Renault might not have been competitive enough to enable him to mix it with the front-runners in normal conditions, he was ideally placed to take advantage when the weather threw a curve-ball. Time will tell, but if Renault, or Lotus, or whatever the team end up being called next year, continue their progress, Kubica could be ideally placed to 'do an Alonso' and lead the former Toleman team right back into contention.

5. Mark Webber

Has he blown the best shot at the title that he is ever likely to get? Webber, through his career, had been famous for his bad luck and seemed for a time to be following in the footsteps of fellow Antipodean Chris Amon. This year, though, fortune smiled on him. Unlike all his other title rivals, he suffered no race-ending mechanical failures, and in the Red Bull RB6, he had a car that would pass muster in the company of the Mclaren MP4/4, the Ferrari F2002 and the Williams FW14. One of the all time great racing cars.

But with fortune smiling on him for once, he didn't quite deliver. He had a scrappy start to the year, finishing an anonymous 8^th in Bahrain and persistently spiking his own guns at his home race in Australia, finishing 9^th after clobbering the back of Hamilton's Mclaren in the course of a scrappy, error-strewn performance. He began the fight-back with pole at Sepang, but left the door open for his team mate in a manner I expect he rued for the rest of the season.

His purple patch began in Spain, with a lights to flag victory which left Vettel wondering where he had disappeared to. He repeated the performance a fortnight later at Monaco, with a drive that was as good as any that Vettel managed all season, mastering the ultimate driver's circuit. Then came Turkey and the collision with Vettel that cost him a possible victory. To my mind, the blame for that accident must rest primarily with Vettel, but the team appeared to see things differently and that apparent vote of no confidence from his team seemed to unsettle him. The situation only worsened with the 'front wing' controversy at Silverstone when the team removed the upgraded front wing from his car and gave it to his team mate, leaving him wondering where priorities lay at Red Bull. He responded with an impressive victory that weekend but thereafter, he was rarely quite on the pace of his team mate. A Schumacher-esque drive secured victory at Hungary, but had Vettel not been penalised for failing to keep up with him under the safety car, he would have been only second. The last time he really got the upper hand on Vettel came at Spa, though on that day, he was beaten by Hamilton.

In the closing races at Singapore, Korea, Japan, Brazil and Abu Dhabi, Vettel established a decisive upper hand in terms of pace, but even that might not have been enough to secure him the title had Webber not dropped a wheel onto a damp kerb in South Korea and thrown away a certain second place. It was a mistake that may haunt him for the rest of his days. He's always seemed one of the more grounded members of the paddock, though, and watching footage of his accident at Valencia earlier in the year, he may simply be grateful to be alive and in one piece.

6. Jenson Button

I have to confess, I feared that, by leaving Brawn for Lewis Hamilton's Mclaren, Button was heading straight into the lion's den and that the 2008 champion, who had matched no lesser a man than Alonso in his first year in the sport, and who had all but killed Heikki Kovalainen's career stone dead, would make light work of Button. As it turned out, Button racked up two impressive wins in the rain at the beginning of the year before the more feted Hamilton had even got off the starting block. In both cases, his ability to perform on slick tyres on a still damp circuit helped him to victory though at Shanghai, especially, I was taken aback to see he simply appeared faster than Hamilton in the wet. Thereafter, he was never quite so quick again, and did not win another race.

Unlike his main title rivals, its hard to point to a single significant mistake on Button's part all year, but the truth is, too many times, he simply wasn't quite fast enough. Failing to break out of Q2 at Silverstone and Hungary something Hamilton was able to do without breaking a sweat indicated that an old Button shortcoming, his inability to find a way of working around a car not performing to his liking, is still there. After Shanghai, the only occasion on which he actually looked quicker than Hamilton was at Monza, where his ability to make the combination of the f-duct and a very high downforce setting (by Monza standards, he was running a barn door on his rear wing) enabled him to come very close to stealing victory from Alonso. In 2010, Button showed that his 2009 title was not solely a matter of having the good fortune to find himself in the right place at the right time at Brawn, and that there is a real talent there especially when the weather is inclement, but at the same time I don't see a driver in quite the same league as the very best of the current crop. Good, but not quite a Hamilton, a Vettel or an Alonso.

7. Nico Rosberg

I've never been able to figure out how quick Nico Rosberg really is. Was he dragging an uncompetitive Williams far further up the field than it really deserved to be, or was he flattered by team mates who had no real business being in Formula 1? 2010 provided no definitive answer to this question. Was Nico Rosberg the hitherto undiscovered superstar who became the only man ever to go up against Michael Schumacher in equal machinery and come out on top? Or was he kept honest by a race-rusty 41 year old, way past his best? I don't think we can know the answer to that question, and so one is forced to judge Rosberg solely on what he got out of the first Mercedes F1 car to grace the grid since 1955.

Three podiums was not a bad score for a man driving what was only the fourth quickest car in the field. He came within a couple of points of dislodging Felipe Massa from sixth in the drivers' points standings, and it is hard to point to a single significant mistake from the Finno-German driver all year. On the other hand, there weren't really any occasions on which he looked transcendentally quick. No equivalent of Kubica's giant-killing performances at Monaco and Spa. Probably his best drive of the year came in the wet at Shanghai, where an inspired decision to stay out on dry tyres as the track got wet allowed him to run second for much of the distance, and to pick up his first podium of the year on a day when his vastly experienced regenmeister team mate looked all at sea. On the whole, the impression was given of a good, solid professional doing a decent job rather than of a superstar and world champion in the making. Perhaps, if Schumacher aborts his come-back and Sutil or Heidfeld gets the second Mercedes seat, we will finally get an answer to the question of whether Rosberg is or is not as quick as his dad used to be.

8. Rubens Barrichello

The Brazilian driver, in his eighteenth full season in the sport, was never going to add to his total of 11 race wins in a Williams Cosworth. And a part of me wondered why, after a surprise opportunity to compete for the world title arose at Brawn last year and enabled him to win a couple of races, he didn't just call it a day. It would have been easy for him to mark time. As it was, he stepped up to the plate and led something of a resurgence for the Grove team. He out-qualified new team mate Nico Hulkenberg 13-6 and scored the lion's share of the team's points. The Williams' Cosworth engines were never the match of the Mercedes and Ferrari powered opposition, with their power units particularly prone to losing horsepower over the course of their life (19 races with 8 engines) and yet he frequently dragged the car into Q3 and had a stunning run mid-season wherein he picked up a fourth place in a topsy-turvy race at Valencia and somehow followed this up with a fifth at Silverstone, scene of the greatest drive of his career back in 2003, and a circuit on which Williams have tended to struggle in recent years. Indeed, from Valencia onwards, he only once failed to make the cut for Q3 - a slightly better record than that achieved by former team mate Button, who had the distinct advantage of a Mclaren Mercedes at his disposal. Like Riccardo Patrese nearly twenty years before, the Brazilian veteran appears to be having something of an Indian summer to his career at Williams. His calm and experience will come in especially useful next year if, as expected, the team replace Hulkenberg with the mercurial but well-funded Pastor Maldonado.

9. Kamui Kobayashi

The Japanese driver whose career looked washed up only a year ago after a lacklustre second year in GP2 took a little while to get to grips with F1 with Sauber in 2010. In his early races, there was little sign of the feisty youngster who had traded blows with Jenson Button in the two races with Toyota at the end of 2009 which had made his name. But then the Sauber, at least in the early part of the year, was really not a competitive proposition, at least on circuits requiring any significant measure of mechanical grip. When Peter Sauber's team began to extract some pace from the car, it was Kamui who took full advantage. Dragging the car into Q3 and scoring the reconstituted team's first points in Turkey, he would follow up with a particularly fine drive at Valencia, making an unusual tyre strategy pay and stealing 7^th from Fernando Alonso on the very last corner. Another 7^th place finish was the reward for a fighting drive at his 'home' circuit of Suzuka (though, in fact, as he'd spent almost his entire junior career in Europe, he hadn't raced there in years) at which he single handedly demonstrated that it is possible to overtake in a modern F1 car, scything through the field from 13^th after his pit-stop to finish 7^th and showing it is possible to overtake in a modern F1 car, providing you show enough initiative. He repeated the performance, albeit in a slightly more low-key way, at Brazil a few weeks later, passing both Toro Rossos on track to nab a point. If his race-craft was second to none, his qualifying form was rather more erratic. He was frequently bested by veteran Pedro De La Rosa in the first part of the year, and its something he'll have to address if his career is to progress, but to my mind, he did enough to establish himself as the best of the new drivers this year, in spite of having arguably the patchiest pre-F1 CV of any of them.

10. Nico Hulkenberg

Ok, if it hadn't been for that stunning pole on a drying track at Interlagos then I might have given the tenth spot to Sutil, Glock or Massa, and I'm not convinced that Willi Weber's latest young charger is in the same league as the man who established the former Hotelier as a driver manager par excellence. He struggled in the first part of the season to match Rubens Barrichello, but as the year wore on, he was increasingly able to get on terms with his more experienced team mate. A spirited drive in Monza was a highlight, although it must be said he was lucky not to be penalised given the number of times he missed the first chicane while defending his position from Mark Webber's Red Bull. And then, of course, there was that pole in Interlagos. Yes, it owed a certain amount to luck, and he was running a high-downforce set-up that would make his life difficult on race day, but still, he was able to find grip from slick tyres on a still damp circuit that eluded all his more experienced and highly feted rivals. If race day was a disappointment by comparison, he nonetheless defended his position maturely, making the likes of Alonso and Hamilton work to get past him, without doing anything stupid and taking a title contender out of the race. It's a shame that Williams' financial situation is such that they probably can't afford to keep him on next year.

The Rest...

There are a number of drivers who have had legitimate claim on the lower reaches of this list. Felipe Massa picked up five podiums for Ferrari on his return from injury and once or twice even appeared to have the upper hand on Alonso. There was little sign, though, of the driver who usurped presumed number one Kimi Raikkonen in previous years at Ferrari. After being asked to move over for his team mate at the German Grand Prix, he never really looked a match for the Spaniard. The Scuderia might reasonably have expected more than a smattering of podiums from Massa, given that his team mate went into the final race leading the world championship.

Adrian Sutil did a decent job with Force India, making the most of the team's early season form to rack up a decent points tally. Highlights included holding Hamilton off for fifth in Malaysia and keeping it on the road for another fifth place in Belgium. He pretty much did for the idea that Vitantonio Liuzzi was a great unappreciated talent.

My final contender for inclusion in this list was Virgin Racing's Timo Glock. It would have been easy for the ex-Toyota driver to have gone to sleep, faced with a season toiling away at the tail end of the grid in a car that was four or five seconds a lap off the front-running pace. Instead, he completely dominated team mate Di Grassi and got about as much as it was possible to do so from out of the Virgin. When strategy or weather conditions favoured him, he occasionally got the car a good bit further up the order than it really merited, holding back a queue of early pitters in Singapore, and threatening to become the first man from the new teams to break through into Q2 on merit in Brazil (I'm excluding the freak wet qualifying in Malaysia where anybody who wasn't able to set a time as the track dried in the final part of the session was never going to get through).

One man I haven't mentioned so far, of course, has been Michael Schumacher, whose come-back was decidedly underwhelming. There were occasions on which he had the better of team mate Rosberg, but more often than not, the man whose sportscar racing career only missed overlapping with that of Nico's father Keke by a single season looked a shadow of his former self. About the only trace of the old Schumacher was evident in his still appalling track manners. Running his former protege, Massa off the road in Canada and engaging in blocking of breathtaking stupidity while vainly trying to prevent fellow veteran Rubens Barrichello from nabbing a point for tenth from him in Hungary. After an absolute nadir in Singapore, he appeared to find something of his old mojo in the closing races of the year. It will be interesting to see whether this was a flash in the pan, or a sign that he's finally shaken off his race-rustiness.

Another veteran driver making a return to F1 after several years away was Pedro De La Rosa, who was brought in to provide some experience for the Sauber line-up. He was probably better than his results suggested, and suffered the lion's share of Sauber's mechanical woes over the course of the season, but I always thought it a little odd that he had been chosen in preference to long-time Sauber man Nick Heidfeld. It wasn't such a surprise to see him let go to make way for Heidfeld after the Belgian Grand Prix. At 39, his F1 career must surely now be over.

Of the rest, Liuzzi was inexplicably disappointing, typically half a second or so slower than team mate Sutil. I can only suppose there's some financial reason for his continued presence at Force India, as I would have been inclined by now to stick test driver Paul Di Resta in the car and see what the man who beat Sebastian Vettel to the F3 Euroseries title back in 2006 can do. Vitaly Petrov deserves some credit for occasionally besting team mate Robert Kubica at Renault, but more often than not was a very long way from the Pole's pace. The second Renault seat has seemingly never been a happy place, and again, money seems the best explanation as to why Petrov is in the car rather than, say, Glock, Heidfeld or Kovalainen.

On the subject of Kovalainen, the Finn went some way to repairing his reputation after taking a real beating in his two years as team mate to Lewis Hamilton at Mclaren. Mike Gascoyne's hurriedly put together Lotus was a deeply conventional car and was never likely to trouble the midfield, but both Kovalainen and team mate Trulli got on with the job of getting the most out of it. Assessing quite how well they were doing is rather tricky, as they were essentially in a private race with the Virgins, but both appeared surprisingly upbeat, and they usually got the better of Richard Branson's low-cost F1 team. Team boss Tony Fernandes appears serious, so there's a good chance the 2011 car, which will have a Red Bull gearbox, will be a more competitive proposition.

Toro Rosso youngsters Sebastian Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari looked to have got to grips with F1, and looked feisty on occasion, but neither did anything to persuade me he is a star in the making. Alguersuari's best drive came right at the end of the year, holding back Felipe Massa's much faster Ferrari for 9th in Abu Dhabi. Buemi usually appeared slightly the quicker of the two and scored the lion's share of the team's points, but I couldn't help but think that a team with a Red Bull chassis and a Ferrari engine ought to be achieving more. I'd be inclined to drop one of them and stick Ricciardo in the car next year.

Last, and by most accounts least, Bruno Senna, Karun Chandhok, Sakon Yamamoto and Christian Klien all found their time wasted driving the ashes of Adrian Campos' F1 dream. The HRT was frankly embarrassingly slow, given it was the work of the world's premier off-the-peg racing car manufacturer, Dallara. Assessing their relative merits is rather tricky. Bruno Senna appeared a shade quicker than Chandhok, just as he did in GP2, though Senna's failure to out-pace Yamamoto suggests to me that he's nothing special either. Christian Klien reminded us all that he existed by stepping into the car on occasion. I hope he wasn't paying for the privilege...

If

2010-11-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

Last weekend was the first time since the Formula 1 World Championship was established in 1950 that four drivers went into the final round with a mathematical chance of becoming World Champion. The title battle might have lacked the personal edge and intensity of those between Senna and Prost in the late 80s and early 90s, or even that between Schumacher and Alonso in 2006, but in terms of the sheer number of serious contenders, I can't think of another season which compares.

In the end, it was Sebastian Vettel who walked away with the title. Readers of this blog will know that personally, I had hoped that Mark Webber would win the championship. Partly because he had always struck me as someone who had established a front-line F1 career against the odds, who for years had looked like he would never get the title-contending car I was always convinced his talent merited, and, in part simply because if he were to win the title, it would probably be the last time that the F1 World Champion is older than me.

Vettel, however, was a worthy winner. On balance, the man who most deserved to come away from the desert on Sunday with the winner's trophy. He made mistakes, yes: Clattering into the back of Jenson Button at Spa, eliminating himself in Istanbul when he moved across on Mark Webber, failing to abide by the safety car rules in Hungary. But, equally, he suffered more mechanical misfortune than any of is major title rivals: The engine that lapsed onto 7 cylinders in Bahrain; the faulty wheel bearing that took him out of contention in Australia while he was in a commanding lead; and finally, the engine failure in Korea, which looked to have robbed him of any realistic chance at the title. That he was able to triumph in spite of these set-backs was down in part to the fact that the Red Bull RB6 was the class of the field, but his own prodigious pace was equally significant. The ten pole positions, the times he drove away into the distance leaving everyone else wondering where he had gone – at Albert Park before the car broke, at Suzuka and, appropriately enough, at the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi.

That speed alone, though, might not have been enough for him to have secured the title were it not the unusually high error-rate of all the title contenders this year. As teams and drivers packed up under cover of darkness at Abu Dhabi last Sunday, Hamilton, Alonso and Webber might all have been ruing mistakes made, wondering what might have been. What if... Mark Webber, especially. Unlike the other two, he does not have a championship to his name, and at the age of 34, with what appears from the outside to be a somewhat frosty relationship with his own team, one has to wonder if the best opportunity he is ever likely to have has slipped through his fingers. He may be a couple of years younger than Schumacher was when he won his seventh title at Ferrari in 2004, but Vettel, who is only five years older than Webber's step-son, is only likely to get faster. Webber has to hope that the 2011 Red Bull is every bit as competitive as this year's. And even then, that might not be enough.

The lapse of concentration that saw him crash out of the Korean Grand Prix, throwing away a near certain second place and, given Vettel's retirement, perhaps a fifth victory. Had he won that race, he might well have found the team willing to order Vettel out of his way at Interlagos, and he would now be World Champion. Nor was that his only mistake. There was his almighty accident in Valencia, after he ran into the back of Heikki Kovalainen's much slower Lotus, his scrappy early races in Bahrain and, especially, Australia, from which he really should have scored more points, given the potential of the Red Bull. And leaving the door open for Sebastian Vettel at the start in Malaysia after securing pole.

Lewis Hamilton's Mclaren was not, over the season as a whole, anything like a match for the Red Bulls, and by the end of the year, Ferrari had also appeared to have moved ahead of the Woking team on performance. As such, three wins and fourth in the points table was not a bad result. But he could have had so much more had he been a little more patient at the start at Monza, had he given Mark Webber a little more room while trying to pass at Singapore and had he taken a slightly more measured approach to the wet races in China and Australia, not been panicked into making the wrong calls on tyres. That, in spite of these errors, and notwithstanding the fact that the 2010 Mclaren was probably only the third quickest car this year, he was still in with an outside chance of the championship at the final race, is testament to Hamilton's incredible natural speed. Discussing the merits of the current F1 grid with a friend and former kart-racer earlier in the year, he expressed the view that in terms of sheer pace, Hamilton was on a different level from anyone else on the grid, even Alonso, even Kubica, even Vettel. And there were times, especially those occasions where he was running top three or four while his world champion team mate was struggling to get out of the midfield, when it was hard to disagree. 2010, though, was not to be his year, and just as with his first season, back in 2007, it was his occasional hot-headedness which prevented him claiming a second world title. If he ever learns to tame that impetuous streak, he might dominate the sport in the manner of Michael Schumacher in the first part of the last decade.

It was probably a good thing that, thanks to a rather eccentric pit strategy from Ferrari in Abu Dhabi and the near impossibility of overtaking there (tip for the track owners – get rid of the stupid fiddly bit leading up to the hairpin before the back straight), Fernando Alonso was denied a third title. Had Alonso secured the championship by less than 7 points, then it would be hard to forget the team's barely disguised order to Massa to hand victory to him at Hockenheim, which seemed about as clear a case of team orders as ever I have seen (I don't have a problem with team orders in F1, but by my reading, the rulebook does). Credit where it is due to Alonso, though. When he was nearly 50 points adrift at the mid-way point in the season, he was insistent that he would win the world title this year. At the time it seemed a most implausible claim. With Ferrari struggling to match Renault and Mercedes at Istanbul and Silverstone, never mind Mclaren or Red Bull, and with but one win to his name at that point, it seemed unlikely to say the least. And yet, he would go into the final race with an 8 point lead, knowing that a top 2 finish would secure in the title no matter what. His wins at Monza and at Singapore, under intense pressure, were a good illustration of why many consider him the most complete driver on the grid. Had he and his team not been frightened into an early pit stop that left him staring at Vitaly Petrov's gearbox all evening, his name would by now have joined those of Lauda, Stewart, Senna and Piquet as three-time champions.

Yet it would be wrong the blame the failure to bring the title back to Maranello entirely on that pit-call. Had Alonso not dropped his car into the barriers at Spa, had he not crashed out on Saturday at Monaco, forcing a back-row start at the one circuit where you really don't want to start at the back of the grid, had he handed back track position to Robert Kubica at Silverstone and avoided the drive-through penalty, he might well have had the title secured long before they got to Abu Dhabi. As with Hamilton and Webber, Alonso could not blame bad fortune alone for his eventual defeat.

Actually, the one man among the title contenders who didn't really make a mistake worthy of the name all year was reigning world champion, Jenson Button. His problem was that, not withstanding those two classy victories in the rain at Albert Park and Shanghai, he simply wasn't quite fast enough. Typically about a couple of tenths down on Hamilton over a single lap, he continued to struggle in qualifying and his race pace, while better, wasn't quite enough to compensate, given how difficult passing is in modern F1. Whether by accident or design, Mclaren appear to have hired the perfect number 2 to Lewis Hamilton. Quicker than Kovalainen ever was, any driver capable of out-pacing Hamilton in the rain, as he did at Shanghai, has a fair mastery of his art, but I expect Button may join the long list of English one-time champions. He rarely took points off the younger Briton and there didn't appear to be any of the tension evident in relations between Webber and Vettel over at Red Bull. One more season at Mclaren then off to enjoy his retirement?

It may have been book-ended by two processions in the Middle East, but the 2010 season turned out to be something of a vintage year. The most open championship battle that I can recall in a quarter century of following the sport. Some classic races along the way, and a new world champion crowned at the age of just 23. If Mercedes and Renault (or Lotus, or Lotus Renault, or whatever they end up being known as) can get their act together next year, 2011 could be even more open.

Looking Back - Part 2

2010-10-31T02:30:00.000-07:00

A fortnight back, I wrote an article which looked at the changes that have taken place in the F1 world over the last 25 years. That piece focused on the changes which have taken place in the design of the cars themselves - the move from relatively aerodynamically simple, manual transmission 1.5l turbo cars with upwards of 1200BHP in qualifying trim to normally aspirated 2.4 litre cars with not much more than half the power, but which are still perhaps 8-10 seconds a lap faster.

There have however, been equally seismic changes to the sport itself - the way it is run, the shape of the Grand Prix weekend, and most obviously, where the races are held. In 1985, there was a race in every continent except Asia (it would be another couple of years before the Japanese Grand Prix emerged as a permanent fixture) but 11 of the 16 races took place in Europe. This year, there has been a race in every continent except Africa (post-apartheid South Africa might seem a much more acceptable place for international sport than was the case back in the mid 1980s, but it would seem there is not anyone wanting to pay CVC/FOM's fees) but far and away the biggest change has been that the championship is much less Euro-centric.

We've lost the Portuguese, San Marino, Dutch and Austrian Grands Prix, taking the total down from 11 to 9. A more significant change when one remembers that the calendar itself has expanded from 16 to 19 races. Asia, however, now has no less than 8 races, which perhaps reflects changes in the overall balance of economic power in the world over the last 25 years. This change, though, has not yet let to an influx of Asian drivers into the sport. There have been a smattering of Japanese drivers over the last 25 years, though none has won a race and - while some of them were quite competent - none particularly looked like they would. More recently, there have been a couple of Indian drivers - Karun Chandhok and Narain Karthikeyan, though I can't help but feel that they have been there because Bernie Ecclestone thought their presence might be helpful in bringing about an Indian Grand Prix rather than because either looked like they would achieve anything behind the wheel.

Perhaps the location of the tracks has not been the most significant change though, really. Look at the old Zeltweg or Zandvoort circuits - with their winding up hill and down dale layouts and basic facilities, and compare with the expensive architecture and wide open expanses of somewhere like the Shanghai International Circuit or Sepang. The former looked almost like they were natural features of the countryside, like tarmac rivers. The latter look very obviously designed.

There are a number of reasons for the change in the shape and design of F1 circuits over the last quarter century. For one thing, it's much harder than it used to be to get planning permission to build a racing circuit in the kind of pristine countryside in which Spa Francorchamps or the old Nordschliefe were built. Brownfield industrial sites and run down docks, on the other hand, a ten a penny. Perhaps more importantly, safety requirements have become much more stringent – run-off areas are now vastly greater than they were back in the mid 1980s. Look how close the barriers were to the circuit at some of the quicker corners at the old Zeltweg, for instance. As a result, it is much harder to build an F1-standard circuit that fits naturally into the countryside. Look, for instance, at the chicanes that were inserted into Imola following the deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger in 1994. The reason for them? Extending the run-off area would have meant felling ancient trees and diverting a river. It is for similar reasons that I was never much inclined to take seriously the mid-2000s rumours that F1 would be heading back to Brands Hatch.

If you're going to build an F1-standard circuit, far and away the easiest way to do it is to buy some waste ground which gives you the freedom to do whatever you want with it. Vast tarmac run-off areas, the ability to have the track go which ever way the designer wants, without having to take account of natural features like rivers or hills. At its best, the result can be quite appealing – I still rather like the Sepang circuit with its mix of long straights, slow hairpins providing overtaking opportunities, and fast sweeping variable-radius corners that test both car and driver's balance and feel. On the other hand, Bahrain, Shanghai and Abu Dhabi do little for me, and certainly don't make up for the loss of Zeltweg, Zandvoort, or even the old Paul Ricard circuit in France. And the Dutch, in particular, were (and still are) passionate about the sport in a way that the Bahrainis and Chinese do not appear to be.

If the cars have got faster, the circuits more expansive and less dangerous, then what of the men behind the wheel? Perhaps the most significant change from the driver's point of view can be gleaned by looking at the list of drivers entered for the opening race in Rio that year. By the season's end, two were no longer with us – Germans Manfred Winkelhock and Stefan Bellof both losing their lives in sportscar races that year. A year later, Elio De Angelis would perish in a testing accident in the low-line Brabham BT55 at Paul Ricard. They would be followed, in 1994 by Ayrton Senna and, six years later, by Michele Alboreto, who died testing an Audi sportscar at the Lausitzring. I hope it is not unduly optimistic to speculate that a similar mortality rate is unlikely to befall the grid of 2010. While motorsport may never be truly safe, in the workaday sense of the word, and while by 1985, it was already much, much less dangerous than it had been in earlier times, there can be little doubting that drivers of that era were forced to contemplate their mortality in a way that their counterparts today are not.

And this, I think, is a part of the explanation for a lot of the changes we have seen in the Grand Prix driver's life over that period. 1985 marked perhaps the crossover point between the earlier, free-wheeling amateur spirit of the 1950s and 60s and the much more sterile, professional attitude of today's racers. Drivers who always knew that it could all end suddenly tomorrow might have been more independent-minded, less inclined to toe the party line for their teams, more willing to speak their minds. It is hard to imagine a James Hunt, or even a Niki Lauda or a Keke Rosberg, lasting long in today's more sanitised sport. And perhaps because of this, or perhaps because the sport was not quite so hyper-competitive as it is now, you would find drivers who would smoke, who would drink heavily, and who took the view that as long as you could get through the race in one piece, there was little reason to compromise your lifestyle with an unduly onerous fitness regime.

A number of developments came along to change this. Niki Lauda, a man who had a very methodical, professional approach to his sport from the outset, employed a fitness guru by the name of Willi Dungl to speed his way back to full health after his fiery accident at the Nurburgring in 1976, and in the years that followed, other drivers began to follow suit, seeing that there was an advantage to be had from being in better physical shape than those around you by the end of a 2 hour Grand Prix. Even without that search for the unfair advantage, the increasing cornering speeds of more modern F1 cars might have forced drivers to spend more time in the gym. When Nico Rosberg tested his father's title winning Williams last year, he remarked on how physically easy it was to drive – because while it might not have had power-steering and he might have had to physically change gear, the downforce and g-loadings through the quick corners were nothing like those which the cars of 2010 are capable of.

But the increasing importance of physical fitness was only one part of the story. Where once, drivers were very much their own bosses, the influx of really serious money, much of it from international corporations mindful of such things as 'brand image' has played an extensive part in turning drivers into salaried mouthpieces of their employers. And so it is that even highly respected journalists now find it difficult to get face-time with drivers without a PR-minder being present, and drivers are expected to be 'on message' and never to be critical of the team or engine supplier who is pouring millions into the sport – a good chunk of which is going directly to the driver's bank account.

However, the single biggest change to the sport has been not in the cars, which are essentially more refined versions of those being run 25 years earlier, nor in the drivers, who are at heart still young men in a hurry who believe themselves the fastest in the world, nor even in the circuits, which might have more run-off (and are certainly in some bloody odd places) but in the sport's place in the world as a whole. It has gone from being an essentially European minority-interest sport to a worldwide and mainstream entertainment. Thirty years ago, I wouldn't have staked my life on the man on the street knowing who Alan Jones, Didier Pironi or Gilles Villeneuve were. But I would be very surprised if that man's son wouldn't know who Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso or Michael Schumacher are now.

And what drove this was television. By 1985, the whole F1 season was being broadcast on the BBC, but this had only been the case for five to ten years, and the sport had yet to become a part of the popular consciousness in the way it is now (come to that, very often all the BBC showed was a 35 minute highlight programme, especially if the timezone in which the race was held got in the way of Eastenders, or whatever it was they were showing on a Sunday evening.) The man who would drive F1's TV revolution, of course, was Bernie Ecclestone. By 1985, he was already a significant figure within the sport, but he was, as the owner of the Brabham team (which scored its last F1 victory with Nelson Piquet at Paul Ricard that year – a circuit Ecclestone would later buy) he was only the head of the Formula One Constructors Association – the team's 'union' which had wrested control of the commercial rights to the sport from the FISA following the FISA/FOCA battle of the early 1980s.

Over the course of the following 25 years, though, Ecclestone would take control of the sport's commercial rights from the teams who were perhaps not really inclined to fight him too hard. After all, the likes of Mclaren, Williams, et al, were fundamentally in business to build racing cars, not to act as sports promoters. And Ecclestone appeared to be doing a good job for them. He might have been taking the lion's share of the vastly inflated television revenues the sport was now bringing in, but a small share of a large fortune beat a large percentage of not very much. And the men running the teams perhaps didn't much begrudge Ecclestone his fortune – thought he deserved it.

But I wonder if the likes of Ron Dennis, Frank Williams et al later came to regret this. When, thanks to a deal with the FIA's Max Mosley, who had always worked hand in glove with Ecclestone, he found himself in a position to sell the commercial rights to a third party, the sport eventually came to be owned by a venture capital fund with little intrinsic interest in the sport. Whose primary motivation was always to obtain the maximum return for its investors. And while CVC Capital Partners clearly wouldn't want to kill the goose which has laid so many golden eggs for them, I do wonder whether the sport would be gravitating towards Asia (where, Japan aside, the locals don't seem much interested) while Latin America, for example, has been ignored, aside from one race in Brazil, in spite of having produced many of the sport's leading drivers over the last half century and in spite of races in Brazil and Mexico typically drawing in crowds that promoters in Turkey or Malaysia would kill for.

I hope that, a quarter of a century on from now, we are talking about how F1 has taken off in Asia, about the great drivers from Malaysia, South Korea, India and the Middle East, rather than about how a once great sport was run into the ground in pursuit of short term profit through the hosting of races in parts of the world where nobody besides those paying the bills were really interested.

New Shores

2010-10-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

Regular readers will know that I'm a bit of a stick-in-the-mud purist on the question of Bernie Ecclestone's desire to always be dragging the F1 circus to new corners of the globe. OK, so I can live without Magny Cours, although it's not a bad circuit, and I don't much miss the ersatz A1-Ring (a pale imitation of the old Osterreichring which once graced that site) . But the thought of losing Spa Francorchamps because the governments of Abu Dhabi or Bahrain are willing to shovel cartloads of cash FOM's way for their white elephant Grands Prix on mickey-mouse circuits that nobody goes to watch leaves me more than a little worried for the future of the sport.

So you might expect me to despair of the latest addition to the F1 calendar - the Korean Grand Prix. And when stories circulated in the weeks leading up to the race that the track was nowhere near being ready for its debut on 24 October, a part of me secretly hoped that FOM might at last get their comeuppance, and that the brakes might be put on races in parts of the world with no motor racing tradition and no local interest. As with the recent Commonwealth Games in Delhi, though, stories that the venue was only half built turned out to be a touch exaggerated (a friend who was on the Manx shooting team tells me that the horror stories about the athlete's village can only have come from people who'd spent their entire lives in five star hotels) and the race went ahead.

And my first impression of the circuit itself? Well I don't think it's quite up there with the best of Herman Tilke's work - the Otodrom Istanbul and Sepang, which perhaps uniquely among the German architect's works, merit comparison with the classic European circuits, but it didn't look too bad. A couple of long straights followed by first/second gear corners which appear to be a necessity if passing is to occur in a modern-day F1 car, and some moderately interesting off-camber medium speed stuff in the latter part of the lap which caught out not a few drivers over the course of the weekend. The relatively gripless freshly laid asphalt and the inclement weather might have helped, but it provided a reasonably entertaining Sunday afternoon's action once things got going. Whether it will make for good racing on a dry day once the tarmac has cured properly I'm not so sure, but at the very least, it's considerably more likely to than Valencia.

The biggest contrast with other recent additions to the F1 calendar though - particularly the three races in the near and middle east, is that the locals appear to be interested. Insofar as its possible to tell from the television pictures, the grandstands - or at least those which were finished before the race - looked reasonably full and there were tales of long queues of traffic as people tried to get into the venue on the Sunday morning. Not, perhaps, what the organisers were wanting , but it strikes me as the right kind of problem for a new venue to be having. Certainly preferable to Turkey and Shanghai's headscratching around how best to hide the fact the grandstands were empty.

One reason I was a bit sceptical about the idea of a Korean Grand Prix when it first appeared on the 2010 calendar is that the country has little in the way of a real motorsports culture to speak of. Can you name a Korean racing driver? No, didn't think so. Come to that, before the Yeongam circuit opened for the business, did the country even have a race circuit? (I'm genuinely interested - if you know, do get in touch - for once, google is failing me...) There is, though, an important difference between the races in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi and the South Korean race. While those Middle Eastern States are hereditary monarchies which are at best only partially democratic, South Korea emerged from military dictatorship over 20 years ago, and is now described by the CIA world handbook is a mature democracy. It is not, in other words, a country in which those in charge are so far detached from the ordinary people that they can throw hundreds of millions at absurd vanity projects like the neon monument to bad taste that is the Yas Marina circuit. If a democratically elected government in a country with a free press is going to agree to spend significant sums of money attracting the F1 world to its shores, they will have to be sure that people will be supportive of the idea.

I'm sceptical about the whole idea of Government-funded Grands Prix. I think the sport would be well advised in the long run to stay away from the tax-payers' pockets and if FOM weren't the heavily leveraged play-thing of a private equity house, it would be quite capable of surviving, and indeed making a good profit, without the need to charge event hosting fees that no race, no matter how well attended, can hope to recoup from gate receipts alone. But a race that forms part of a broader plan to regenerate one of the more backward parts of South Korea as an automotive and technological hub makes a certain amount of sense. And for once, I found myself thinking that the idea that a Grand Prix can help promote an area as a tourist resort might not be an entirely false one. The pre-race 'local colour' segments about Bahrain, Malaysia and Abu Dhabi have never left me wanting to visit those places, but I couldn't help thinking that, while the circuit might look like a giant building site, the surrounding countryside looked pretty stunning.

Equally, I do concede that there is a strong case for F1, and motorsport more generally, breaking new ground, going to countries where the sport has not yet established itself. South Korea is now a prosperous, fast developing country, and there is no reason why, in the medium term, the sport couldn't take off there. Certainly there appeared to be a good deal more interest than in Turkey. After all, there was a time when Japan had no home-grown motor racing culture to speak of, and that's hardly something which could be said of the place today. And South Korea, unlike Turkey or Bahrain, has a significant motor industry - Hyundai have already dipped their toe in the WRC, and I wouldn't be surprised if eventually they made the leap into F1. So a qualified thumbs-up to the Yeongam circuit and the South Korean Grand Prix, I think. Provided we get to keep Spa, Monza and Silverstone.

Looking Back

2010-10-17T05:27:00.000-07:00

I realised the other weekend that it had been exactly a quarter of a century since I went to my first Grand Prix. I've written before on the impression that that trip left on my 7 year old self and on the particular significance of that race - the day on which Alain Prost secured the first of his four world titles, and on which Nigel Mansell finally broke his duck and won his first Grand Prix. The realisation that it has been 25 years since I was sat on the banking at Pilgrim's Drop got me thinking about how the sport has changed in the intervening years.

I find it a little hard to comprehend that 1985 is now as distant as 1960 was when I went through the gates at Brands Hatch. Back in 1960, Formula 1 cars were cigar-shaped space-frame devices with less than 300 BHP on tap. Front engined designs were fast being made obsolete by the success of the Cooper and Lotus mid-engined chassis, but had not yet disappeared from the F1 grid and the cars still ran on skinny grooved tyres, much as they had done since the early days of the sport at the beginning of the century.

By 1985, Formula 1 cars were carbon-fibre monocoques with big, fat slick tyres and front and rear wings, bodywork plastered with sponsors' logos - and on a causal inspection, they really don't look so radically different from the cars which lined up on the grid at Suzuka last weekend. A bit stubby and simple, but the same basic shape.

In one way, the cars were considerably ahead of the modern F1 car. The 1.5 litre turbocharged engines provided by Honda and BMW were, in single-lap qualifying trim, capable of generating well north of 1000 BHP - a figure which today's rev-limited 2.4 litre normally aspirated V8s don't even come close to (although it must be said that an engine technician of 1985 would have found the idea of an 18,000rpm rev limit a touch unnecessary, given that nobody was pushing their engines beyond about 12,000rpm at the most, back then).

Scratch beneath the surface, though, and the changes over the last 25 years have been immense. The really game-changing technical innovations - active suspension, traction control, continuously variable transmission - have all been and gone, falling foul of the regulators desire to keep costs, and lap times, under control (the last of these - continuously variable transmission, never raced, though Williams did head a significant way down to road towards developing a race-ready system before it was banned). Only the replacement of stick-operated manual gearboxes with the steering-wheel mounted paddle-change semi-automatic boxes, debuted by Ferrari in 1989, have remained.

Instead, the over-arching story of the last quarter of a century of race car development has been one of ruthless optimisation of a basic concept that, by 1985, had just about been settled upon. And to get an idea of just how successful this has been, look at the pole times at Monaco - the only circuit in use in 1985 which is still in use today, substantially unaltered (though the walls have gotten a touch further away). In 1985, Ayrton Senna stuck his Lotus Renault on pole with a 1.20.450. Earlier this year, Mark Webber claimed the top spot for Red Bull (also Renault powered, as it happens) with a 1.13.826. Nearly 7 seconds faster. And remember, that this leap forward has come in spite of restrictions on wing size, the imposition of control tyres, rev-limited engines that must last 2-3 complete Grands Prix and a slightly raised minimum weight limit. A senior engineer interviewed for Motorsport Magazine a couple of years back reckoned that, with today's knowledge, a car built to 1985 rules would be limited mainly by the ability of its driver to remain conscious through the quicker corners given the G-loadings that it would be possible to generate. The FIA's ever more restrictive rulebook has been, at least in part, a necessary response to the advances of designers and engineers, ensuring a degree of sanity is retained.

The really big story of the last quarter of a century of F1 car design has been the phenomenal improvements made in the understanding of how to generate aerodynamic downforce. While an F1 car of 2010 might have the same basic shape as its 1985 predecessor, it is a much more intricately sculpted machine - its form dictated by the cumulative knowledge generated by hundreds of thousands of man hours of some of the most talented aerodynamicists in the world. The increased use of first wind-tunnels, and later, computer simulations of wind tunnels, to refine the flow of the air over the car, making that airflow press the car down onto the ground, has led cornering speeds to spiral far beyond that ever seen during the 'ground effect' era of the early 1980s. And the sheer number of people involved in the design of a car has mushroomed since the days when a car could meaningfully be said to be the work of a single designer - something which was, just about, sort of, still the case in the mid 1980s.

There was a time, after all, when taking Eau Rouge flat in qualifying was a mark of supreme confidence. Now, in a good car, it's flat in the rain, and in the dry, it's barely more than a kink in the road. Other technological advances - not least the evolution of data logging and telemetry equipment to give teams far more objective information about what the car is actually doing on the circuit than could ever be provided by the subjective impressions of even the most technically astute racing driver, have all helped to drive this incremental improvement forward at a truly impressive rate.

But what of the next 25 years? Assuming I'm still around to see them, what will Grand Prix cars look like by the time I near my 7th decade? Perhaps the story will be the same - an onward march of small, iterative improvements to a basic design which had been settled while I was still in primary school. Maybe... But there are reasons to think that might not be the case. For one thing, how plausible is it that the racing car of 2035 will still be running on fossil fuels? And if it is not, what kinds of technological breakthrough might we see in engine technology over the next decade and a half. It could be an interesting ride...

Radio on the Television

2010-10-11T13:37:00.000-07:00

The quality of television coverage of Formula 1 in Britain took a quantum leap when the BBC took over the reins from ITV at the beginning of 2009. The end of mid-race ad-breaks has been a relief. I've never forgotten ITV's decision to cut to commercials in the dying laps of the San Marino Grand Prix in 2005 while Alonso and Schumacher were fighting for all their worth for victory and am glad I no longer need to keep a radio by the telly while watching the race.

More than that, though, the BBC have really taken advantage of digital-age technologies in a way that ITV never did. We've been treated to the option of watching the whole race from a succession of in-car cameras, a choice of commentary teams - if you're not keen on Legard and Brundle, there's Croft and Davidson, though sadly, not yet the possibility of listening to Brundle and Croft - and their latest innovation (a website only feature, I think, though I don't own a television and watch everything on IPlayer, so I don't know), the real time 'car tracker' enabling you to see where everyone is on the circuit at any given point in time. OK, they've not got everything right - I could happily live without the forced banter between Eddie Jordan and David Coulthard - but on the whole I've been very impressed by the job they've done. And Lee McKenzie's much easier on the eye than Jim Rosenthal.

I was initially rather sceptical of the merit of another innovation the BBC have brought to race weekend coverage - the webcasting of free practice sessions. Now, I don't know what kind of an audience these shows get - until last weekend, even I hadn't bothered tuning in and I probably sit close to the sad obsessive fan end of the spectrum than most, but it did strike me as something which, to use the marketers' lingo, would have a 'niche audience'. After all, it's not as if drivers are competing for anything during free practice. It really is just 'watching cars go round in circles', which even I can't summon up much enthusiasm for.

Actually, though, the format worked quite well. And mainly because what is happening on track is only a minor part of the show. It is essentially an hour and a half long radio discussion programme on the subject of F1,with some passing comment on who appears to be going quickly, all in the knowledge that Friday practice times never mean very much anyway. And all with moving pictures thrown in (though it's also broadcast on 5live radio, where it probably doesn't lose much).

And so Maurice Hamilton treated us to his reminiscences about the infamous 1990 championship decider which was settled at the first corner when Senna torpedoed Prost's Ferrari (a move which his countryman Felipe Massa appeared to try to re-enact at the beginning of this year's race). This was interspersed with discussion of Red Bull's front wing - the five different versions they trialled on Webber's car during the race last year and Christian Horner's growing frustration with those accusing his team of cheating, and questions from viewers about how Spoon corner got its name. Answer: It looks like a spoon. Which prompted one of the commentary team to suggest that the series of bends leading up the hill should really be called the 'knuckledusters'. Either is preferable to 'turn 14'.

Karun Chandhok, who is often part of the commentary team since being dropped from HRT, texted in to complain about how early he had to get up to watch free practice and Maurice Hamilton shared his memories of Peter Warr, who had died during the week. The former Lotus team manager had actually won the first Japanese Grand Prix - a sportscar race in 1962 - driving a Lotus sportscar but it was the famous shot of him celebrating his young charge Ayrton Senna's first GP win in torrential rain at Portugal in 1985 that stuck in Hamilton's mind.

The more relaxed format of free practice also gives the crew a chance to speak to people behind the scenes, and so we were treated to a reasonably long interview with Virgin's John Booth on both their experience of the 2010 season and their hopes for next year and Lotus' Mike Gascoygne also dropped by for a chat.

Truth be told, I don't have the time to listen to this regularly - even I can't spare four hours every second weekend to listen to Crofty and Davidson shooting the breeze while drivers make system checks, get a feel for the relative merits of prime and option tyres and all the rest. And in all honesty, both Joe Saward's Sidepodcast-hosted An Aside With Joe and the excellent Motorsport Monthly Podcast are more interesting to listen to. But I'll probably tune in to get an early glimpse of what the new Korean GP track is like, providing that race actually happens.

The Strange Death of American Single-Seater Racing

2010-10-03T11:22:00.000-07:00

Remember when America used to produce single-seater drivers of real standing? AJ Foyt, Mario Andretti, Al Unser Jr, Bobby Rahal, Rick Mears, et cetera.... Drivers from a time when the Indy Car Series was, if not quite on the same level as the F1 World Championship in terms of its global significance, then at least within touching distance.

Then came the infamous IRL/Champ Car split of the mid-1990s, with Tony George's Indy Racing League laying claim to the blue riband Indy 500 and the Champ Car Series taking all the big name drivers, teams and most of the other individual races of any significance. Then years on from the split, both series were on their knees and it was clear that some kind of reunification was the only way that either would survive. The way things turned out, the slightly more virile Indy Racing League effectively swallowed up the remains of the Champ Car World Series (notable assets, Newman Haas Lanigan Racing, KV Racing, the Long Beach Grand Prix and, er, that was about it). Reunification occurred more or less by default, the weaker of the two series reaching the point where it was no longer really a going concern.

Two years on, its hard to tell whether the creation of the Indy Car Series from the ashes of the IRL and the Champ Car World Series marks the rebirth of American Single-Seater racing or merely another staging post on its inevitably decline into insignificance. It doesn't appear to penetrate the popular consciousness of the American public to anything like the extent it once did. It is telling, I suspect, that the two drivers in the field who have 'name recognition' among the wider public are Danica Patrick - famous chiefly for not quite becoming the first woman to win the Indy 500, and Helio Castroneves, who is known to TV viewers as the winner of 'Dancing With The Stars'. Last weekend, a close fought battle for the series title between reigning champion Dario Franchitti and Penske's man of the moment Will Power was settled in the Scot's favour. The battle between road-course specialist Power and jack-of-all-trades Franchitti was an intriguing one, and the likes of Scott Dixon, Tony Kanaan, Ryan Briscoe and Helio Castroneves all figured at various points.

However, it's hard to ignore the fact that the races have been taking place on one continent - North America - while the leading drivers are coming from every corner of the world except the US. There's Kanaan, Meira and, Matos, Viso and Castroneves from South America, Wheldon, Lloyd, Wilson, Conway and champion Franchitti from the UK, Dixon, Power and Briscoe from the Antipodes, Mutoh and Sato from Japan and a small sprinkling of continental Europeans in Baguette and Di Silvestro. In Tagliani and Tracy, there are even a couple of decently quick Canadians.

But the series is, despite the races in Motegi and Sao Paulo, overwhelmingly US-based, and you have to go down to 7th in the points table to find the highest placed American driver in the field, Ryan Hunter-Reay. He is one of just three American drivers who raced full time in the series last year, along with Marco Andretti and Danica Patrick. And while all three of them have won races in their career, none of them strike me as really first rate racers. Andretti impressed me at first, but seems to be running his career in reverse, and has never matched the pace he showed in his debut year in the IRL in 2006. There is a reason why Penske and Ganassi, who have dominated the series over the last three years, have opted for foreign talent.

To be fair, another son of a famous father, Graham Rahal, who didn't exactly embarrass himself when paired with Sebastien Bourdais as an inexperienced teenager at Newman Haas back in 2007, found a berth for most of the season, albeit acting very much as a gun for hire, driving for no less than four teams over the course of the season. It would be interesting to see what he might be capable of given a regular drive in a truly competitive car, but I've not seen anything to suggest he's on quite the same level as Franchitti, Power, Dixon or Castroneves.

So where are all the American single-seater stars? After all, it's a big country with a population close to that of Western Europe and one with a significant motorsports culture. And it's not like they've all gone overseas to dominate Formula 1! The short answer is that they're all going round in circles in NASCAR stock cars. In an earlier era, before Bill France and sons saw an opportunity to take advantage of the IRL/Champ Car feud to turn NASCAR into the US' premier motorsport championship, I rather think the likes of Jeff Gordon, Denny Hamlin, Jimmy Johnson and Matt Kenseth would be fighting out for victory in the Indy 500 rather than the Daytona 500.

As it is, when Scott Speed found himself booted out of Toro Rosso half way through 2007, it was to NASCAR, rather than the Indy Car Series, which his experience might have suggested he would have been better suited, that he went. And if even drivers who came up through the European junior ladder - and let's not forget, Speed finished 3rd in the inaugural GP2 championship and didn't exactly embarrass himself in F1 - elect to go stock car racing, it goes to show how little regard there is these days in the US for the Indy Car Series.

Don't forget, either, that the last really successful American single seater driver, three-time IRL champion Sam Hornish, upped sticks and went off to race in NASCAR at the end of 2007. Danica Patrick, probably the most well known American single seater racer, dipped her toe in NASCAR's waters this year, and probably only the fact that she looked frankly out of her depth is likely to keep her in the Indy Car Series for the time being.

Surely though, not every US-born driver is interested only in trading paint, going round in circles, driving 1960s-era technology NASCAR stockers? There must be drivers for whom the lure of what they call 'road racing' is too much to resist, who would far rather ply their trade at Laguna Seca, Road America or Watkins Glen than exclusively on identikit ovals? So where are they?

It's hard to be sure, but I can't help thinking that what is holding back budding American single-seater drivers is the sheer competitiveness of the European junior formulae. Where many of the best young drivers in the USA are pushed towards stock car racing from an early age because - simply - that's where the money is, the junior single seater formulae in the US are dominated to a significant extent by ex-pat Europeans who have cut their teeth in a vastly more competitive environment than is presented by the Star Mazda or Skip Barber formulae where the Americans will have learned their trade.

And its noticeable that, even at the very top of the American single seater ladder, the field is made up of drivers whose burning ambition was to become Formula 1 World Champion, but who for various reasons, found that path blocked. Perhaps because they didn't quite have what it took and Indycar racing was the next best thing, perhaps because they lacked the connections and sponsorship to make their way through the fiercely competitive upper ranks of the European junior series (where exactly do you find the £1m or so a season in a competitive team in GP2 costs?) After all, Will Power didn't exactly stand out in British Formula 3 when he raced there in 2004, and Dario Franchitti was easily beaten to the F3 title ten years earlier by Jan Magnussen. Likewise, drivers like Briscoe, Kanaan, Castroneves and Wheldon all looked good in their junior careers without appearing exceptional. And it is noticeable that the drivers in the field who did make it as far as Formula 1 - Takuma Sato and Justin Wilson, were not conspicuously successful when they got there. The end result is that the Indy Car Series is not the pinnacle of American motorsport so much as a dumping ground for people who didn't quite make it in Europe. Because Europe's second division of single seater racers is, these days, a good bit quicker than America's best.

Who goes where?

2010-09-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

It has reached that point in the year where the focus of many a driver and team is as much on the season coming as on the dog end of the one currently in train. Not so much, perhaps, if you are Red Bull, Ferrari or Mclaren, and are still in the running for this year's championships, but for everyone else, there is the hope that 2011 will be better.

And inevitably that means drivers thinking about whether they can land themselves with a more competitive seat, and teams pondering whether a change of drivers might bring a change of fortunes. It is perhaps no coincidence that the top three teams are retaining exactly the same driver line up for 2011, while it is far from clear that this is the case anywhere further down the grid.

For drivers, the most promising vacancy at the moment is probably the one alongside Robert Kubica at Renault. After a dismal 2009, where even the talents of Fernando Alonso were insufficient to keep them from slipping into midfield mediocrity, the team would appear to be once more on an upward trajectory. Current number 2 driver Vitaly Petrov has not yet been ruled out - and Eric Bouillier has been remarkably frank about what is required of the young Russian, saying that he doesn't need to match Kubica, but he does need to show that he has the potential to get rather closer to him that he is managing at the moment, but one senses that La Regie are sniffing around to see if there are better prospects out there.

I'm not convinced by the wisdom of taking on Kimi Raikkonen, though to be fair, much depends on whether the Finn is feeling a renewed enthusiasm for F1 following his sabbatical in the World Rally Championship, or whether he (or his management) is simply casting around for a way to make money as it looks like Red Bull are becoming disillusioned with the marketing potential of their tie-up at Citroen. However, if the Finn meets with Boullier and convinces him that he's genuinely serious about giving F1 another shot then, providing his pecuniary demands are not excessive, he's probably the fastest man Renault are going to be able to hire. Certainly it will be interesting to see how he compares with Robert Kubica.

More likely though, if Petrov goes, it will be in order to be replaced by one of a number of drivers who would meet Renault's job spec of being a good solid number 2 who can be relied upon to rack up constructors championship points, and who are currently finding their talents wasted in uncompetitive machinery. Timo Glock and Heikki Kovalainen have both shown they are good, serious racing drivers and their talents have been largely wasted with Virgin and Lotus this year. While it's possible those teams might be rather better prepared next year (I've rather more faith in Fernandes' Lotus operation than in the awkward menage-a-trois between Wirth Research, Richard Branson and Manor Motorsport) a Renault seat would still look a more tempting prospect.

Then there's Nick Heidfeld, back for the moment at his spiritual home of Sauber after spending much of the year on the sidelines at Mercedes, hoping that Michael Schumacher might throw in the towel. Again, Renault would be accepting they're not hiring a future mega-star if they took him on, but he's certainly not slow - he's been teamed up with Raikkonen, Webber and Kubica in the past, and held his own against all three of them. Probably a better bet than Sauber, even if Heidfeld disregarded the awkward truth that Peter Sauber's choice of driver to sit alongside Kobayashi next year is likely to be governed by financial constraints rather than driving talent.

The other name that strikes me as a possible for Renault is Force India's Adrian Sutil. The Anglo-Indian team started the year well but have been gradually slipping back towards the rear of the midfield, and it seems to me that if the German rainmaster is to progress then he's going to have to find another ride. Assessing how quick he is has never been easy - he's easily had the beating of Tonio Liuzzi this year, but he didn't always look any quicker than Giancarlo Fisichella, and going back to his debut in the sport at Spyker, it is striking that HRT's Sakon Yamamoto wasn't that far off his pace. He'd be a gamble, but there have been odd hints - particularly when the heavens open - that he's got something special about him.

Although Renault might not be his only option. Of the top teams, Renault is the only one which officially has a vacancy but Martin Brundle mischievously noted that an awful lot of drivers were seen coming and going from the Mercedes motorhome over the Monza weekend earlier in the month. Nico Rosberg is almost certain to be driving for the team again next year, but I can hardly be alone in wondering whether Michael Schumacher will call time on his so far rather uninspired come-back, or should he not jump, whether the team might opt to push him. It would be an ignominious end to a long and tremendously successful career, but time and tide wait for no man...

... And if Mercedes is to remain a German 'super team' then Adrian Sutil might be a good fit. It has been said that a part of the motivation for Mercedes' involvement in the sport has been to increase its appeal to younger car buyers, and if that is their aim then Sutil perhaps makes more sense than Nick Heidfeld (who may be relatively young by any normal definition, but, at 33, is in F1 terms beginning to run out of time). As mentioned above, Timo Glock might also be available and if the team were prepared to pay Williams enough money to get them to release him, Willi Weber's new protege, Nico Hulkenberg would tick all the right marketability boxes, and more importantly, after a rather shaky start, has begun to regularly match and sometimes beat team mate Barrichello. Perhaps not the new Schumacher, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's now faster than the old one is these days.

So far, in considering Renault and Mercedes' options, I've not mentioned any young drivers still seeking to break into F1. The bad news for would-be F1 drivers is that those top teams which might have a vacancy have enough choices from among the established F1 drivers that I'd be surprised if either of them hired a rookie. The truth is that the options for drivers looking to get their first F1 ride in 2011 are looking rather limited.

Toro Rosso and Williams have yet to announce their line-ups for next year, but I wouldn't be especially surprised if both teams retained their current line-ups. Sauber have already announced that Kamui Kobayashi will be driving for them next year, so the vacancies are likely to be made up of the following: The second Sauber, one or possibly both seats at Force India and, perhaps, a seat or two at Lotus or Virgin if someone manages to pinch Kovalainen or Glock.

Scottish DTM driver Paul Di Resta is seemingly considered a shoe-in at Force India, and if hiring a driver who hasn't raced in single seaters since 2006 seems a rather eccentric choice, then it is worth remembering that he is the man who beat Sebastian Vettel to the F3 Euroseries title that year, and that his DTM career has taken off after he regularly started doing incredible things with a second string two-year old Mercedes in his debut season. Whether he's as good, or even better than Vettel, or ultimately turns out to be another driver with a strong junior record who doesn't quite cut it at the very highest level, only time will tell, but as a fellow Edinburgher, I'm glad he's getting a chance.

So who might the other hopefuls be? There's GP2 champion Pastor Maldonado, but after some stories over the summer that he was in talks with Sauber, things seem to have gone very quiet on that front of late. His problem, I suspect, is that he took a very long time to come good in GP2, and has had a wildly inconsistent career that would make him a bit of a gamble. He comes with plenty of cash, but almost certainly not as much as Telmex-backed Sergio Perez, the man whom he beat to the GP2 title. Perez was in only his second season in GP2 (as against Maldonado's 5th!) and the signing of fellow Telmex-backed driver Esteban Gutierrez as a test driver at Sauber suggests that he may have a chance with the Swiss team.

Beyond those two, it's not quite clear who else would be in the running for an F1 seat - Daniel Ricciardo has impressed me with his performances in the Renault World Series but as a Red Bull backed driver, he's unlikely to get a shot next year unless the team lose faith in Alguersuari or Buemi, both of whom have been doing a fairly decent job of late. And in any case, it might make more sense to give Ricciardo the benefit of another year gaining experience in GP2 if, as I reckon is likely, he takes the Renault World Series at his first attempt this year.

Certainly it makes more sense than taking a seat at HRT next year. Whether their struggles with the recalcitrant Dallaras have done anything to further the careers of Bruno Senna, Sakon Yamamoto or Karun Chandhok this year I rather doubt, and the simple truth is that, stuck in such a hopelessly uncompetitive car, there is a limit to what any driver can do. Even beating your team mate might depend as much on the vagaries of the machinery as on any difference between the drivers. Where Lotus look like they will make progress next year and Virgin at least look like they might do so, I see no reason to expect HRT to be any less hopeless than they have been this season. On the other hand, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they weren't on the grid at all. Which might be a blessing in disguise for some young F1 hopefuls.

Raikkonen's Progress

2010-09-21T11:06:00.001-07:00

Just a few days after Renault team principal Eric Boullier admitted that he had been approached by Kimi Raikkonen's management team regarding a seat with the team in 2011, the Finn took his first ever outright rally win last weekend. Now it was nothing to get too excited by - the Rallye Vosgien is an amateur affair, and anyone who knows roughly what he is doing shouldn't have too much trouble winning it if they have a works Citroen WRC at their disposal. But winning the event was, to be fair, not really the point. The rally was held in the countryside surrounding Strasbourg - the same part of the world in which the forthcoming Rallye France will take place. With the Citroen Junior Team having used up all 15 of its allotted test days for the year, this was the best way to provide the still inexperienced Raikkonen with some asphalt mileage ahead of the event.

After the best part of a year on the stages, though, how is Kimi's second career in rallying going? It all rather depends on what your expectations were. Some of the more excitable elements of the motorsports press seemed to think that he might be in the running for podiums on asphalt by the end of the year - and that is looking very unlikely. This, though, always struck me as something of a long shot. Rallying is really quite different to circuit racing, and but for a couple of outings in a Fiat Punto S2000 last year, the 2007 F1 World Champion had no real experience of the stages before this season. If David Coulthard and Ralf Schumacher have struggled adapting to DTM tin-tops, Raikkonen has faced an altogether tougher challenge. It's a little like the difference between a grass court specialist tennis player playing on clay, and a tennis pro being handed a badminton racket and trying to win the world title, if you will.

Let's not forget that Sebastien Loeb didn't find things any easier when he tried to go the other way. He might have looked impressive in testing for Toro Rosso and Red Bull a couple of years back, but it's always hard to know how much to read into testing times - a light fuel load and a new set of tyres can make any driver who knows roughly what they are doing look quick. When Loeb tested a GP2 car against the rest of the GP2 field last year (reportedly as a prelude to an aborted race debut with Toro Rosso at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix) he was last and two seconds off the pace. Not so slow as to be embarrassing, but equally, it was clear that he was no match for circuit drivers who have spent years doing nothing else. And if you were going to pick one rally driver out as having the kind of style that might translate to the circuit, it would be the ultra-precise Sebastien Loeb.

With his first points finish, for 8th, in Jordan, Raikkonen became only the second driver in history to score points in both the World Rally Championship and the Formula 1 World Championship. He's got a little way before he matches Carlos Reutemann's podium finish in a Peugeot 205 T16 on the 1985 Argentine Rally, but it's worth bearing in mind that the Argentine former F1 driver finished a whole half hour behind the winner. That said, had the World Rally Championship existed in the late 60s, all-rounder Vic Elford would have got in there first, he did win the Monte Carlo Rally in 1968 and scored a handful of F1 points finishes.

Both Raikkonen's points finishes and Reutemann's podium point to a fundamental difference between World Championship rallying and Formula 1. Aside from a few front runners, there is not typically the same strength in depth in a WRC event that there is at a Grand Prix. At the moment, there are perhaps as few as six really fast serious professionals competing full time in the WRC: Sebastien Loeb, Dani Sordo, Sebastien Ogier, Petter Solberg, Mikko Hirvonen and Jari-Matti Latvala. Behind them are a clutch of competent, experienced paying amateurs and semi-professionals: Federico Villagra, Matthew Wilson (there mainly because his father runs the Ford team), Henning Solberg, Mads Ostberg et cetera. It is as if, in Formula 1, behind the front runners like Hamilton, Alonso, Vettel, Kubica et al, the rest of the field was made up of a bunch of also-rans from the back half of the current GP2 and Renault World Series fields who happened to have the cash to pay for the ride.

It's always been true to some extent of rallying, but with only two manufacturers in the sport at the present, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that there is little strength in depth in the WRC at the moment. And it's hard to know what to make of the fact that Raikkonen has generally been able, just about to hang on to the back of this group in recent rallies. A sign that he's learning quickly, or merely that he's being flattered by a weak WRC field? Only in Bulgaria, where the Fords seemed to be really struggling, was Raikkonen trading times with the likes of Latvala and Hirvonen, rather than Wilson and Villagra.

I do rather wonder whether, by jumping straight into a WRC machine for a full season, Raikkonen is trying to run before he can walk. He might perhaps have learned more by spending a low key year in the Intercontinental Rally Challenge , learning his new trade at the wheel of something a little less powerful, away from the public eye. It's not as if the WRC is entirely devoid of talent either, with many of the drivers who might ten years ago have led one of the lesser manufacturer teams instead to be found there: Jan Kopecky, Kris Meeke, Juho Hanninen and, on occasion, fellow ex-F1 racer Stephane Sarrazin.

As it is, I'm beginning to wonder whether he has hit something of a brick wall - if after picking up the basics in winter testing, he's no longer really able to improve his game. Certainly, it does not appear, looking at his stage times, that he's really going any quicker than he was at the beginning of the season. His times tend to ebb and flow from around 2 to as much as 7% off the ultimate pace, just as they did on the opening rally in Sweden back in February. It's as if the car and the very different events - what, after all, does what a driver learns in Sweden do to help him in Jordan, or in Bulgaria and Japan - mean that he's not really able to learn much. Maybe it's expecting too much of him too soon - and we should be thinking in terms of a multi-year programme in which the results only really begin to come in his second or third season. After all, it took drivers like Solberg and Hirvonen some time to really get onto the pace, and for all that Raikkonen seems to have had a lot of accidents this year, I don't think he's actually had as many as Colin McRae did in his first full year in the WRC.

But is Raikkonen, who has, after all, come from an F1 world in which he was a champion and one of the recognised top drivers, patient enough to spend several seasons learning the black arts of rallying when he's already given over more than a decade of his life to perfecting the art of circuit racing? And even if he does intend to, when the novelty factor wears off, will Citroen and Red Bull be particularly interested in paying for him to do so? That just might be what is behind the rather unexpected noises about Raikkonen and Renault. For the reasons Joe Saward outlined in a perceptive article on his blog last week, I'm not convinced such a deal would make much sense for either Raikkonen or Renault. Renault can rely on Kubica for the inspired pace, and would perhaps be better served by a cheap, competent number 2 (Nick Heidfeld springs to mind) while Raikkonen looked washed up at the end of 2009 and if received wisdom is to be believed, was not overly enamoured of F1 life anyway.

So I hope he stays for another year, at least, in the World Rally Championship. I suspect that, with Sebastien Ogier doing everything to mark himself out as the new Sebastien Loeb at the moment, he will never reach the very pinnacle of rallying. He might have had the innate talent, but I suspect that a man trying to learn what is in a sense an entirely new sport at the age of 31 will never be able to reach quite the same level as someone who has been doing it since his teens. But given time, he might get close. I doubt he will ever go on to be the first man to win the World Rally Championship and the F1 World Championship, but he just might manage to be the first man to win both a WRC event and a Grand Prix. Which would surely be a more worthwhile aim than going back to an F1 world which has moved on in his absence.

Summer's End

2010-09-13T10:34:00.001-07:00

The seasons have an underlying rhythm to them. After the relaxed carefree weeks of summer turn steadily languid through the heat of August, September marks a return to the reality of work, a sense of knuckling down as the nights draw in and the weather turns more chill. Where once it was going back to school or university, these days for me its the return of Parliament from its summer recess that marks Summer's end. And one event that is inextricably linked with this time of year in my mind is the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

There can surely be no better place to mark the end of European season than the Autodromo Nazionale Monza. Even as it stands today, emasculated by chicanes, it remains the fastest circuit on the F1 calendar, in its own way every bit as much a unique challenge as Monaco. Watching the onboard footage as drivers top 215mph along its long, narrow straights, its one of the few places where Grand Prix racing still looks, well, dangerous. But more to the point, Monza tends to mark the point in the racing season at which it becomes clear who is really in the battle for the World Championship and whose campaign has fallen off the rails. With the end of summer, the destiny of the World Titles tends to come into focus.

Last year, it was their poor performance at Monza that all but guaranteed that Red Bull would not deny Brawn either world title. Going back a few years to 2003, it marked the point at which what had been a five-way title fight boiled down to the three way battle between Raikkonen, Schumacher and Montoya. And, indeed, Schumacher's victory, after a lacklustre summer, turned out to be a portent of the fact that, after the FIA's meddling with the tyre regulations, he and Ferrari would retain their crowns for a fourth successive year.

A fortnight ago, it seemed for a moment, after Messrs Vettel, Alonso and Button all crashed out of contention at Spa, that what had been another five way fight was narrowing down to a straight face-off between Mark Webber and Lewis Hamilton. But then that all changed last weekend. Hamilton, ever the live-wire, walking a narrow line between genius and foolhardiness, let his impetuousness get the better of him on the opening lap and failed to score, while Webber was, if anything, too cautious, and the combination of a poor opening lap which saw him drop from 5th to 9th, and his Red Bull's lack of straightline grunt ensured he could do no better than 6th.

By contrast, the three men who failed to score at Spa all had a pretty decent weekend at Monza. Fernando Alonso, whose title hopes looked all but doomed when he dropped his Ferrari into the barriers on the way to Rivage two weeks earlier, suddenly looks to be right back in the mix following his Monza win. The fact that neither he nor Ferrari have been further punished for the team orders farce at Hockenheim does them no harm either. Suffice to say that should he eventually win the title by less than the 7 points that he took from Massa that day, his rivals would have good reason to feel aggrieved.

Jenson Button had been looking rather overshadowed by team mate Hamilton in recent races. Having got the ball rolling for Mclaren with victory at Melbourne Park and quickly followed thatr up with another win in China, he has in recent races he has looked more and more like Mclaren's unofficial number 2 rather than a serious title prospect. But at Monza, he had his team mate beat even before Lewis broke a steering arm against the back of Massa's Ferrari at La Roggia. Even Sebastian Vettel played himself back into contention to an extent, clawing points back from the men at the head of the points table with his fourth place finish being probably about the best anyone was going to get out of a Red Bull at Monza.

And so as the season departs Europe for its final globe-trotting fling through Singapore, Korea, Japan, Brazil and finally Abu Dhabi, it looks like we once again have a full five-way title fight on our hand. Sebastian Vettel, in 5th, is just 24 points down on leader Mark Webber. And remember with 25 points for a win, in old money, that's a gap of just under 10 points. But which of the five pretenders stands the best chance of coming away with the crown?

Let's start with the two men who should be the favourites, Red Bull drivers Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel. There can be little doubting that over the course of the season, the Red Bull has been the quickest car, sometimes, as at Hungary, by an almost embarrassing margin. By rights, Vettel and Webber should have nobody to worry about but each other by now. Except that silly errors from both drivers, mechanical frailty and a fair dose of plain old misfortune has allowed Alonso, Hamilton and Button to gatecrash their party. And now it's no longer so clear that the Red Bull any longer has quite the same advantage it did earlier in the year. It might be too early to conclude that Ferrari and Mclaren have caught them. Monza was perhaps always the weakest track for Red Bull's relatively underpowered but tremendously aerodynamically efficient machine. On the other hand, I'd be surprised if they have quite the advantage they seemed to have on everyone at the Hungaroring.

And it might be crucial that, where the other three are all past or current World Champions, neither Webber nor Vettel yet has a title to their name. And for differing reasons, that will add to the pressure that those two will feel. Vettel is still frightfully young, at only 23, and in only his third full season in F1. While that relative inexperience clearly hasn't slowed him down at all, I can't help thinking that it might help to explain the string of silly errors - the collisions with his team mate at Istanbul and with Button at Spa, the moment of doziness behind the safety car at Hungaroring, which have cost him crucial points. Without those, even allowing for his having had the lion's share of Red Bull's mechanical maladies, he'd be some distance in front in the title race right now.

If Vettel's problem is finding a controlled outlet for the nervous energy of youth, then Webber has the opposite problem. The last-chance urgency of approaching middle age. The sense that, even if Red Bull can produce another title contender in 2011 his young team mate will only get faster and more polished and that 2010 and this represents the best chance he is ever likely to get of becoming Australia's third world champion. He's been remarkably calm in recent races, but I wonder if that very caution might cost him in what is after all a five way fight for the title. He has the points lead, which mean's he's the prey rather than the hunter. Remember how that went to Button's head last year?

Over at Mclaren, Button's role is reversed from last year. Rather than defending a large points lead, he's having to claw back a points deficit to the leading contenders, Hamilton and Webber. Button's problem is that, while he can be as quick as anyone on his day, when he can't get the 2010 Mclaren set up to his liking, he really struggles with it. Remember his failing to make Q3 at Hungary? It seems that when the Mclaren isn't where it should be, it is Hamilton who is much more adept at driving around the problems, and getting the most from it. And the circuits which are coming up, with their great reliance on low speed traction and with little scope for the Mclaren's refined F-Duct to be used to its greatest advantage, are going to play into the hands of a driver who can take a recalcitrant car by the scruff of the neck and wring the most from it. Not something Button has ever been known for. That said, in a five-way battle like this, a big part of winning is about not making mistakes, and of the contenders for the title, nobody has made fewer.

Hamilton has not been quite so error free, but over the year it's hard to ignore the fact that he has been the quicker of the two British World Champions driving for Mclaren this year, and has perhaps got more out of his machinery than anyone else on the grid. If the Mclaren proves quick enough, he would be my tip for the title, but I can't help thinking that Turkey aside, Mclaren have only won races this year when it has poured with rain, or on tracks where out and out straight line speed is more important than downforce. It might rain at Interlagos and Suzuka, but not one of the five remaining tracks on the calendar look like natural Mclaren territory to me. That mistake on the opening lap at Monza might turn out to be very costly indeed.

All this leaves Ferrari and Fernando Alonso. The Spaniard has one big advantage, namely that while all his other rivals have their team mates to worry about, the Scuderia has only one dog left in the fight. Having a number two driver to covertly, and to judge by the German Grand Prix, perhaps overtly, assist Alonso's title challenge might prove decisive. Unlike the other teams, they can afford to use one of their drivers as a guinea pig, and, potentially as a 'hare' or as a 'roadblock', which just might prove to be a crucial advantage. Combine that with the fact that Alonso has more World titles and greater experience of being in title fights than his rivals, while Ferrari are past masters at it, and I wonder if it just might be enough to enable them to overcome the faster but seemingly error-prone Red Bull team.

So, forced to place a bet, I'd say it's going to be between Alonso and Webber, with Hamilton heading the chasing pack. But it really could go any way. And, of course, in terms of individual races, it won't be just these five who will be in contention. While it is still mathematically possible, Nico Rosberg and Robert Kubica stand little chance of walking away with the title, but I wouldn't rule out either for a surprise race win, particularly at Singapore, where both have proven fast before. It's going to be an interesting autumn.

Like Father, Unlike Son

2010-09-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

Imagine you're in your late teens. Growing up in Monaco. The son of a multi-millionaire. The world is your oyster. Probably, you need never really do an honest day's work in your life if you don't want to. Sounds like a dream come true? Perhaps, but on the other side of the coin, that very ease, the way that everything has been handed to you means it's hard to imagine that you're going to have the application, the drive, to really make the most of the gifts that fortune has bestowed upon you.

So in a way, it's a little surprising that 1982 World Champion Keijo Rosberg's son Nico has been as successful as he has in Formula 1. An awful lot of sons of famous fathers have tried their hands at motorsport, but the success stories have been relatively thin on the ground, at least at the very top level. And I can't help thinking that being the comfortably-off son of a famous father probably doesn't help a young driver's focus and determination. I suspect that it is no coincidence that the two most successful sons of famous fathers both lost those fathers while they were still themselves children - Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve. Perhaps it was some sense of insecurity which gave those two a determination which such as the Mansell brothers, Nelson Piquet Jr, Nicolas Prost et al, have seemed to lack (though the Mansell brothers at least, never really showed any real sign of having the fundamental ability to do the job anyway).

Nico Rosberg, though, is an awkward exception to the rule. In his early junior career, he didn't really stand out to me. He attracted attention principally for getting that Williams test back in 2003 when he was only 17, and one couldn't help but think that Frank was simply doing a favour for the man who had won the 1982 title for his team. Certainly, as late as 2004, when, in his second year in the championship, he finished fourth in the F3 Euroseries behind Premat, LaPierre and champion Jamie Green, there was nothing to suggest that he was any qui from a host of talented youngsters, not all of whom could possibly find a place on the F1 grid.

But then he moved to GP2 with ART and, while I expected British F3 Champion Nelson Piquet Jr to win the battle of the 'sons of famous fathers', and reckoned Alexandre Premat likely to be the quicker man in Frederic Vasseur's team, he went and won the championship at his first attempt, narrowly edging out the more fancied Heikki Kovalainen. And all of a sudden, he was rather more than just a fresh-faced son of a famous father. Scratch beneath the surface, and there was always reason to think that Rosberg might have been a cut above many of the young hopefuls in the junior formulae.

For one thing, while it would be easy to caricature Rosberg as the spoiled son of a 'racing dad' he is probably one of the brightest men on the grid. He turned down a place to study engineering at Imperial College London in order to further his racing career, and apparently achieved the highest score ever recorded on the 'Engineering Aptitude Test' given to all new Williams drivers when he joined the team in 2006. It's striking too that Rosberg Jr always sounded calm and confident when dealing with the media, even when at the time of his F1 debut at the age of just 20, back in 2006, in marked contrast with Piquet Jr who always gave the unfortunate impression of a young man with a chip on his shoulder (though to be fair, the difficult atmosphere of the Renault team during his sojourn there can't have helped).

On the surface, he's a very different character to his father. Where Keke was famous for a very non-PC willingness to speak his mind, and had a popular image as something of a 'hard man' of the F1 grid, his son looks like a man who has walked straight out of a shampoo commercial, has been christened 'Britney' by harsher members of the F1 fraternity, and always sounds 'on message' when speaking to the press. Asked if he would have preferred to have raced in his father's more free-wheeling era, a time when drivers could smoke without being subject to brickbats for compromising their race fitness, he responded simply that he hated smoking. But beneath that, I wonder if it is not only a natural aptitude for hustling an F1 car that he has inherited from his father. Just as Rosberg Sr, for all his larger than life persona, was a tremendously determined man whose path to the top was not easy, a man who overcame adversity to win, so Rosberg Jr is the gilded youth born into a life of comfort and riches, who could have lived the life of a feckless playboy, but who has chosen to try to show that he is every bit as good as his father.

The question remains though, just how good is Nico Rosberg? He certainly made an impact when he made his F1 debut at the Sakhir circuit at the age of just 20, back in 2006. Picking up fastest lap in his first ever race, becoming the youngest person ever to do so in the process, he followed this up with a third place grid position two weeks later in Malaysia, in a Williams that was hardly the class of the field. At the time, Jackie Stewart talked about him as a potential future mega-star and while Stewart's view might have been influenced by his work for Williams sponsor RBS, he's not a man who's easily impressed.

After that explosive start, though, Rosberg's career has so far failed to live up to that early promise. The 2006 Williams was not one of the better cars to come out of Grove, let down as it was by terrible reliability and a lack of high speed downforce that meant he would make the points just once more all season. Over the year as a whole, it is fair to say that he was comprehensively outpaced by Mark Webber. There's no shame in that, Webber is a very quick driver, perhaps quicker than anyone realised at the time, and he was then into fifth year in the sport, while Rosberg was still finding his feet, but still one wonders, if Rosberg is really quick, wouldn't he have shown better against Webber?

Three more years at Williams brought a steady stream of points, and a couple of podiums but no victories, though as his best finish was a second place behind Fernando Alonso at Singapore in 2008, arguably, he is a Grand Prix winner in spirit, if not in fact. But after four years in the sport, we are arguably no closer to knowing quite how good Rosberg really is. He had no trouble outclassing his Williams team mates, Alexander Wurz and Kazuki Nakajima but its hard to quantify how much of an achievement that is. Were Wurz and Nakajima perfectly solid, competent peddlers who were made to look second rate by an exceptionally gifted team mate? Or were the late noughties Williams a good deal better quicker than we realised?

Williams themselves didn't seem quite sure. There were dark mutterings that, for all Rosberg's clean-cut image and sponsor-friendliness, he just didn't have the overwhelming drive to win that the best of his rivals did. And where Williams certainly did have good reason to complain is in pointing out that Rosberg threw away a fair number of good points finishes - most notably at Singapore in 2009, with silly errors. There, he had looked a safe bet for a podium, and perhaps even an outside shot for victory, when he wandered over the white line exiting the pits and picked up a drive-through penalty which put him out of contention. And what if those rumours that he'd been approached to replace Fernando Alonso at Mclaren and turned that opportunity down are true? That he (or his manager) didn't believe he was fundamentally good enough to take on Lewis Hamilton in identical machinery? If it's true, it suggests a man who doesn't have the self confidence of a natural born winner.

A move to Mercedes for 2010 ought to have answered these questions. If Rosberg had matched, or even bettered Jenson Button, then we could be sure that he was amongst the very quickest in the business - a potential future world champion. Except that Button jumped ship to Mclaren and Rosberg found himself paired up with a returning Michael Schumacher. If the younger German had feared that he would be put in the shade by the 7 time world champion, he had no reason to worry. Rosberg has generally been a shade faster than his more illustrious team mate, and has certainly been a good deal more consistent, bringing the car home where Schumacher has seemingly been a magnet for trouble.

But is that because Rosberg is much better than we realised, a man who can beat the outstanding driver of the last 20 years? Or is it simply a sign that Michael Schumacher is over the hill, race rusty, long past his best? There is simply no way of knowing for sure. The truth may lie somewhere in between. While I just can't quite bring myself to believe that Schumacher, at the height of his powers, would have found himself trailing Nico Rosberg by 44 points to 102, it may be that Schumacher looks less competitive than he is because we are underestimating Rosberg. After all, if Schumacher had been trailing, say, Hamilton by a similar margin, one might almost be tempted to congratulate the old stager for putting up such a good fight at 42. If Schumacher were to call time on his increasingly ill-advised looking come back and hand the car over to Nick Heidfeld, we'd be much closer to knowing the answer.

Motor Racing's Darkest Day

2010-08-25T11:37:00.001-07:00

On the back of most race day tickets is a short anachronism. "Motor Racing Is Dangerous. Spectators attend at their own risk." Thankfully, the risk has long been fairly miniscule. That's not to say that spectators have not been injured, or even killed. Set against the vast numbers attending motorsports events each year, though, the numbers are tiny - a spectator is almost certainly at far more risk of dying in a road accident on the way to or from the event. While rallying, in particular, has perhaps been lucky that there haven't been more serious accidents involving spectators (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyVHj3sHVHQ for something really hair raising...) the truth is that tickets might more accurately read "Motor Racing Used To Be Dangerous" though that might perhaps be tempting fate.

A documentary which appeared on the intermittently wonderful BBC4 recently reminded viewers of a time when spectator safety was altogether more rudimentary, if not non-existent. It told the story of the Le Mans disaster of 1955, which resulted in the death of 83 spectators, with many more injured. Drawing on interviews with two men who drove for the front-running teams, Mercedes and Jaguar, and a number of spectators who were present that day, the documentary was interesting not only for the black story at its heart, but for the way in which it showed viewers a picture of motor racing culture as it was over half a century ago.

Over 300,000 people attended the race that year, which, to judge by what those interviewed on the programme had to say, was then seen as one of the major events on the social calendar. A woman recalled being excited to go to Le Mans that year on her honeymoon. Another recalled how everyone would dress up for the occasion (the contrast between 50s race goes in their hats and bow ties, and the modern equivalent in their replica team gear was especially striking). Just 10 years after the end of World War 2, the world was beginning to rediscover a sense of levity, of excitement, after the austerity of the immediate post-war years. With the war still very much in the recent past, much was made of the battle between the two front running teams, the German Mercedes squad and their English rivals, Jaguar (though it should be pointed out that this can be taken too far - Mercedes had one Stirling Moss on their driving squad, which was very international in flavour).

If the documentary has a flaw (aside from the schoolboy error of claiming La Sarthe is 'the longest circuit in the world') it is that it appears to try to suggest that the accident was in some way the result of that rivalry. The fatal accident occurred some time after seven in the evening. Mike Hawthorn, having just lapped Lance Macklin's Austin Healey, slowed to enter the pits. Macklin lost control of his car as he swerved to avoid Hawthorn's slowing Jaguar, which sent him straight into the path of Pierre Levegh's Mercedes. Levegh's car launched itself off the back of Macklin's car, catapulting straight into the packed grand stand opposite the pits, disintegrating and exploding on landing, its magnesium chassis burning fiercely. The result was far and away the worst death toll at any motor racing event, grainy black and white photographs showing a scene not unreminiscent of the aftermath of a terrorist bombing.

As is perhaps inevitable with an event of that magnitude, the controversy would go on long beyond the end of the race. Amazingly, from our modern perspective, the race was not stopped. The organisers cited the need to ensure that ambulances heading to the circuit to tend the injured were not obstructed by tens of thousands of spectators heading in the opposite direction. Mercedes withdrew their cars from the race, inviting rivals Jaguar to do the same. Jaguar declined the invitation, and when Mike Hawthorn and Ivor Bueb were photographed celebrating their victory, spraying champagne, it became a national scandal in France. In the long term, the result was the same for both teams. Mercedes and Jaguar withdrew from international competition in the aftermath of the accident, neither to return until the mid-80s when both would again fight it out for victory at Le Mans - with Jaguar taking the honours in 1988 and 1990, and Mercedes winning the last race before the introduction of chicanes on the Mulsanne in 1989.

The single issue which caused the most debate at the time, though, was that of whose fault the accident was. Even now, the two surviving drivers interviewed for the programme, Levegh's team mate, American John Fitch, and Jaguar driver Norman Dewis, had radically different views on the subject. In Fitch's view, the blame lay with Hawthorn, who according to Fitch, was devastated by guilt in the immediate aftermath of the accident and only later changed his story, blaming (by implication at least) an error from Macklin. Dewis, by contrast, considered that Macklin had simply lost control at the near-flat out corner leading onto the pit straight, and questioned whether the ageing Levegh (he was nearly 50 when he died) still had the reflexes necessary to race the powerful Mercedes 300SL, suggesting a sharper driver might have taken avoiding action when Macklin's Healey went out of control.

Watching the amateur cinefilm footage of the accident, which had been seen by few before the making of this documentary, though, it strikes me that this was simply a racing accident, that really, nobody could be said to be to blame for the accident. A public inquiry (which also had access to this footage) came to the same conclusion. Perhaps it is because people wanted someone to blame, but it seems to me that by focusing on the actions of the drivers, they were looking in the wrong place.

The government's report on the accident remains unpublished to this day, but it doesn't take a long government inquiry to establish that the reason the accident had such devastating consequences, the 'blame' if you wish to use the word, lay with the complete absence of protection for spectators. Back in the 50s, armco and catch-fencing had yet to become standard features (and no matter how much the latter may frustrate amateur photographers like me, it is simply a necessity when spectators sit level with the track surface, on the outside of a fast corner). The grandstands were right next to the circuit, the track at that point was very, very narrow, and there was no 'in road' to separate those heading for the pits from those continuing at full chat across the start/finish line. Add in the vast performance differentials between the fastest and slowest cars and the only real surprise is that such a serious accident didn't happen earlier.

It remains the single worst day in motor racing history. Thankfully, there has been no accident on such a scale since. I for one rather doubt that the sport could, in these safety conscious times, survive another accident in which there were mass casualties among spectators. Looking at the footage from the 1955 Le Mans race, the casual disregard for spectator safety is faintly chilling. But then those were different times. Two World Wars had caused devastation across Europe on a scale which is hard for people of my generation to really understand. The documentary suggested that the 1950s were the 'golden age' of motorsport. And if your romantic ideal of the sport is a vision of brave amateurs, fighter pilots with steering wheels, doing battle in dangerous circumstances, then perhaps it was. But the world has moved on, and those of us sitting in the grandstands should perhaps be grateful.

Wrong Time, Wrong Place

2010-08-19T11:09:00.000-07:00

As a child, growing up in England in the mid 1980s and already well and truly bitten by the motorsports bug, one thing I was sure of was that I was not a fan of Nigel Mansell. Yes, he might have been pretty damned spectacular at the wheel when the mood took him, but out of the cockpit, even at the age of 9 or 10, I was put off by his sheer ordinariness and by his amateur theatrics, his willingness to fulfill the old Aussie stereotype of the whinging pom.

I was much more a fan of the enigmatic, foreign Ayrton Senna. I was intrigued by the cool calculating professeur Alain Prost, and the care-free go-ahead aggression of Gerhard Berger in his Benetton and Ferrari years. If pressed to name a favourite British driver, though, I would have gone for then Arrows driver Derek Warwick. A straightforward honest fighter who was worthy of a better drive than he ever got. The Hampshireman was back in the press recently as the ex-F1 driver steward at the Hungarian Grand Prix who wanted Michael Schumacher black-flagged forthwith for his ridiculous move on Rubens Barrichello in the closing laps of the race, but it strikes me that his career in motorsport is worth telling, because it goes to show just how important luck and timing can be in this business.

Derek Warwick, like his near-contemporary Martin Brundle, began his racing career in the rough and tumble world of stock car racing, and it's tempting to assign some of his straight-ahead no-nonsense approach to racing to those early years in this discipline (and for any US readers out there, British stock car racing is an altogether rather different and more down at heel world from your NASCAR. Imagine what NASCAR might be like if the fans were running the show) In his mid 20s, he came into enough money to put together a season of F3, and though it was done on a shoe-string (at least in comparison with his major rival Nelson Piquet) he won one of the two British titles in 1978.

It would be another three years before he appeared in Formula 1, in 1981, as the lead driver for flamboyant entrepreneur Ted Toleman's fledgling Formula 1 team. Using an early incarnation of engine tuner Brian Hart's 1.5 litre turbo engine, the car, as ugly as any ever to grace the F1 grid, was both woefully unreliable and hopelessly slow. At his first race, he was some 8.6s away from pole position, and Toleman's debut season rather puts the performance this year of HRT, Virgin and Lotus into perspective. He would spend the entire summer failing to qualify the ungainly device, and would take his first race start only right at the end of the year, at the season-closing race at the ridiculous little street circuit at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. On a circuit where the driver could just perhaps make up for the deficiencies of his equipment, he scraped onto the grid in 22nd position, and ran to around mid distance only for the gearbox to break.

In many ways, that race was the curtain raiser for his second year in the sport, when the improved pace of the Toleman meant he spent most of the year failing to finish, rather than failing to start, Grands Prix. A third year at the team in 1983 was more successful. The car was still fragile but by now rather more competitive, as the Hart turbo unit was conier more powerful than the normally aspirated Cosworth V8s still being run by many teams. The season ended with a run of four points finishes (and back then of course, points were only awarded for the top 6 finishers) in the last four races of the year. More importantly, the young British star, now being touted as the country's next world champion, had attracted the attentions of La Regie. Renault had just narrowly missed out on the world championship with Alain Prost and after a spectacular falling out between team manager Gerard Larrousse and his lead driver, Warwick was signed up to partner Patrick Tambay for 1984.

It looked like he was in the pound seats, and he began by disappearing off into the lead at the opening race at Jacerapagua in Brazil, only to retire when his suspension collapsed. A first podium followed at the next race in South Africa, and he went one better next time out at Zolder, appearing at this point in the season to be a genuine title contender. Unfortunately, that is about as good as it got for the Briton. Another couple of podium finishes followed later in the year, including a second place at his home race at Brands Hatch, but these were interspersed with a string of retirements. While the Renault was considerably more reliable than the Toleman he had driven the year before, it was, relatively speaking, nowhere near as competitive as the car Prost had driven the year before.

At the end of the year, Warwick was approached by one Frank Williams, offering him a drive for 1985. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems obvious that Warwick should have taken up Frank's offer, but at the time, it was a much more difficult choice. Yes, Keke Rosberg had won for the team in Dallas in '84, but the team were newly into a relationship with engine supplier Honda, whose early V6 turbos had horrendous throttle lag, which was reputed to make the car all but undriveable. And Renault? Well we now know that they were on a downward slide, that the 1985 RE60 would prove hopelessly uncompetitive, and that they would leave the sport with their tail between their legs at the end of the year, but at the time, it was easy enough to think that 1984 was just a bad year, that the factory team would bounce back in 1985 and enable Warwick to win races, perhaps even the title.

And so Warwick elected to stay with Renault, and Frank Williams was forced instead to offer his second seat to another, less fancied Briton who had never won a race in five years in the sport, and who had just left Lotus under a cloud. A man called Nigel Mansell. The rest, as the cliche runs, is history. Warwick endured a torrid time with Renault in 1985, with only a couple of fifth place finishes to show for his troubles. Mansell won his first Grand Prix towards the end of the year as Honda's engine came good, and he went on to become one of the sport's major stars and a regular race winner as the decade wore on.

Warwick, on the other hand, found himself out of work when Renault withdrew from the sport at the end of the season. An offer from Lotus, then still a force to be reckoned with, if not quite the team they had once been, was withdrawn when it was vetoed by team leader Ayrton Senna, who feared Warwick's presence in the team might dilute their focus on himself. And the team knew Senna was enough of an asset to them that they were well advised to do whatever he asked.

Derek Warwick found himself out of F1 for 1986, and teamed up with fellow F1 refugee Eddie Cheever to drive for Tom Walkinshaw's Jaguar sportscar team. Together, they came within an ace of snatching the teams title from the established front-runners, Rothmans Porsche, which might have helped to make up for the awful time Warwick would have in F1 when he got back on the grid, driving the lowline Brabham BT55 after Elio De Angelis died in a testing accident at Circuit Paul Ricard.

There would follow three seasons at Jackie Oliver's Arrows team, partnering his sportscar team mate, Eddie Cheever. He would generally have the upper hand over the American and there were flashes of real inspiration. The 1988 car was good enough for regular point finishes, but nothing more. The normally aspirated 1989 machine lacked power, thanks to its Cosworth DFR, but was perhaps the best chassis Warwick would ever get his hands on. While Cheever's career fizzled out, Warwick twice came close to breaking the Arrows team's duck. He finished 5th, 17s down on winner Nigel Mansell at the opening race at Brazil, which might seem unremarkable, but for the fact he had lost 20 seconds in a bungled pit stop. Later, he would retire from the lead at a wet Canadian Grand Prix, and terrify Gerhard Berger with his sheer commitment in qualifying at Monaco. But now well into his mid-30s, it was clear that the momentum had gone out of his F1 career.

In 1990, he finally got the Lotus seat he'd been denied 4 years earlier, but the team was now a pale shadow of what it had once been, and occasional points finishes were the best that Warwick could manage with the overweight Lamborghini powered 102T. For 1991, he once again found himself unable to secure an F1 ride and went back to Tom Walkinshaw's TWR Jaguar sportscar team where, at the wheel of the all-conquering XJR-14, he proved a regular race winner, but missed out on both the World Title and Le Mans victory. Tragedy came when his younger brother, Paul, whom Derek had always insisted was the real talent in his family, was killed in a British F3000 accident at Oulton Park and the subsequent Le Mans and World Sportscar titles with Peugeot (ironically enough, given that rival French car-maker Renault could arguably be blamed for his being consigned to making up the numbers in F1) must have had a bitter-sweet edge.

A final season in Formula 1 with Footwork (the team which had once, and would again, be known as Arrows) was a bit of a damp squib as the Mugen powered car was never more than a back end of the midfield device and at the end of the year, he found himself once again out of work, and at nearly 40, his career in F1 was run.

So how good was he? As good as Gerhard Berger or Jean Alesi, I reckon. Probably not quite in the same league as the real stars of his day, Senna and Prost. Someone with that level of ability would probably have been not merely quicker than people like Cheever, Tambay and Patrese, but would have dominated them utterly, which Warwick never quite did. But all the same, one wonders what he might have gone on to achieve had he taken that Williams drive in 1985. Perhaps he would have simply been destroyed by the fearsomely fast Rosberg, but maybe not. After all, at the time, people assumed that the same would happen to Nigel Mansell. Warwick's career is an all too telling illustration of the part that sheer blind chance can play in determining who becomes a star, and who an also-ran.

The Maldonado Enigma

2010-08-11T12:08:00.000-07:00

Quick question. Which driver holds the record for the most consecutive feature race wins in GP2? Lewis Hamilton? No? Perhaps it's Nico Rosberg? Or Timo Glock? Or even last year's champion Nico Hulkenberg? No, it's not any of those drivers, it's the Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado, who, in his fourth full season in the category, last weekend took his winning run to five at Hungary and who is now surely all but certain to be crowned the series' sixth champion, if not at Spa at the end of the month, then at Monza.

It just goes to show what a mug's game assessing the potential of drivers in the junior formulae can be. To recap, the Venezuelan driver has been competing in GP2 or Renault World Series since 2005. He had an early reputation as something of a mercurial wild-child, not helped by the three race ban he picked up for ignoring yellow flags and seriously injuring a marshal at Monaco a few years ago. But for a disqualification for a technical irregularity at Misano, he would have won the 2006 Renault World Series (eventually instead won by Alx Danielsson, of whom nothing has since been heard). Next came GP2. Flashes of pace for unfancied Trident Racing in 2007, including a dominant win at Monaco, scene of his earlier disgrace, suggested he was one to watch, and in the latter part of 2008, driving for Piquet Sports, he looked as quick as anyone.

Then it all went wrong. At the end of last year, Maldonado looked washed up, yesterday's news. After signing for manager Nicolas Todt's ART team for 2009, he went into the season as one of the favourites for the title. As it would turn out, he failed to win a feature race all season, and finished up a distant sixth in the title race, while his freshman team mate Nico Hulkenberg took five wins on his way to wrapping up the championship. It was the kind of let down which would have done for the career of many a young driver.

Maldonado, though, has the backing of Venezuelan oil giant PDVSA, who appear to be determined to get a Venezuelan driver into Formula 1, and who have continued to put up funding for Maldonado to race (though to be fair, I don't know the ins and outs of this deal: whether it is primarily about getting a Venezuelan into F1, or whether it is nepotism of the kind that enables Milka Duno to waste everyone's time in Indycars. The key difference being that Maldonado belongs in a high performance single seater, where Duno really, really doesn't...) And for whatever reason (perhaps because with Ernesto Viso looking a bit old now and Johnny Cecotto Jr and Rodolfo Gonzalez not yet having shown any sign of being really special there's nowhere else for PDVSA to go) the oil company produced the cash to enable him to come back this year for a fourth run at GP2, not with ART, but with the new Rapax team which has emerged from the ashes of Minardi Piquet Sports.

I have to admit I was sceptical as to his chances. If he couldn't win races with ART, there seemed no reason to assume that he was going to start doing so, driving for a team which last year, with Alberto Valerio and Roldan Rodriguez, had done little more than make up the numbers.

Except, of course, that's not the way its worked out. Not only has Maldonado won the last five feature races in a row (albeit relying a little on luck for that last victory at Hungary, where both the cars on the front row failed to take the start) but he came really very close to winning at Monaco as well. Which would have made it six wins out of seven. All of a sudden, a driver whose career looked to be all but over at the end of last year is being talked about as a possible replacement for Pedro De La Rosa at Sauber next season (his passage no doubt eased by the bags of money the Venezuelan state oil company could bring to the party).

So how to explain it? It might be tempting to read Maldonado's dominance this season as an indictment of the overall quality of the GP2 field this year, in comparison with previous seasons. I'm not convinced by this though. If anything, the pedigree of this year's front-runners looks rather more substantial than it has done for some time. ART has F3 Euroseries champion Jules Bianchi, Racing Engineering have got his closest rival last year Christian Vietoris. There's GP2 Asia series champion Davide Valsecchi at ISport, and a number of frontrunners from last year's Renault World Series, including Charles Pic and Oliver Turvey.

My hunch is that what Maldonado's performances this year illustrate is that much overlooked but all too vital matter of a driver's psychological state, his confidence. In other sports, it is recognised that people can go through peaks and troughs, that success breeds success and that a player can simply lose their nerve after a run of bad results. Look, for instance, at the records of many a top tennis player. In motorsport lore, though, it seems all too many people believe that a driver simply has a fixed level of 'innate talent' and any remaining variation in their performance is entirely down to the equipment at the driver's disposal. Some concession might be made to the idea that drivers might get faster as they gain more experience, or slow down as they age, but the idea that drivers' form can rise and fall independently of this has never gained much traction.

Which is a mistake, I think, because really it appears to be the only explanation there is for the remarkable turn-around in Maldonado's form. I can only guess that perhaps he didn't click with his previous race engineer, and maybe Nico Hulkenberg's pace caught Maldonado by surprise, caused him to start over-driving, or to lose his nerve, and fail to perform to the level he was capable of. Because the driver scrabbling around for the minor points in a title winning car last year simply doesn't look to be the same man who has won five feature races with a car which his team mate Luiz Razia has been able to do no more with than pick up a couple of reverse grid sprint race podiums. The really intriguing question, though, is whether, if he does get his Grand Prix chance with Sauber next year, it will be the Pastor Maldonado of 2010 who has dominated the series in the manner of Hamilton or Hulkenberg, or the confused, under-performing Maldonado of 2009, who appears on the F1 grid.

Teen Spirit

2010-08-02T11:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, ideas for articles come from unexpected places. And this week, it was listening to Laura Marling's 'I Speak Because I Can' that got me thinking. The first really good record written and performed by a child of the 1990s as my ears hear it*. And there are certain things that you don't really expect of teenagers. Like really well made folk records. And you wouldn't anticipate that they would start turning up on the Grand Prix grid.

Except, from time to time, they do. And while it feels like the Formula One grid has been getting ever younger in recent years, it's not an entirely new phenomenon either. The first driver under the age of 20 ever to compete in a World Championship F1 race was the wealthy Mexican 19 year old, Ricardo Rodriguez, who made his debut for the Ferrari team at the Italian Grand Prix of 1961. The younger of the two Rodriguez brothers, he had been racing motorcycles since his early teens, regularly shared sportscar rides in the States with his elder brother from the age of 15 and made his Le Mans debut at the age of just 17 in 1959.

A year later, he became the youngest man ever to finish on the podium at the French endurance classic, sharing a Ferrari 250 with Andre Pilette to take a second place finish. And how did he do at his Grand Prix debut? At the fearsome old 10km Monza autodrome with its steep banked corners? He stuck the car on the front row, ahead of Phil Hill, the man who would win the title that year in the same car. Sadly, a water pump failure put him out after just 13 laps and ensured there would be no fairy-tale debut win. It was enough, though, to convince Enzo Ferrari to sign up Rodriguez for the 1962 season, albeit he didn't get to drive as regularly as his more experienced team mates. By 1962 though, the 'Sharknose' Ferrari 156 was not quite the all-conquering machine that it had been the year before and Rodriguez' relative inexperience told over the season as a whole. There were a few minor points finishes, a few accidents and nothing to grab the attention quite like his debut. That said, there might not have been any wins, but there was every sign that Ricardo was a potential star of the future. A man still learning his trade, but learning fast and with time on his side.

Except, sadly, time was not on his side at all. With Ferrari not entered for his home race, the non-Championship Mexican Grand Prix (at the circuit now named after him and his brother) in November 1962, he did a one-off deal with Rob Walker to race a Lotus 18. In qualifying, he flew off the road at the fearsomely fast Peraltada and was killed instantly. While it might be tempting to draw an Icarus-like moral of a man who flew too close to the sun, propelled too young into the dangerous world of F1, and paid the ultimate price, the truth is that it is more likely that his Lotus suffered a mechanical failure on the entry to Peraltada and Rodriguez was simply unlucky.

If Rodriguez was a shooting star, who shone brightly but all too briefly, New Zealander Chris Amon had a much more conventional F1 career, and his debut as a teenager two years later at the Belgian Grand Prix was a low key affair. Driving a Lola-Climax for former driver Reg Parnell, he qualified 15th and went out after ten laps. Two season with Reg Parnell Racing brought only a couple of points for one solitary 5th place finish at Zandvoort, and thereafter, sporadic F1 outings in assorted Lotuses, Brabhams and Coopers were interspersed with a more successful parallel career in Can-Am racing for several years, until Ferrari came knocking, offering a drive for 1967, which appeared to be Amon's opportunity to make the big time. As it was, he would never win a an F1 GP, but over the following few years, he would come tantalisingly close on several occasions and would earn a reputation as the best driver never to win a Grand Prix. He finally retired in 1976, after some 13 years in F1, after Niki Lauda's fiery accident at the Nurburgring led him to conclude it was time to cash in his chips. His failure to win a Grand Prix earned him a reputation as the unluckiest man in F1, a driver of whom Mario Andretti famously said "if that man became an undertaker, people would stop dying." Amon, though, took a more mature perspective. He might never have stood on the top step of the podium, but he survived 14 seasons in F1, and that made him a lot luckier than some. And maybe it's better to be remembered as the best driver never to win a race, rather than merely one of many good drivers who won one or two.

As Formula 1 became more genuinely professional as the 1960s and 1970s marched on, there would be no more teenage Grand Prix drivers for nearly 20 years. F1 became something you couldn't simply walk straight in to, as arguably it had been in the late 50s and early 1960s. It was no longer simply a matter of buying a Grand Prix car (as Moss, for instance, did at first) and turning up to collect the start money. You needed experience of F3, F2 or similar, before you could race at the top level, and increasingly, the sport's governing body demanded that drivers had sufficient relevant experience before they would be allowed to race.

It would be another New Zealander who would become (arguably) the youngest man ever to start a Grand Prix up to that time in 1980. Mike Thackwell had previously tried and failed to qualify an Arrows at the Dutch Grand Prix but scraped onto the back of the grid a few weeks later at the Canadian Grand Prix, driving a Tyrrell. It didn't last long - he was eliminated in a start-line accident that caused the race to be restarted (some pedants would argue that he therefore never started the race and as such, the record for the youngest starter remained with Rodriguez until Jaime Alguersuari turned up in a Toro Rosso last year).

Thackwell would go on to win the final Formula 2 Championship in 1984 and was unlucky not to follow that up with the first ever F3000 title a year later. Despite that, he never established himself in F1, taking just one more start, in a hopelessly outclassed RAM at the Canadian Grand Prix in 1984. After Martin Brundle was sidelined with a broken leg,he would also attempt the forlorn task of trying to qualify a normally-aspirated Tyrrell against the turbo cars on the drag-strip that was the old Hockenheimring later that year, to no avail.

He is regarded by many as one of the sport's great lost talents and when his career finally ran up against a brick wall, he stepped away quietly to go surfing off the south coast of England after spending a while racing sportscars for Sauber. Was his reputation hurt by coming into F1 too early? Perhaps, though if one is searching for a single neat explanation for Thackwell's failure to progress in F1, then the testing accident he suffered in an F2 car, the year after his GP debut, which seemed to knock his confidence as a driver, might be the more important factor. By the time he had recovered from that, the F1 world had moved on to younger, fresher faces.

Seventeen years later, the Minardi F1 team, which had brought Jarno Trulli and Giancarlo Fisichella into the sport in the previous couple of years, signed up an Argentinian kid by the name of Esteban Tuero for the 1998 season. His scanty pre-F1 single-seater career gave no indication that he had any business being on the GP grid and while the team claimed that he had been signed on the basis of his testing performances, the fact that he brought a lot of cash to the struggling team was probably decisive.

Tuero did a better job than might have been expected. While there was nothing in his performances at Minardi to suggest that he was a future champion, he matched his more experienced team mate Shinji Nakano and did enough to persuade Giancarlo Minardi to keep him on for 1999. But then came a huge accident in the Japanese Grand Prix which left him with a neck injury and he retired from the sport for good, just six months past his 20th birthday. Whether he had been scared by his Suzuka accident, had become disillusioned with life on the road, far from home comforts and family, or whether he had simply run out of money, isn't entirely clear. Tuero himself has never fully explained his reasons for calling time on his F1 career. These days he races with moderate success in Argentinian touring cars. Of all the teenage F1 drivers, I wonder if he is perhaps the clearest example of a man whose career suffered from having used family money to buy his way too far up the racing ladder too soon, before he had either the experience to make the most of his F1 chance, or the maturity to deal with life in the Grand Prix bubble.

Three years later, another 19 year old made his debut for Minardi, and at first glance, it might have looked like Fernando Alonso was just another Esteban Tuero. Someone who could bring money to the struggling team, now owned by airline magnate Paul Stoddart. History, of course, has shown just how wrong such an assumption would have been. Youngest race winner up to that point at Hungary 2003 (he would later lose that accolade to Sebastian Vettel, or whom more anon). Youngest World Champion just two years later (subsequently beaten by Lewis Hamilton) he's now regarded by many as the best in the business. Scratch beneath the surface and it was always clear he was a quite different kettle of fish from Tuero. A karting star, it was not his family's money that was buying his way onto the grid (his family background is, by F1 standards, quite modest) but that of wealthy manager/svengali, Flavio Briatore. In other words, he was not in F1 at 19 because Daddy thought he should be, but because someone with years of experience as an F1 team boss and entrepreneur saw in him the potential to go all the way. Someone mature enough, but more importantly, fast enough, to make the most of whatever opportunity he was given, at whatever age.

Seven years later, and another 19 year old found himself making his Grand Prix debut, filling in for an injured Robert Kubica at the US Grand Prix of 2007. If Messrs Alonso, Tuero and Thackwell had all made their debuts unobtrusively in cars that were never going to trouble the points-scoring positions, Vettel found himself in a rather different position, making his debut in a BMW Sauber which Nick Heidfeld had finished 2nd in only the week before. He was in a car that could do the business if he could. Rather than be blindingly quick and end up throwing the car off the road, he drove steadily to take a single point for 8th. Sebastian Vettel, though, was merely the youngest of a new breed of drivers, the best prepared and most heavily groomed ever to enter the sport. The products of well funded, manufacturer (or team) backed 'driver development programmes' the best of which, at least, provided drivers with both the hard cash and access to physical trainers, psychologists, media handlers and often, the opportunity to test an F1 car, in exchange for the driver signing a long-term contract with the team in question.

Where Vettel stood out is that he somehow contrived to be signed to not one but two such programmes. A few weeks on from his BMW Sauber debut, he found himself at the wheel of a Toro Rosso when the team parted company with American Scott Speed. A year later, he became the youngest Grand Prix winner ever, when he guided his Toro Rosso to victory at a soaked Italian Grand Prix. There can be no doubting that the 2008 Toro Rosso/Red Bull was very quick in the rain, but all the same, it was a remarkable performance. In only his third full season in the sport, he's arguably favourite to become World Champion, and but for errors on both his part and that of his team, he could even have taken the title last year.

The most recent, and youngest of F1's teenage stars is another driver from the Red Bull stable, Spain's Jaime Alguersuari. Drafted in after the team parted company with Sebastien Bourdais part way through last year, he has been solid rather than spectacular, and I wonder whether like Thackwell and Tuero, he might have got his chance too early. On the other hand, it may be that he only needs time, or it may be that he's a solid, dependable pro who simply isn't quite quick enough and never will be. The story of teenagers in F1, though, is an interesting echo of the path that the sport as a whole has taken over the last half-century or so. From a playground for the rich and fearless in the late 50s and early 60s, through the increasingly serious and professional 70s, 80s and 90s, where a young kid with little experience could hardly be expected to jump straight into a Grand Prix car and be competitive, until, finally, in recent years, the increasing professionalism of junior karting, the ever younger age at which drivers can begin racing single seaters, and the ever more intensive coaching and preparation of junior drivers has enabled drivers to gain the necessary experience to race in F1 at ever younger and younger ages. How long before we see the first child on the F1 grid?

*You say 'second rate Joni Mitchell imitator', I say 'best singer song-writer I've heard in years'. De gustibus non disputandum est...

Only Following Orders

2010-07-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

If there is a God then, at least when it comes to the world of Formula 1, he would appear to have a dry sense of humour. Eight years on from the Austrian GP fiasco in which Ferrari's instruction to Rubens Barrichello to pull over and allow Michael Schumacher to win the race after one of those rare afternoons on which he simply had no answer to the Brazilian, it is Ferrari who have been the first team to fall foul of the ban on team orders which resulted from events in Austria that day. And who should be in charge of the governing body now, but Jean Todt, the man who was in charge at Ferrari on that day.

Whatever some people might have you believe, team orders to drivers were not invented by Jean Todt on 12 May 2002. Back before the war, when pit to car radio was but a gleam in the future's eye, Alfred Neubauer devised a complex system of signals to send messages and instructions to his drivers when he was Mercedes' team manager, and in the 50s when he ran the Mercedes F1 team, it was always clear that Juan Manuel Fangio was its lead driver, and where they found themselves 1-2 (which was most of the time, given Mercedes' margin of superiority), his team mate Stirling Moss was not expected to race him. Later, in the 1970s, Ferrari would have a clear policy of having a number 1 and 2 driver, ensuring that Jody Scheckter took the 1979 title despite the fact that many reckon Gilles Villeneuve was the faster driver. Three years later, at Imola in 1982, it was what Villeneuve perceived to be Didier Pironi's disregard for team orders which led to their falling out. More recently, Mclaren twice ordered David Coulthard to move over for Mika Hakkinen (at Jerez in 1997 and then again in Australia the following year (in both cases, Mclaren's justification for this was that they were merely righting a wrong done to Hakkinen in the pitstop procedure) while ordering drivers running 1-2 to hold station and not fight each other has long been common-place.

So what was different about Austria 2002? In the past, team orders had been used when there was a championship at stake and one driver was in clear contention for the title while the other was not or where a team were struggling to make their mark and secure a first victory (e.g. Jordan at Spa in 1998), but in May 2002, it was really quite apparent that there was no way that anyone but Schumacher and Ferrari were going to win the world title. By that time, he had won four of the opening five races and there was no realistic challenger. Equally, it was quite clear that, on that particular weekend, he was not the equal of Barrichello. He had been outqualified by Rubens, and had been a good quarter of a minute behind him at the point when Barrichello was ordered to move over by Jean Todt. Whether it was because of a lurking paranoia at the centre of Ferrari, a sense that they had to make absolutely certain that their lead driver maximised his points haul at every opportunity in order to absolutely guard against a (frankly rather unlikely) title charge by a Mclaren or Williams driver, or whether it was done at the behest of Schumacher, a mind-game aimed at destroying Barrichello's will to race him, is not entirely clear. Either way, it was uncalled for, it caused a media storm, and it helped to bring about the 'team orders' rule.

What happened at Hockenheim last weekend doesn't really fall into the same category. For one thing, Ferrari are locked in a battle for the drivers championship with rivals from Red Bull and Mclaren and, with Alonso considerably better placed than Massa in the driver's championship, unlike their major rivals, they really only have one dog left in the fight especially as Alonso has almost always seemed the quicker of the two this season. For another, while Barrichello plain beat Schumacher in a straight fight, only the vagaries of fuel strategy, the near impossibility of overtaking in similar machinery and the fact that Alonso had been victim of some very dubious driving from Vettel at the start had enabled Massa to get into the lead in the first place. What happened at Hockenheim is what has happened in F1 since time immemorial, until the ban on 'team orders' came in eight years ago.

Except, of course, the ban is all but unenforceable. What got Ferrari into trouble last weekend was their lack of subtlety. The fact that Massa's engineer, Rob Smedley, apologised to his driver after he let Alonso through, and the breathtakingly obvious way in which Massa did it, short-shifting to a ridiculous degree on the exit of the hairpin, made it clear to the world exactly what has happened. Because, while the letter of the law is that "team orders which interfere with the result of a race are prohibited", the rule is really "teams must not take the piss." There are plenty of ways in which teams can arrange that their drivers switch position. Sometimes it can be done simply by clever use of pit strategy. Under the current rules, the driver who is called in for tyres first will tend to make up time on a driver called in later as he will have the same fuel load and fresh rubber. So if you want to swap your drivers around before the pit-stops, all you need to do is call your preferred driver into the pits a few laps earlier.

Where all that is required is that drivers are instructed to hold station and not race each other as, perhaps, happened between the two Mclaren drivers at Istanbul, it's even easier. You can tell them to conserve fuel, or go easy on their brakes, or whatever, and, provided the drivers know the code, are aware what that message means, the rest of the world need never know. And indeed, it's not even clear whether such instructions are actually against the rules. Telling one driver to move over to let another one through is fairly clearly 'interfering with the results of a race' but is telling drivers to go steady and bring the cars home?

Even if the decision requires to be made too late in the race to be done via pit strategy (at Hockenheim, Ferrari might have been reluctant to compromise Massa's race until they were sure that it would be Alonso and not Vettel who was running behind him after the pitstops) there are other ways of doing it. A codeword a touch more subtle than "Alonso is faster than you", especially if the driver is willing to cede the position by, for example, missing his braking point into the hairpin on one lap, might leave us all wondering if there had in fact been team orders, but we'd never know for sure. Of course, Massa probably wouldn't be too happy with such an arrangement. If he's going to have to give up the race, he'd probably rather the world knew it.

I don't really see what alternative the FIA had but to penalise Ferrari. The rules are quite clear: Team orders are forbidden. If there are all sorts of subtle, covert ways of imposing team orders that have been going on ever since the rule came in, so be it - when it is done as blatantly as it was at Hockenheim, the governing body have to do something if they are to retain any credibility. And penalising the drivers seems somehow unfair: After all, Alonso simply did what any driver in the same situation would do: he saw a door open in front of him and he walked right through it. Penalising Massa for obeying a team order would be even more unfair. That said, a $100,000 fine for a team like Ferrari probably won't act as much of a deterrent. By F1 standards, it's a pretty cheap way of buying points for their title contender.

The question is whether, in the long term, the rule does more harm than good. When there are so many ways in which the teams can work around it, so many ways in which they can camouflage the use of team orders, does it do more damage to the sport to ban them than it does to permit them? Is it perhaps better that what happened last weekend at Hockenheim be permitted than that Ferrari had choreographed things more subtly so the world would never have known that Massa had not simply been beaten fair and square. And where a championship is at stake, and only one driver in a given team is in with a shot at winning it, is it really so unreasonable to allow a team to ask the driver who is out of contention to move over to let the one who can take the title maximise his points tally? And what about the situation where the drivers are not fighting for the lead, but for fourth or fifth place, and the guy behind looks quicker - better placed to take the fight to the guys ahead? It's not a purely hypothetical problem - it's arguably exactly the problem that Ferrari faced when a delayed Alonso cruised up behind Massa in the Australian Grand Prix earlier this year. One for Jean Todt to untangle. Appropriately enough, since the whole knotty problem is arguably of his making....

The 'Monaco of the Midlands' and other Tales of the Streets

2010-07-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

It's perhaps a trend which has already reached its peak and is beginning to blow over, but for a while recently, there appeared to be something of a revival of the idea that street races are the future of Formula One. We have the Singapore night race, the rather underwhelming race around Valencia's principal container port (sorry, I mean, harbour) and Bernie Ecclestone has long pushed for a Grand Prix in downtown New York, though I would be more than happy to bet the farm that this will never come to pass. At the height of his protracted battle with the owners of Silverstone, the BRDC, and before the Donington folly came on the scene, there was even talk of a race around the streets of London.

To be honest, I've never been a great fan of street races. It's true that there's little that quite matches the spectacle of final qualifying at Monaco, with the world's best drivers playing dare with the walls in the search for the perfect lap but the very reason that qualifying is so important at Monaco - the fact that it's all but impossible to overtake around the Principality, means that it's produced very few genuinely exciting races and an awful lot of follow-my-leader processions. As one of 19 races, it might be a glorious, unique anachronism, but hardly a template to be followed. Singapore and Valencia, both the work of Hermann Tilke, are supposed to offer more in the way of overtaking opportunities, but in reality have produced fairly processional races on each of the occasions that the F1 circus has visited.

It begs an obvious question: Given the current vogue for 'improving the show', what is behind the drive for these events? As ever, it comes down to that old adage, "follow the money". FOM wants to extract as much hard cash as it can from race promoters, and in justifying the increasingly exorbitant fees being charged, they now seek to sell a Grand Prix as being - like the World Cup or the Olympic Games - not just a mere sporting event, but an opportunity to put your city, or your country, on the map, a big event to promote tourism, a 'marketing opportunity'. The trouble is, if the race is taking place on some waste ground out in the sticks that happens to provide the space for a purpose-built circuit, as is the case with two of Tilke's better works, Sepang in Malaysia, and the deceptively named Otodrom Istanbul in Turkey, it's not clear that the event really does much to promote its alleged 'host city'. The Turkish race, in particular, despite being hosted on a race track that ranks alongside the best on the calendar, has signally failed to attract any sort of a crowd and does the square root of nothing to promote Istanbul (which, I'm told, is actually well worth a visit).

From the promoter's point of view, particularly when the promoter is a country's Minister of Tourism, or a city administration, it makes far more sense to bring the race to the city centre. People are more likely to visit, and when they do, they will spend their money in your city, take a proper look around, maybe stay on a few days, and if they enjoy themselves, go home and tell all their friends what a great time they had in Singapore, or Valencia, or wherever it is (a side-note - I've never been to either place and have little idea whether they have anything to offer, but the point stands). It's something which is worth paying a little more money for than the chance to bring a few tens of thousands of race fans to some place thirty or forty miles from the city centre, where they might well camp, or hide away in distant hotels, never venturing out except to go to the circuit. As I say, it makes sense for everyone, apart, unfortunately, from us poor sods who end up watching the resulting processions on television.

A question sprung to my mind: Could Britain do the same? I'm not thinking of a London race - the problem with that is that London, like Paris or New York, is a world famous city with no need of such promotional events (although it hasn't stopped them from bidding for and winning the Olympics (London) or the World cup (France, but effectively, Paris)). But what about one of the country's other major cities? A part of me thinks that, with this country seemingly seeking to become more like Brazil (the Terry Gilliam film, not the South American country) with every passing year, it would never get past the bureaucrats, the lawyers, the not-in-my-backyard brigade and the Health and Safety Executive. But then I remembered, we've already done it, and I was there...

As an eight year old, I spent a rain-lashed Sunday (the tailend of Hurricane Charly) sat on a grass embankment above a roundabout, watching the first motor race on public roads on the UK mainland Britain. Yes, there were bureaucratic hurdles, it required an Act of Parliament, the Birmingham Road Race Act, which took nearly a year to make its way through the Commons, but these were overcome and on the August Bank Holiday of 1986, the first Birmingham Superprix was held, a round of the Formula 3000 Championship. Unfortunately, the weather turned out to be so horrendous that there was relatively little on-track action on race day. The F3000 race was won by Spaniard Luis Perez Sala from Pierluigi Martini, but it ran for just 24 of its scheduled 52 laps, after Andrew Gilbert Scott collided with Alain Ferte's stationary car, blocking the circuit. Those of us who were there were treated to a Thundersports support race in the morning and, if memory serves me correctly, a rather processional race for Metro 6R4s in the wet in the afternoon, but all in all, I doubt there was more than an hour or so's track action in return for a whole day spent being battered by hurricane winds and heavy rain.

It was not the most successful race weekend I've ever been to, to put it mildly. Future events ran more smoothly, though the event was never a huge success. It probably didn't help that Formula 3000 had very little resonance with the wider public. It wasn't Formula 1, which people (especially in Birmingham, the home city of Britain's star of the time, Nigel Mansell) and neither was it British Touring Car racing, which might have lacked the star names and the glamour of Grand Prix racing, but provided entertaining racing and was regularly on the telly back in the 1980s (a time when, thanks to the relative paucity of terrestrial channels, that meant rather more).

The circuit, too, needed work, consisting as it did of a series of 90 degree and 45 degree left handers (with a single right-hander thrown in) and the only real challenge coming from the proximity of the barriers. Then there is the problem that, no matter what way you dress the place up, Birmingham is no Monaco, and come to that, it's not even any kind of a rival to Macau, Pau or Valencia. It may be host to some great cultural events, but it's genuinely difficult to think of a major European city that is less conducive to sight-seeing. Though if you think Bladerunner is a touchstone for architects, you ought to check out the new Bullring. If Birmingham City Council thought that the Superprix was going to turn Birmingham city centre into the Monaco of the Midlands, they were sorely mistaken....

All that said, I'd love to see someone give a city centre street race in the UK another crack. Formula 1 is probably not realistic, Silverstone has a 17 year deal in place with FOM, and in any case, it's a much better race circuit than any lovechild of British town planners and Hermann Tilke is ever likely to be. But a touring car race around the streets of Glasgow or Newcastle? That would work, I'm sure. And I still think there was a spark of genius underlying the Scotsman newspaper's April fool about a race around Holyrood Park in Edinburgh....

The Half Time Scores

2010-07-12T11:50:00.001-07:00

So we have reached the half-way point in this year's Formula One season with Mark Webber's convincing victory at the British Grand Prix last weekend, and what an intriguing year it has been. The year got off to something of a faltering start with a processional race at the soporific Sakhir circuit in Bahrain which left observers wondering whether Alonso and Ferrari might be about to reprise the Scuderia's classic 2004 season and run away into the distance. As it's turned out, they haven't won since and the title battle appears to be distilling into a fascinating contest between two sets of team mates, Red Bull's Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel, and Mclaren's Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton.

There can be no doubting that Red Bull have built the fastest car this year, but a combination of ill fortune and silly errors have resulted in their lying only second in the constructors' championship and third and fourth in the drivers race after ten of this year's nineteen races. Life has not been made any easier by the terse, difficult relationship between their two drivers, Webber and Vettel. Through 2009, they appeared to be getting on fine, and indeed the Red Bull camp appeared a rather more harmonious place than the pit garage of their title rivals Brawn, but the apparent calm has been shattered this year. The reason? Last year, the young Vettel had a small, but definitive advantage over his team mate in terms of outright pace that ensured there was no debate as to who the team's de facto number one driver was. But whether we really saw the best of Webber, who was still struggling with the after-effects of the broken leg he sustained in a cycling accident over the winter, remains open to question. Either way, Webber has come back stronger this year - fast enough to match Vettel but, crucially, not so quick as to emerge as the team's unchallenged number one driver.

The fierce intra-team battle cost points in Turkey, but in reality, it has been mistakes from its drivers and the mechanical frailty of the RB6 which has ensured that at the half-way point, they trail Mclaren and its drivers. Vettel saw a potential win disappear when his engine lapsed onto 7 cylinders in Bahrain, and another victory went astray with a wheel failure in Melbourne two weeks later. Webber lost points in Melbourne when he ploughed into the back of Hamilton as his frustration got the better of him and was plain unlucky at Valencia. Both drivers paid the price for rather sub-optimal tyre strategy in the rain at Shanghai, and without those errors, one or other Red Bull drive would almost certainly be heading the driver's championship, and the team might have won eight or nine races by now, rather than the five they have actually won.

Ironically, before the start of the season, it had been the pairing of Hamilton and Button at Mclaren that many observers had thought the most potentially explosive. Could the Woking team contain the egos of two World Champions, two men who undoubtedly believed themselves worthy of unquestioned number 1 status? The answer, thus far, would appear to be yes. In reality, it might well help that both drivers have a World Title to their name. I can't help but think that much of the tension in the Red Bull camp arises from the fact that Webber, at 34, knows that this year might just represent the only serious shot at winning the driver's championship that he will ever get, while Vettel, in only his third full season in the sport, still feels he has everything to prove. They certainly pose a stark contrast with the relaxed demeanour of Jenson Button this year.

It perhaps helps that, while neither he nor the team would admit it, Button is probably a tenth or two a lap slower than Hamilton. He's quick enough to pick up the pieces when his more high-wire team mate drops the ball, experienced enough to make the right calls in marginal situations such as at Melbourne, when his early switch to dry tyres enabled him to leapfrog the early front runners to take his first victory for Mclaren. He's not going to beat Hamilton to the title on outright pace. Since moving to Mclaren, he's shown that he's a genuine front running driver, whose title success was not solely down to happening to luck in to a very quick car last year, but he's not yet put in any performance quite the equal of, for example, what Hamilton was able to do in a Mclaren that looked out of sorts at Silverstone last weekend. On the other hand, if Lewis' impetuous side gets the better of him too often, it's not impossible he could end up winning the championship through dogged consistency and making fewer mistakes than any of his rivals. Button is not the fastest driver on the grid, but he just might have reasonable claim to be the smartest, the one with the sharpest racing brain.

One can't help think that, all else being equal, it will be Hamilton rather than Button who will lead Mclaren's fight for the title this year, but there have been just enough occasions on which he has got the better of his young team mate that it would be dangerous to write him off entirely. And if both of them are still in with a shot of the championship in the final races, it will be interesting to see whether things remain harmonious in the Mclaren garage.

It would be a brave man who would bet against one of the Red Bull or Mclaren drivers walking away with the title, but Fernando Alonso would beg to differ, telling reporters after the British Grand Prix that "I am more convinced than before this race that we will win the championship." Since Bahrain, the Ferraris have never quite looked to be on the pace and indeed at Istanbul, struggled even to make the top 10 in qualifying. At Silverstone, though, Alonso, at least, looked the quickest man after the Red Bulls, and under the new points system, he's not so far from the lead as to be out of the title race entirely. And unlike his rivals at Mclaren and Red Bull, he appears to have established himself as the team's clear number one. Only at Istanbul, always something of a favourite for Massa, and the place where he won his first Grand Prix, has Alonso been out-raced by his team mate.

The best of the rest are the two remaining manufacturer teams, Renault and Mercedes. Neither has yet won a Grand Prix, though both have picked up podiums. Kubica has been the star of the season for me. He might not have won a race - though he came surprisingly close at Monaco, and drove a measured race in difficult conditions to pick up a second place in Canada. The field is surely too competitive this year to give the Pole any chance of repeating his surprise run at the title in 2008, but if the cards fall his way, and if the team's rate of progress is kept up, a race win is not completely out of the question. Renault's biggest problem has been that it is effectively a one car team. Vitaly Petrov has scored just 6 of Renault's 89 points this year, making it difficult for Renault to challenge Mercedes in the constructor's title race. That said, in being paired up with Kubica, a man I reckon to be as quick as anyone on the grid, he has in many ways the toughest task of all the newcomers. One can't help but think his place in the team next year will depend on his continued ability to funnel money in the direction of the Enstone team.

If Renault's greatest strength has been the performance of its lead driver, Robert Kubica, who has barely put a foot wrong all year and has dragged the R30 far further up the field than it really has any business being, then Mercedes, by contrast, has been let down by the shortcomings of its number 1 driver. Some may be reluctant to say so, but the sad truth is that, at 41, Michael Schumacher just isn't quite the driver he once was. This, after all, is a man who won races in the awful Ferrari F310, who finished on the podium in a Benetton at Barcelona which had spent much of the race stuck in 5th gear. And now, he's being beaten by Nico Rosberg?! It's not that Rosberg has been doing a bad job, but I just can't believe that he ever would have much troubled Schumacher in his full pomp. At first, it was possible to explain this away as simple race-rustiness after 3 years away, but of late that excuse has been wearing rather thin, and a slightly sad air of desperation has crept into his driving - forcing Kubica off the road and then chopping off one-time protege Massa's nose in the closing laps at Montreal. I can't be the only person beginning to wonder whether the only pertinent question left is whether Schumacher will jump or be pushed.

Down in the lower reaches of the midfield, Force India, Williams and Sauber have all had a rather mixed year. In terms of points, Force India leads this group, and when compared with their performance up to the middle of 2009, their leap forward has been incredible - from the very back of the field to being regular points scorers. On the other hand, there has been no repeat of the incredible performances they put in towards the end of last season - nothing to match that pole and second place in the Belgian Grand Prix for Giancarlo Fisichella. To my surprise, Adrian Sutil has maintained his edge over Tonio Liuzzi though he still remains in the awkward position of being fast enough to justify his place in F1, but not so special that he's likely to attract the attention of any of the top teams.

Williams have had an up and down kind of a year. They started the season with a car that belonged in the outer reaches of the top 10 - at least when the experienced and seemingly evergreen Rubens Barrichello is at the wheel, but as the season got into its swing, they began to slip back, with the nadir coming in Spain when Barrichello failed even get out of Q1. It has been difficult to assess to what extent this is down to shortcomings of the car, and how much is down to their use of Cosworth engines not generally reckoned to be a match for Renault's units, let alone those of Mercedes or Ferrari. In the last couple of races, though, there has been something of a revival in their fortunes, with Barrichello running in the company of the Ferraris and Renaults at Silverstone, and even Hulkenberg outpacing Petrov and scrapping with Michael Schumacher for the final points. If they can maintain this momentum, there is at least half a chance they'll beat Force India to finish best of the rest, behind five potentially race-winning teams. Such has been the fall of Williams in recent years, that this would count as a solid year for the Grove squad, all told.

If Williams have occasionally looked to be in trouble, it has been nothing when compared to the disastrous start to the year the Sauber team have had. Left high and dry by BMW at the end of last year, it was far from certain that they would even make the grid this year. When this year's car appeared, though, it looked quick in winter testing, only for the team to fall flat on their faces come the opening race. The 2010 Sauber appears still to be a bit of a 'mare at any track featuring a lot of slow corners, but at Silverstone, they crept into the top 10 on merit, and Kamui Kobayashi (the latest in a line of mercurial racers from Japan?) has begun putting in performances that remind us of his attention-grabbing debut in the Toyota last year. If they can sort out the low-speed cornering problem, they too could launch themselves into the thick of the battle with Force India and Williams, though they lie some way adrift at present.

Of the rest? Toro Rosso continue to occupy a couple of slots on the grid to no particular effect. It's hard to know quite why a team with a machine derived from Adrian Newey's all-conquering RB5/6 is so uncompetitive. Whether this is down to the limitations of the former Minardi team running them, or of two drivers about whom I can summon little enthusiasm (the vagaries of the Red Bull young driver programme will forever remain a mystery to me) I don't know. Lotus have emerged as the most serious and competitive of the new teams, but the established runners are unlikely to be much troubled by them this year. Looking down the road, though, the combination of Fernandes and Gascoygne appear to mean business. I'm not sure the same can be said of Virgin, though the VR01 is perhaps the prettiest car on the grid - proof that wind-tunnels are the enemy of beauty? They can at least console themselves with the thought that they are not HRT. Quite how an established race car manufacturer like Dallara can have got things so wrong is a mystery to me. I'd be surprised if they're still around this time next year - 2010's Super Aguri?

Forced to pick a winner? My hunch is that, reliability and team management problems notwithstanding, it will be Red Bull. Adrian Newey's RB6 is simply too good not to win titles. And if it's going to be Red Bull, then logically, it ought to be the man they want to win the title - Sebastian Vettel, though I can't help but admit that I rather hope I'll be proven wrong and the Aussie battler, so long dubbed the unluckiest man in F1, can pull it off.

Home Race Memories

2010-07-07T10:59:00.000-07:00

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since I was taken to my first Grand Prix, the European Grand Prix of 1985 at Brands Hatch, as a late seventh birthday present. For many years, I went to every Grand Prix in Britain and even now, more than fifteen years on from my last such trip, it feels a little odd that the British Grand Prix can be happening without my being there, camped out in a field near Becketts.

The first race I went to was notable for being the occasion of Nigel Mansell's first Grand Prix win, and of being the day on which Alain Prost wrapped up the first of his four driver's titles with a low key run to fourth place behind both Williams and Ayrton Senna's Lotus. These milestones, though, meant relatively little to me at the time, and are not what sticks in my mind. At 25 years distance, what I remember most clearly, aside from a frozen night before the race spent failing to sleep in the boot of the family Escort, was being blown away by the sight of 1000BHP turbo F1 cars streaming down Pilgrim's Drop towards Hawthorn Bend, trails of sparks flying from their titanium undertrays like fireworks (why can't we bring them back?). At the age of 7, it was the sheer speed of F1 cars which imprinted itself on my mind, made me insistent on watching the race from the entry to Hawthorn, to what I suspect was probably the irritation of my father who would rather have been somewhere better suited to trying out the new telephoto for his Olympus OM10. I was already a Formula 1 fan when I went to that race in early October, but I think now it was that weekend which sealed the deal, which turned a passing childhood fancy into a life-long love affair with the sport.

The British Grand Prix memories which remain strongest in my mind, though, came later. 1987 - the first time I saw Formula 1 at Silverstone. Not the modern circuit (good as it is), but the fearsomely fast old circuit. Sitting in the stand at Stowe, which in those days was an even more frighteningly quick corner than it is now, watching a titanic struggle play out between home favourite Mansell and his nemesis and team mate Nelson Piquet. There was no way that, at such a fast circuit, anyone was going to win in anything other than a Williams Honda, but the question was which one. Piquet led early on, and Mansell fell back by half distance, his tyres having taken too much punishment on a heavy fuel load. So he was forced into an unplanned tyre stop, emerging around half a minute behind Piquet with 28 laps to run. It seemed a lost cause, but then he began lapping very quickly. He broke the lap record 11 times in his pursuit of Piquet, and four laps from the end, right in front of where I was watching, he ducked out from Piquet's slipstream, with much better grip on his newer tyres, and grabbed the lead, to score a famous victory. I was not a Mansell fan as a child. Even at nine years of age, I was far too much the contrarian to support a British driver, but that afternoon, I was too caught up in the moment to care.

A year later I was once again in the grandstand at Stowe, and lucky to have a corrugated iron roof over my head for my first sight of Formula 1 in the rain. That day would, as it happened, see one of Mansell's finest drives, while being the first Grand Prix I had ever gone to that he did not win. As with more or less every wet race in the second half of the 1980s, it was won by my childhood idol, Ayrton Senna, though Mansell's drive to second in the underpowered Williams Judd, which had been hastily converted from active to passive suspension only the previous evening was the standout performance. If race-day was all about Senna's wet weather genius and Mansell at his very best, Saturday provided some comic relief. Andrea De Cesaris' altercation with a marshal as he abandoned his stricken Rial by the pitlane exit at Copse on Saturday morning stays with me even now, perhaps because I remember seeing the photos my father took of him apparently trying to thump the marshal (that telephoto lens again...)

This race was followed by two hot summer races won by Alain Prost, the first in a Mclaren and the second in a Ferrari. His team mate Mansell had grabbed the pole that day, but he never quite had an answer to Prost, and at the end of the afternoon, he announced his retirement. They were not the most memorable of races, but on the other hand, they were the first races of the 3.5 litre atmo engine era, and for the first time, after the slightly underwhelming whistle of the 1.5 litre turbos, F1 cars sounded like racing cars again. The Lamborghini V12s that powered the Lolas and Lotuses of that era, in particular, made a fantastic racket.

Two more Mansell victories followed in 1991 and 1992, the latter of these, especially, marred by the migration of a minority of the kind of idiots who have made following the England football team such a depressing experience. A drunken clown wrapped in a Union Jack ran out onto the circuit to 'celebrate' as Mansell crossed the line for a win which, given the superiority of the 1992 Williams FW14, could hardly be said to rank among his best. I don't remember much of the race.

There's a neat symmetry of sorts about the fact that the last Grand Prix in Britain I went to was, like the first, a European Grand Prix rather than a British Grand Prix. Tom Wheatcroft had dreamed of bringing Grand Prix racing back to Donington for the first time since the 2nd World War, and on Easter Sunday, 1993, he got his way. The combination of that Easter date, awful weather and the disappearance State-side of home favourite Mansell resulted in a rather sparse crowd but those who did make the trip were treated to a race that has gone down in motorsports folklore. The race where, thanks to the wet conditions, Ayrton Senna took a Mclaren Ford that was far from truly competitive and made everyone else look like amateurs up against a professional. The yellow helmet, sailing serenely to victory through the rain. Shades of what Lewis Hamilton did, another yellow helmet in a Mclaren in the rain, at Silverstone fifteen years later.

I'll be up in a field in Balado this weekend, rather than down Silverstone way. The fact you can never get near the pit or paddock, the way that the grandstands and spectator banks have gradually crept further and further back from the circuit in the name of safety and the silly ticket prices have all rather put me off going back. Nonetheless, a part of me will miss it. If you're going, enjoy yourselves.

The New Boys

2010-06-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

In last week's Autosport, Mark Hughes asked whether the current crop of F1 championship contenders might just be the strongest that the sport has ever known. Such a suggestion will inevitably raise the hackles of the beard stroking senior citizens who insist that nobody's ever really matched Moss, Fangio, Clark or Stewart but I think there just might be something in it. What, though, of the generation that will one day supplant them? Who will eventually do to Messrs Hamilton, Alonso, Vettel, Button, Kubica and Webber what Prost did to Lauda, Senna to Prost and, had Senna lived, what Schumacher might have done to Senna?

Is there anyone among this year's crop of F1 debutants who might one day be World Champion? It's too early to say, though I suspect that the answer to that question is 'no', but, as the season races headlong towards its halfway point, how are Petrov, Hulkenberg, Kobayashi, Di Grassi, Chandhok and Senna getting on?

The man with both the most difficult job and the best equipment of the bunch is Russian Vitaly Petrov. On the one hand, the Renault is, in Robert Kubica's hands has twice proven good enough for a podium, a car quick enough to enable a promising youngster to show what he is made of. On the other hand, he's having to learn his trade very publicly, and in Robert Kubica he has a team mate who's about as fast as anyone on the grid. And thanks to Lewis Hamilton's performances against Alonso in 2007, the F1 world is less inclined to give new drivers the benefit of the doubt if they are not immediately on the pace than might once have been the case.

At no time has Petrov looked like he would get on terms with Kubica, and while Kubica lies seventh in the driver's championship, Petrov has scored points on just one occasion. He has, though, shown flashes of real pace - scoring points in China and looking very quick there when it rained. Unlike almost everyone on the F1 grid, he didn't spend his entire childhood at the wheel of a go-kart and indeed, before he began racing in GP2 in 2006, he hadn't done much outside of the hermetic world of Russia's Formula Lada. As such, he might have more scope to improve than any of the other debutants. And if not, well, rumour has it he (or his father) is paying a lot of Renault's bills, so he might be given the benefit of the doubt.

Over at Williams, GP2 series champion and former A1GP star Nico Hulkenberg has been rather closer to his team mate's pace than Petrov has ever managed to be. On the other hand, in his 18th season in F1, I'm not convinced that Barrichello is quite the opponent that Kubica is, and thus far, the veteran Brazilian racer has generally had the upper hand. To be fair, it is almost certainly harder for a rookie driver to come in and trounce an experienced team mate in a slow, troublesome car, than in a really well set-up machine like the 2007 Mclaren but I still can't help thinking that if Hulkenberg were really the 'new Schumacher' then he would by now be outpacing his team mate.

That's not to say he might not establish himself as a solid GP driver in the mould of a Heidfeld or a Glock or, for that matter, a Barrichello. After a shaky start to the season, he qualified well at Monaco (though damage picked up at the first corner ensured he got no further than the tunnel come race day), was unlucky but quick at Montreal and was on course for a solid points finish in Valencia until his car packed up on him in the closing stages of the race. If, by the end of the year he's regularly matching Barrichello and if, crucially, he can keep his car out of the tyre walls, he will have done enough to show he belongs in F1, if not necessarily, that he's a future star.

A man who did look to have real star quality when he stepped into the Toyota vacated by Timo Glock at the end last year was Kamui Kobayashi. Immensely combative, what was all the more impressive was that in only his second F1 race, he was outpacing his highly rated team mate Jarno Trulli, and finished up with a very solid sixth place in Abu Dhabi.

This year, though, in a rather uncompetitive Sauber, Kobayashi has done little to remind us of those startling debut races. He's been outqualified 5-4 by veteran Pedro De La Rosa, a man who, at 39, is surely with the team more for his vast experience in car development and his testing skills than for his outright pace. Given that, before he was parachuted into Toyota last year, there had been little in his junior career to suggest he was anything more than a competent journeyman, having hardly troubled the front runners in what was not the most competitive GP2 grid the sport has ever known, dark whispers have circulated that the Toyota he drove in Abu Dhabi might not have been 100% kosher. That, anxious not to see another team pull out of F1, the stewards might have been prepared to look the other way. To my knowledge, there has never been any serious evidence to back up these claims, but equally it's hard to deny that Kobayashi has frequently looked a little out of his depth in F1 this year.

Again, though, there have been odd flashes of promise when the cards have fallen his way, or when the Sauber has been dialed into the circuit properly. At Barcelona, which places a premium on aerodynamic efficiency, and where a lack of low speed mechanical grip matters less, it was Kobayashi that got the Sauber into Q3 for the first time all season, and it was Kobayashi, too, who scored the team's first points of the season in Turkey.

His drive of the season, and it just might have saved his drive, came last weekend at Valencia. He qualified badly, but when the safety car came out after Webber's accident, the team rolled the dice and opted to keep him out on the harder tyres while everyone else took the opportunity to make their mandatory stop. He ended up third, and to my surprise (and surely that of most people watching) he stayed there, easily able to keep Jenson Button's Mclaren behind him. When he finally pitted, 5 laps from the end, he fell to 9th, but where everyone else struggled all afternoon to overtake on a circuit hardly conducive to it, Kobayashi, armed with new soft tyres, forced his way past Alonso, and then did for Sebastian Buemi's Toro Rosso at the very last corner to finish 7th. For the first time we saw flashes of that form which so captivated us when he made his debut with Toyota. A mercurial, intermittently brilliant Japanese driver who lacks consistency? A bit of history repeating...

The three drivers making their F1 debuts with the new teams have life much more difficult in one respect, and much easier in another. On the one hand, nobody expects that Karun Chandhok, Bruno Senna and Lucas Di Grassi will be able to achieve anything much in HRTs and Virgins that are the thick end of 5 seconds off the pace. But at the same time, it's hard to see what they can do to make a name for themselves.

Di Grassi is teamed up with Timo Glock, the man who beat him to the GP2 title back in 2007, and once again it has been the German who has generally had the edge, outqualifying his Brazilian team mate 8-1 so far . Di Grassi has often been as much as a second a lap off his team mate's pace. It's not clear, though, whether that's an entirely fair comparison. Virgin Racing is hardly Mclaren or Ferrari. They're not really in a position to field two equally competitive cars, and they've been desperately playing catch-up on the development front ever since they lost most of their winter testing to recurring hydraulic problems. They made life still more difficult for themselves by building a car with too small a fuel tank to go the distance, and developments to address these problems, as well as to improve the performance of the cars, have not always been available at the same time for both drivers. Glock had a long-wheelbase VR01 with its larger fuel tank from Spain onwards, while Di Grassi had to wait until Turkey. I don't know whether the same delay has applied in respect of various aerodynamic updates, but it may be that the gap between the two drivers is not as large as it appears. F1, though, is a harsh world, and as long as Di Grassi is being outpaced by Glock, he's unlikely to get a chance with a more competitive team.

Karun Chandhok and Bruno Senna were previously team mates at ISport in GP2 a couple of years back. Then, as now, it's Ayrton's nephew who has generally had the edge over the son of the former Indian Motorsports Federation, though as with Glock and Di Grassi at Virgin, it is hard to know whether this is a reflection on their relative pace, or simply the luck of the draw with a slow and unreliable car. To be honest, I've never been entirely convinced that either really has what it takes to be in F1, although they've both generally kept out of trouble and the HRT is such a dog that the credentials of those driving it is rather a moot point.

On balance, I don't see anyone among the current crop of rookies who is likely to match the drivers at the front of the field at the moment. That, though, is not necessarily a sign that the sort is in trouble. There are always fallow years: did anyone of any real note emerge between 2003 and 2005? But perhaps I'll be wrong. The second half of the season will give us a clearer idea.

Assessing the Backmarkers

2010-06-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

Ferrari's Luca Di Montezemelo thinks that they have no business being in Grand Prix racing, remarking in the aftermath of the Canadian Grand Prix that "cars who perform at GP2-level should not be allowed to participate in F1 races because they are supposed to race on Sunday mornings." He was referring, one presumes, to the three new F1 teams, Lotus, Virgin and HRT. Di Montezemelo, though, might have his own reasons for feeling aggrieved, as Fernando Alonso's shot at victory in Montreal foundered when he was slowed by Trulli's Lotus on his in-lap before his second stop and he then lost second when Button took advantage of a moment's hesitation when he came up to lap Karun Chandhok's HRT. And that's before we consider that Di Montezemelo might rather like the idea of running a third Ferrari to make up the numbers, or perhaps even of selling a customer version of the car to another team. Ideas which, I suspect, would fill Force India or Williams with as much horror as any of the new teams. From a less partisan perspective though, how are the new teams faring this year?

This might come as a surprise, and to be somewhat counter to the prevailing wisdom on the matter, but I think they're doing about as well as anyone could expect. They may be four or five seconds off the pace at some circuits, but to assess their performance fairly, it is necessary to consider how they compare, not with Sauber or Toro Rosso or Williams, but with other new F1 teams over the last fifteen or so years. I'm not thinking about Brawn, who took over a large, well-resourced F1 team as a going concern, nor Red Bull, for much the same reasons. Even Super Aguri cannot really be classed as a true start-up team in the sense that Lotus, Virgin and HRT are. They started our running an updated 2002 Arrows chassis which was a long way off the pace (though perhaps not quite so far off as one might have expected a four year old chassis hacked apart to fit a 2.4 litre Honda engine where it had been designed for a 3 litre Cosworth) but later got their hands on discarded 2006 BARs which proved an altogether more competitive proposition, especially when engineering and financial support from Honda is thrown in to the mix.

The last team to enter F1 with a car that they had designed from the ground up, using a completely new team, was Japanese car giant, Toyota, back in 2002. They had a budget which dwarfed that of even the sport's biggest players, and the benefit of an entire year spent pounding around the test tracks of Europe in 2001 (with the truly awful, overweight test-car, the TF01). And yet still they found in their first season that their car was not a great deal faster than Paul Stoddart's desperately underfunded Minardi PS02, or at least the one with Webber at the wheel.

Three years before, in 1999, with a similarly stratospheric budget courtesy of British American Tobacco, BAR arrived with great fanfare and talked, rather foolishly, of winning races in their first season. They had 1997 champion Jacques Villeneuve on the payroll, and the Supertec (nee Renault) engines might not have been the equal of Mercedes or Ferrari's units but had won the title a couple of years previously with Williams. And yet they failed to score a single point all season, something even Minardi managed to do. Yes, the team eventually, slowly pulled itself into competitive shape, and they might have done better had they hung on to more of the Tyrrell squad after they bought it to gain an entry, but their experience went to show that getting a completely new F1 team off the ground is not a simple task, no matter how much money you have to do it with.

The fair comparison, though, I would argue, is not between 2009's crop of new teams and the mega-budget efforts of BAR and Toyota, but between Virgin, HRT and Lotus on the one hand, and Forti, Pacific and Simtek on the other. For these, if we disregard Lola's disastrous and abortive attempt at F1 in 1997 were the last three genuinely new teams to enter Formula 1 without the benefit of either a vast corporation or a car manufacturer behind them (pedants might argue that Virgin is a pretty big corporation, but I'm yet to be persuaded that they are really anything more than title-sponsors of Manor Grand Prix, and Lotus has not insubstantial backing, but were on the other hand the last of the three teams to get established and are not directly connected with the car-maker.)

And the comparison is pretty favourable. Some years ago, the FIA introduced the so-called 107% rule to discourage chancers and those whose hearts were not really in it from turning up, running around at the back and making the sport look less than professional. The rule fell by the wayside as the F1 qualifying rules have got steadily more unnecessarily complex in recent years, but it is interesting to note that, in Canada, all bar Karun Chandhok's HRT, which had gearbox maladies, were comfortably inside the 107% rule. Indeed, the fastest of the new boys, Heikki Kovalainen's Lotus, was just 3.1s and 104% or so away from the pole time. Compare and contrast with Forti's first run Canadian Grand Prix, back in 1995, when the quicker of their two cars, that of Roberto Moreno, was some 6.3 seconds off the pace and the wrong side of the (then not yet introduced) 107% rule. A year earlier, the quicker of the two Pacifics, driven by Bertrand Gachot, a man whose career never really recovered after he lost his Jordan drive in 1991 to a spell in prison, was 6.6s away from pole and missed out on the 107% cut-off. The Simtek, which, like this year's Virgin, was the brainchild of Nick Wirth, was a fundamentally better car, but was still much further from the pace than the Lotuses or Glock's Virgin were the other weekend, being 5.5s away from Michael Schumacher's pole time.

In fact, for all Di Montezemelo's bluster, when it comes to single lap pace, at least, the new teams are really not so far away from the pace of the tail-end teams of recent years. To go back to the Minardi's final year in the sport in 2005, and again referring to the qualifying times, Kovalainen's Lotus was quicker, relatively speaking, than either of the two Jordan-Toyotas, Patrick Friesacher's Minardi or, perhaps most surprisingly of all, new boy Christian Klien's Red Bull.

There have been ways in which the new teams haven't exactly shined. Costly pit-stop fumbles, their seeming inability to get on top of the complex hydraulic systems which all modern Grand Prix cars rely on (leaving them with a finishing record which looks like it comes from an earlier age when a 60 or 70% attrition rate was the norm) and perhaps most embarrassing of all, Virgin's miscalculation that left them with a car whose fuel tank was too small to get them to the end of most of the races without slowing to a crawl. But let's remember that 12 months ago, these teams had only just found out that they had a slot on the grid (indeed, Lotus would not be given its place until September). They have had to cope with a ban on in-season testing which, while it might help them in the long run (by negating some of the advantages of the vastly greater budgets the front-running teams have to spend) is really hurting them in the short term, forcing them to do all their development work at race weekends, and learn their lessons in public.

But the new teams are hardly in the same class as some of the embarrassments of yesteryear of whom I remember far less criticism. Even at their greenest, with a car they had spent Friday building in the paddock, HRT were never as awful as Life Racing Engines or Andrea Moda. And unlike those two teams, they have come on in leaps and bounds as the season has progressed so that, whatever the ultimate limitations of Dallara's first F1 car since 1992, they are at least able to lap within a second or so of the Lotuses and snap at the heels of the Virgins. Though they've still got the daftest name I've ever heard given to an F1 car (a doctor friend of mine speculated that they were running on evening primrose oil after seeing their qualifying efforts in Bahrain).

So yes, it's fair to say that none of the new teams have managed to make quite the same impact as Jordan or Sauber did in their first years, though in both cases, they went on to have very trying sophomore seasons, but Lotus at least, look like they're in it for the long haul and are arguably doing a better job given what is at their disposal than a certain Italian team I can think of...

The Fastest Tortoise

2010-06-15T09:29:00.001-07:00

It's not been the best couple of weeks for the man in charge of Red Bull's driver development programme, Helmut Marko. First he finds himself at the centre of allegations that the team attempted to nobble Mark Webber and ensure that Sebastian Vettel won the Turkish Grand Prix, and then, two weeks later, the record he held with Dutchman Gijs Van Lennep for driving the fastest ever Le Mans 24 hour race finally fell after 39 years.

The Le Mans 24 hour race was a very different beast in 1971, when Marko and Van Lennep took their Porsche 917 to victory at an average speed of 138.1 mph. Where now there are strict rules about how many mechanics can work on the car when it is in pitlane (4), how long a driver can remain at the wheel over a single stint (no more than 4 hours) and how great a portion of the 24 hours a driver may drive (no more than 14 hours) things were all a lot more informal in the early 1970s, as even a cursory glance at photographs from pitlane, which was thronged not only with mechanics but with journalists and all kinds of hangers-on.

And where the Audi R15 TDIs that finished 1-2-3 last weekend are a model of a very particular kind of measured, teutonic efficiency, their big diesel engines almost silent, breezing effortlessly through the night. By contrast, the Porsche 917, perhaps the platonic ideal of a racing sports prototype, was a fearsome beast which, particularly in its early days, left many of its drivers genuinely terrified. With around 600BHP, it had about as much power as the modern Audi, but that power was delivered through a much more primitive chassis which, just to add to the fear factor, had a magnesium chassis in order to save weight. Not, in short, something you would want to be stuck inside if it were to spear off the road and the go up in flames.

Yet at first glance, it might seem remarkable that Marko and Van Lennep's record lasted as long as it did. The Automobile Club De L'Ouest's ban on the big 5 litre Ferrari and Porsche sportscars played a part (cynics might suggest a transparent attempt to give a helping hand to the French Matra organisation) and there is no doubt that the sportscars of the mid 1970s were not as quick as those of the era which immediately preceded it, in much the same way that the sports prototypes of the mid 1990s couldn't hold a candle to the all-conquering Peugeot 905s and Toyota TS010, but there can be little doubt that the Group C cars of the 1980s were a good deal quicker than the Porsche 917 had ever been. The early Porsche 962s and Jaguar XJR-5s might not have had any more power, but they did have the benefit of another 15 years or so of development and they were considerably faster. How do we know for sure? Well, at least in part because the Kremer brothers ran a modified 917 in the 1981 Le Mans race and, while it certainly wasn't slow, it wasn't quite as quick as the more modern Porsche 936s and would almost certainly have been completely outclassed had the Kremer brothers deigned to run the car against the 956s the following year.

No, the single biggest obstacle standing in the way of anyone aiming at the 1971 record has been that the circuit at La Sarthe has been made steadily slower and slower over the years. It was in 1972 that the end of the lap was slowed down by the introduction of the Ford Chicane, and the bypassing of the fearsomely fast Arnage by the Porsche Curves. Later came the introduction of the Dunlop chicane and just when the 1971 record looked like it was coming under threat at the height of the Group C era, with Jan Lammers, Johnny Dumfries and Andy Wallace coming very close in 1988, the 3 mile long Mulsanne straight was broken up by the introduction of two chicanes and average race speeds dropped considerably as a result.

The increased use of safety cars and the mixed grid of gentleman drivers in underpowered LMP2 prototypes and GT2 Porsches and Ferraris had made it still more difficult to break that fastest race record in recent years. In all truth, the Audi and Peugeot diesels have probably had the speed required to top Van Lennep and Marko's 222kph average for some years, but wet races and long safety car periods (often the result of accidents involving prototypes and much slower GTs) have mitigated against the record actually being broken.

Finally, last weekend, the Audi R15 of Timo Bernhard, Romain Dumas and Mike Rockenfeller broke that 39 year old record, winning the race at an average speed of 140mph and heading up an Audi 1-2-3, with all three cars creeping under the bar set by Porsche nearly 40 years earlier. The irony was that the fastest Le Mans ever wasn't even won by the fastest car in the race that weekend. The gap between Peugeot and Audi has, if anything, got bigger since last year, with the French cars lapping up to four seconds a lap faster than their German rivals. But anyone familiar with Aesop's fables will know that the steady determination of a tortoise can sometimes beat the flighty but unreliable hare. And so it proved. The Peugeots led the first half of the race but then, one by one, all four of their cars hit problems, and eventually not one of them would finish the race. Whether there was something fundamentally wrong with the 2010-iteration of the 908 or whether they simply pushed the engines too hard after getting held up early on by minor niggles isn't clear, but either way the old cliche is true: to finish first, first you must finish. Peugeot hared off into the distance early on, but Audi, it seems, had produced the fastest tortoise in the world.

So another long-standing record has gone. It took 44 years for Fernando Alonso to snatch the late Bruce Mclaren's record as the youngest Grand Prix winner of all time, though that record would belong to the Spaniard for just a few short years before Sebastian Vettel stole it away from him. Likewise, Emerson Fittipaldi's claim to be the youngest world champion ever lasted for 33 years before Alonso took it from him, only to find his arch-rival Lewis Hamilton took the record away from him just 3 years later. Which begs the question, how long will Audi get to keep this record for? No record lasts forever, it seems. Though I would be surprised if the 251mph recorded by Roger Dorchy in Gerard Welter's WM Peugeot down the old Mulsanne straight will ever be bettered...

Civil War?

2010-06-06T07:39:00.001-07:00

If I'd been asked to pick out the most explosive driver pairing at the beginning of the year, I might have singled out Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button. Could Mclaren cope with the combined egos of the two most recent World Champions in the same team? And then there was the question of how Fernando Alonso would settle in alongside Felipe Massa at Ferrari. Massa, after all, had established himself as the de facto number one at Ferrari before his injury in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix. But it is hard to imagine that Alonso moved there thinking he would be playing a mere supporting role, or at the Scuderia hired him for that purpose. Come to that, the combination of aging returning 7-time champion Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg, a man who has got his hands on a potentially race-winning car for the first time and has everything to prove. But right now, in the aftermath of the Turkish Grand Prix, it is the Red Bull pairing of Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel which looks the most troubled because they have been the first pairing to break that cardinal rule of motor racing, "don't collide with your team mate".

Let's not get things out of proportion. Team mates have collided with each other before now, without it resulting in what divorce lawyers might call "irreconcilable differences" and really serious feuds between team mates at the front of the F1 grid are really not as common as is sometimes made out. That's not to say that F1 drivers have always necessarily got on especially well with their team mates but the real swords-at-dawn grudge matches? There was Senna and Prost at Mclaren and, infamously, the tragically brief war between Didier Pironi and Gilles Villeneuve at Ferrari in 1982. But beyond that, I struggle to think of others.

Interestingly, the roots of the feuds between both Senna and Prost and Pironi and Villeneuve lay not in on-track collisions between the drivers, but in what one driver perceived to be the reneging on a deal not to race each other. At the San Marino Grand Prix of 1982, which, like the US Grand Prix some twenty four years later, had a greatly reduced grid because of the withdrawal of the FOCA teams (barring Tyrrell, who in deference to their Italian sponsor, ignored FOCA's boycott of the race), there was little chance of anyone other than Ferrari winning, once the Renaults had gone out. On the final lap, Villeneuve claimed that both drivers had been told to hold station. Pironi claimed otherwise, and dived down the inside of his team mate and into the lead at Tosa to win the race. Afterwards, Villeneuve claimed to have been cheated of a win that was rightly his and was quoted as saying "I'll never speak to Pironi again in my life." Two weeks later, he was killed in an accident in qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix.

Seven years later, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost found themselves on the front row for the second round of the 1989 World Championship, again at Imola. After Senna had been eliminated in a first corner accident at the opening round at Jacerapagua, he apparentl approached Prost and suggested a deal by which they didn't race each other into the first corner at Tosa on the opening lap. Prost agreed and, at the start, Senna duly got away from pole and into the lead. On the fourth lap, however, came Gerhard Berger's horrific fiery accident at Tamburello which caused the race to be stopped. At the restart, it was Prost who got away from the line better and led through Tamburello. Senna, however, dived out of his slipstream and snatched a lead he would never lose. Later, he would claim that the original deal had covered only the first start, and not the restart. Prost considered this a fundamentally dishonest claim, and relations between the two were never really the same again, reaching their nadir with their collision at the Casio Chicane while fighting for the title at Suzuka later in the year.

One might point to the rivalry between Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet at Williams in the late eighties, more recently, the intense battle between Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton in their year together at Mclaren in 2007. However, these always struck me as first and foremost a battle between one of those drivers and their team, rather than a grudge-match between the two drivers. Both Alonso and Piquet has assumed that, as double world champions, they had implicit number one status when they moved to Mclaren and Williams respectively, and neither appreciated it when they found that their less fancied team mates were not only being allowed to take the fight to them, but appeared to have the support of at least a faction within their team. While I don't doubt that Piquet and Mansell, in particular, would certainly never be friends - their background and outlook on life was far, far too difficult (and Piquet's childish comments to Brazilian Playboy about Mansell's wife didn't help).

So where might the Webber/Vettel falling-out fit into this picture? I would argue it has more in common with the latter two examples, than with the all-out war between Senna and Prost. Where Senna and Prost were clearly the two stand-out drivers of their era, two men who knew that, in equal machinery, nobody else was much of a threat, Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel are merely two of perhaps seven or eight really first-rate drivers in Formula 1 at the moment. Likewise, until the collision last Sunday, they had largely avoided causing each other trouble, and appear to have a fair degree of mutual respect for each other. Whether that can survive their accident at the Otodrom Istanbul remains to be seen, but neither strikes me as the sort of person to pursue a vendetta against a team mate.

No, the far bigger problem is likely to be the relationship between Mark Webber and his team. For in my eyes, and indeed, those of the great majority of observers, the plain truth of the matter is that Sebastian Vettel made a mistake while trying to pass Webber and drove the pair of them off the road. Perhaps he thought, wrongly, that he was already clear of Webber's front wing by the time he began to pull right, back towards the racing line in preparation for braking. Perhaps he simply expected Webber to yield and give him room, in which case I can't help but think he hasn't been paying enough attention to his team mate's racecraft over the last couple of years. Webber gave him just enough room to stay alongside, but was determined not to give any more than he had to, to give Vettel the choice between backing off and following him, or braking on the dirty, dusty inside line. What happened was an understandable error on Vettel's part, a racing accident, but

The trouble is, Red Bull didn't seem to see it that way. Christian Horner's first comment to journalists was that he was disappointed that his drivers didn't give each other room. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that what he was really saying was that he thought Webber should have given Vettel space, let him past, in the interests of ensuring a Red Bull one-two.

And that, inevitably, that can only have fed a creeping belief on Webber's part that Vettel is Red Bull's favoured son. He is, after all, the team's longer term prospect. The man far more likely to be with the team in three, or even five, years time. The man that the team need to keep sweet if they want to be certain he won't run off to Mercedes when Michael Schumacher finally calls time on his career.

On top of that, there are those who would whisper that the young fresh-faced Vettel is a much better 'fit' for Red Bull's marketing activity. Certainly, as someone rather closer in age to Webber than to Vettel myself, I can't help thinking it's been a very long time since I last went out on the town fueled by vodka and red bulls. It's the sort of thing I might have done when I was, like Vettel, in my early 20s. Personally, I can't stand the stuff. On top of that, Vettel is also the Red Bull protege, having been backed by the soft drinks maker since his early teens, where Webber came to the team as a hired mercenary, having previously driven for Williams.

Normally, this wouldn't be obvious. Webber might suspect that Vettel was the unofficial Number 1 in the team, and Dietrich Mateschitz might prefer it if it were Vettel who was racking up the wins and leading the title, but if, as happened at Barcelona and Monaco, Webber was the in-form man, the team could live with it. But the Vettel/Webber collision left the team suddenly exposed, forced to nail their colours to the mast, to side with one driver or the other. Or rather, it didn't force them to do any such thing, but under pressure, in the heat of the moment, the team's allegiances were thrust into the light. And it will be interesting to see whether Christian Horner, Dietrich Mateschitz, Adrian Newey, et al, can repair the damage and ensure that both their drivers still believe they have the full support of the team. The news, last week, that they had re-signed Webber for 2011 suggest that, in spite of everything, they're determined to give it a go.

Stage-side

2010-05-31T12:05:00.000-07:00

At first, you hear only the distant sound of a car engine, straining against its rev-limiter like a dog against its leash, interleaved with the low crackle of the exhaust on the over-run. For a minute or two it echoes across the valley, but doesn't seem to be getting any louder, any closer. Then, suddenly, it appears. Rear end fish-tailing slightly as the tyres struggle for purchase on the damp tarmac, it rounds the tight 90 degree left-hander and its barreling straight towards you, at an ever increasing velocity. Building from 30mph to nearer 100 in the space of a few seconds. Then just as it seems its never going to slow down, that a tonne or more of Mitsubishi Lancer Evo. 10 rally car is going to come ploughing straight on through the barbed-wire fence and make mince-meat of you, the driver jams the brakes, the front of the car dips under the force being applied, and the car is pitched into an elegant four-wheel drift through the left-hander you are standing on the outside of, tearing up a chunk of turf from the inside verge as he goes. And then he's on his way again, banging back up through the gears, the sound of the engine becoming steadily fainter as he disappears down the narrow sing;e-track road, into the distance. There'll be another one along in a minute...

I struggle to think of any other sport where a spectator, watching the event live and in person, has less insight into what is actually happening, less idea of who is in the fight for victory and who has little chance of winning, than in the case with rallying. On each stage, you see the cars for just a few seconds, and perhaps two or three corners at the most. Even if you have an intuitive feel for their pace over those two or three corners, you cannot know whether it's representative of their performance over the stage as a whole, which might be fifteen miles long, and consist of hundreds of corners. Watching the penultimate stage of the Jim Clark Rally last weekend, I had literally no idea who was in contention for the win, and who was minutes or more off the leader's pace, with no realistic chance of victory. I had no idea, until I got back to the ceremonial finish area in the village of Duns, that Gwyndaf Evans, a man whom I remember seeing in action in a lurid-pink coloured Sierra RS Cosworth in the late 1980s, had finally broken his Jim Clark Rally duck and won the event in his Mitsubishi Lancer.

So why did I bother to make the trip? And more to the point, why was I joined by what I would guess, based on the evidence of a single stage (Wedderburn, in case you're curious), was a larger crowd than any other motorsport event in Scotland bar the BTCC and British Superbike rounds at Knockhill? The answer, in short, is that there is no other form of motorsport that has such an immediate, visceral, visual impact - that lets you get so close to the action, and which is so obviously a challenge for the driver. It may be every bit as difficult to get a really good time out of a low-powered single-seater but it doesn't look half as much of a challenge as getting the quickest possible time out of a 300BHP rally car on a damp single-track road on cut slick tyres. And 80 or 90mph might look very pedestrian on the wide open expanses of Silverstone, but it looks pretty bloody hair-raising on a narrow, pot-holed country lane with an eight foot stone wall on one side and a ditch on the other.

One thing that did surprise me though, was how much more entertaining the National-class event that ran behind the British Rally Championship counter that was the main event. While the main event was contested by Group N and Super 2000 cars (though the only competitive Super 2000 car, Craig Breen's Fiesta, had gone out of the event by the time I was watching), the National event seemed to serve as a kind of graveyard for top-line rally cars from the past thirty years. Damian Cole won that event in an ex M-Sport Focus WRC, but he was pushed all the way by Simon Mauger in, of all things, a Mk. 2 Escort which was far and away the most spectacular car through the bit of the Wedderburn stage I saw, the combination of rear wheel drive, a thirty year old chassis and bundles of horsepower on a by then rather wet surface looking a real handful.

Even if the cars hadn't been as spectacular as they were, there was something very refreshing about the sheer variety of the machinery. Rather than endless Subaru Imprezas and Mitsubishi Lancers, there was a Focus WRC, a Skoda Fabia WRC, several very quick Mk. 2 Escorts and, yes, a lot of Mitsubishis and Subarus. There was even an ersatz Metro 6R4 (though it had been entered into a previous rally as a 'Metro 4R2', reflecting the fact that it was in 2WD and had a 4 cylinder engine.) I appreciate that such an approach could hardly be expected to work in the big-money world of the World Rally Championship, where such open and free technical regulations would soon get out of hand. But if the people running the WRC really want to reconnect with fans, to create a real spectacle, how about mandating rear wheel drive?

(All photographs author's own.)

Electric Dreams

2010-05-23T02:50:00.002-07:00

The other week, I found myself flicking through an 'annual progress report' which my electricity company had deigned to post to me. You know, the kind of corporate bumf which I would normally send straight to the bin, but something in this one caught my eye: a project being undertaken by the founder to develop an electric car.

Now that, in itself is no great novelty. There have been electric cars for years - milk-floats and those tiny little runabouts that look like nothing so much as over-glorified mobility scooters. This, though, looked rather more interesting. Using a Lotus Exige as a base car, a team of engineers (ex-F1 engineers, according to the publicity material) had been set the task of building an electric car capable of doing 0-60 in 4 seconds and topping out at around 125mph. This, unlike any electric car I've heard of before, besides the massively expensive Tesla Roadster, is nudging into the kind of territory where you could race these things.

Now a part of me recoils in horror at the very idea of electric car racing. Motorsport, for me, is about the noise, about the smell, of big, powerful petrol-engined racing cars. It's part of the reason that, for all their technological sophistication, I can't work up much enthusiasm for Peugeot and Audi's diesel endurance racers. And if diesels are bad, electric racing cars are worse. There is simply no getting away from the fact that Ecotricity's Nemesis sounds like a London tube train under acceleration.

Put it down, if you like, to the fact that I'm my parents' son, and back in the late 1960s, while my father was dabbling about with a Formula Junior, my mother was wandering about bare-foot and studying for a degree in ecology, but another part of me is half in love with the idea of electric racing cars. You can read an awful lot of invective on the outer fringes of the blogosphere about how the notion of global warming is some giant government conspiracy to.....well... that's the problem. I've never really seen a coherent explanation of quite in whose interest such a conspiracy would be. But even if climate change turns out to be a storm in a teacup, there is still no getting away from the fact that the stuff we use to run almost all of the world's vehicle fleet today - oil - is going to run out some day, and perhaps sooner than is commonly realised. And if we want to go on having the kind of personal transport the car provides, that means finding another fuel to run them on.

Now what does all this have to do with motorsport? There is a perfectly reasonable argument that, regardless of what the future of motorised transport is, motorsport can continue as a fossil-fuel powered sport. As Mark Hughes pointed out in Autosport a few weeks back, the fact that we nowadays do not use horses as everyday transport has not killed off the Grand National. There is a vital difference, though. Horse racing never did really have any impact on the use of horses as an every-day form of transport. By contrast, at least in its early years, top level motorsport played a great part in driving forward the development of the motor car. These days, a Formula 1 car is so far removed from anything you might drive on the street that it no longer really fulfills this role to a significant extent (though some of the work on electronic driver aids and semi-automatic gearboxes in the early 1990s may have filtered down onto road cars) but electric cars are at a much earlier stage in their development. Where work to eke more power out of a given capacity of internal combustion engine has long since run up against the law of diminishing returns, I can't help but think that the competitive pressure of top-level motorsport could do much to accelerate the development of the electric car.

I'm not suggesting that the Formula 1 World Championship should switch to electric motors in the near future. Apart from anything else, F1 cars really need at least 700 or so BHP in order to be in any way challenging to drive, and no electric motor and battery combination that could fit in a racing car comes close to being able to provide that kind of power output for the duration of a 2 hour Grand Prix. And yes, there is also the sound problem. An F1 car shouldn't sound like a high speed milk-float. But electric motorsports series do already exist.

The EV racing cup is scheduled to begin next year and while, at least for now, they are not attracting the kind of media interest or, more importantly, money, that might drive a real quantum leap in the performance of electric vehicles, but for now, a really big money electric racing effort is not needed and might even be counter-productive to the growth of this form of racing. The small start-up engineering firms and enthusiastic amateurs can begin the process of developing these cars, leaving the big players to come in later when the racing is competitive enough and, crucially, the cars are fast enough, to ensure a real spectacle.

It's not just cars. If anything, electric motorcycles, being lighter, are a more realistic prospect. Last year, a race for electric motorbikes was held for the first time on the Isle of Man TT course, and while the times are not, for now, troubling the petrol powered bikes, they're not embarrassingly slow. The race was won last year by Rob Barber at an average speed of 87.7mph - a long way from the 135mph laps being turned in by the big boys, but considerably quicker than the kind of speeds which were achieved in the first 30 or so years of the event. Given another ten years, and investment from one of the really big players, it's possible that they might not be nearly so far from the pace of the petrol bikes.

I might, of course, be completely wrong. Perhaps electric cars will turn out to be one of history's dead ends - like Betamax or Minidiscs. Maybe the cars of the post-oil age will be powered by biofuels (by the by, a fascinating conversation between two great technophiles, Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross, made mention of work being done by biotech entrepreneur Craig Venter to genetically engineer algae which can be turned into diesel). But would I bet against the 2025 Le Mans 24 hour race being won by a battery powered car? No I wouldn't.

Looking Ahead

2010-05-17T10:04:00.000-07:00

Formula One, it seems, is doomed to live permanently in the immediate future. Those at the front never really stop to bask in the glory of their successes, while down the field, the focus is always on how to claw one's way closer to the front, tomorrow, next week, next year. It might seem sad in a way, this inability to stop and smell the flowers, to enjoy the moment, but it's an immensely competitive world, and anyone who lets their guard down, who isn't ruthlessly planning for the next race, the next season, will quickly fall behind. After just six races and two months, already teams and drivers are beginning to turn their focus to 2011. And vultures are beginning to circle around those who have been judged to be under-performing.

In truth, there are really only eight seats in Formula One that offer a driver a realistic shot at winning races on a regular basis right now - two apiece for each of Red Bull, Mclaren, Ferrari and Mercedes. As such, those teams hold all the aces when it comes to selecting drivers, and in recent weeks, there have been persistent rumours that one or another of the big four is considering a change to their line-up for next season.

Looking most precarious at the moment is Ferrari's Felipe Massa. The Brazilian had surprised many over the past three seasons by matching and latterly generally beating the highly-rated Kimi Raikkonen. The arrival of the more focused Fernando Alonso, however, seems to have stopped Massa in his tracks. Autosport publish a handy ready-reckoner chart before each race, taking the fastest single lap from each driver over each Grand Prix and averaging them out to show how far each driver is from the ultimate pace. It's most useful for comparing the performance of team mates, and what it shows is not good news for Felipe - he's been an average of four tenths of a second a lap off the pace of Alonso thus far this year, a far bigger performance gap than separates any of the other pairings in the big four teams.

Why? It's really hard to say. Perhaps Massa was flattered by comparisons with Kimi Raikkonen, who had seemingly lost interest in F1 after sealing the world title in 2007, and who was perhaps never quite so quick as was thought. Maybe he's not quite the same driver he was before that horrific accident in qualifying at Hungary last year. Equally possibly, Alonso's determination to get the whole team behind him, something which Kimi Raikkonen was never really interested in trying to do, has pulled the rug out from under Massa. A team which had taken Massa to its heart perhaps in part because they had found Raikkonen such a cold fish, now, in Alonso, have someone who can really lead them in the way that Schumacher used to. Leaving Massa a little surplus to requirements. And the trouble is, that with the competition between the top four teams so intense, Ferrari really can't afford to have one of its drivers feeling lost, lacking in confidence, unsure of himself. Not if it's costing him four tenths of a second a lap, anyway.

Mercedes, too, are wrestling on the horns of a dilemma when it comes to driver choices for 2011. When they announced that Michael Schumacher would be returning to F1 with the team, it looked like they had pulled off a remarkable coup. Rather than running a line-up of Rosberg and Heidfeld, one which looked a little uninspired when their major rivals had the likes of Hamilton, Alonso and Vettel on their books, suddenly they were being led by a seven time World Champion, probably the single best driver of the last twenty years.

Except he just doesn't seem quite the man he once was. Yes, Rosberg's points lead over him owes much to Schumacher's misfortune - the mechanical failure at Sepang, the first lap chaos at Melbourne, the penalty for that moment of silliness at La Rascasse last weekend. But still... does anyone really think that the Schumacher of old, the one who so dominated the sport for more than a decade, would find himself being matched by Nico Rosberg? A man who, with all due respect, has not one Grand Prix victory to his name? Schumacher himself admits that after three years away, it's taking him time to get back into the swing of things, but that's not something he seemed to need when, with almost no previous experience in an F1 car, he rocked up at Spa one August day in 1991 and stuck a Jordan 191 further up the grid than the car had ever been in the hands of its regular drivers. So do Mercedes hang on in the hope that he'll come good eventually? Or do they start casting about for a younger man who has the hunger to take the fight to Red Bull, Mclaren and Ferrari?

The question though, is, if not Schumacher, then who? About a fortnight ago, Mark Webber's career looked to be hanging by a thread, and he might have jumped at the chance to drive for Mercedes next year. Beaten by his team mate in the opening races, he'd compounded his problems with a series of silly, unforced errors which cost him points in Australia and in China. Then came the strongest week of his racing career; back-to-back victories at Barcelona and at Monaco where he plain outpaced his young superstar team mate and didn't put a foot wrong. Now he's leading the driver's championship and being talked about as a possible replacement for Massa at Ferrari - if they can persuade him to leave. He might make a very good partner for Rosberg at Mercedes, come to that. Surely, though, the man that Mercedes must really want is Webber's team mate, the 'new Schumacher', Sebastian Vettel. Surely anyone with pretences of putting together a 'German superteam' must need the country's rising star, the man who nearly won the World Championship for Red Bull last year, on board? Except why would either Webber or Vettel want to give up a drive in the dominant, Adrian Newey designed Red Bull?

Far more likely to be interested in situations vacant at Mercedes or Ferrari is Renault's Robert Kubica, to my mind, the one really great, first rate racer who is not currently signed to one of the big four teams. with a realistic shot at the World Title over the next couple of years. He's frequently dragged the Renault R30 far further up the field than it really belongs - a 2nd at Australia, a front row grid slot and podium finish at Monaco - and he actually looked disappointed he hadn't won!. All this in a car his team mate Vitaly Petrov has rarely troubled the points with. As in 2008, while obvious title contenders are busy spiking their guns, he looks like he just might lead a sneaky, insurgent campaign for the driver's crown in a car that's far from championship winning material.

Further down the field, there will be others wondering whether a change might do them good, and unlike the big four, they might well not wait until next year before making the switch. Take Sauber: They've been curiously disappointing all year after looking quick in winter testing, only once looking like they might score points (at Barcelona). And surely I can't be alone in wondering whether their driver line-up of Pedro De la Rosa and Kamui Kobayashi isn't part of the problem, whether they've really been getting the most out of the car.

De la Rosa has never struck me as anything more than a good journeyman, a man with enough testing experience perhaps, to be useful to a team struggling to re-group after being sold down the river by former owners, BMW. Kobayashi, on the other hand, has thus far been a crushing disappointment. There's been no sign of the feisty self-confidence and pace he displayed in his two races at the end of the season with Toyota last year. Perhaps last year's Toyota was better than we realised, or maybe he's just not at home with the Sauber, but the precise reasons matter little, the team just can't afford not to get the most of what they have.

Maybe they will be tempted to try to steal away one of a number of solid, talented drivers currently wasting their efforts in machinery that's four or five seconds a lap off the pace at the back at the field. Virgin's Timo Glock and Lotus' Heikki Kovalainen and Jarno Trulli might be putting a brave face on it, and maybe they really believe that in a year or so, their new teams will be snapping at the heels of the likes of Sauber, but I can't help but think one or more of them could be tempted away to try to sort out Sauber.

Failing that, if the team must run an unproven GP2 racer of uncertain pedigree, there might be others at least able to get stickers on the sides of the bare white car. Pastor Maldonado has never struck me as quite the real deal, but he might be worth a shot, especially if he comes with pots of Venezuelan Oil cash. Then there's Sergio Perez, the current GP2 Series leader who, by the by, looked mighty at Monaco in the GP2 feature race last weekend, and who has a long-standing relationship with the Mexican telecoms giant, TelMex. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but I'd be surprised if De la Rosa and Kobayashi both see out the season at Sauber.

Talking of people with reasons to fear for their jobs, watching the action from Monaco last weekend, I got to thinking that if I were Sebastien Buemi or Jaime Alguersuari, I might not be feeling to secure at Toro Rosso right now. It's not that either of them are doing particularly badly with the Toro Rosso this season - they've both looked solid enough, picking up points here and there and not doing anything silly. But neither has done anything to persuade me that they're potential future World Champions. People the Red Bull team proper will be interested in. Whereas, watching Daniel Ricciardo, the latest of a long line of Red Bull junior drivers, dominating the field in the Renault World Series race at the weekend, I had the uncanny feeling I was watching the new Sebastian Vettel doing his stuff... Surely Red Bull are going to want to get him into an F1 car sooner rather than later... Next year, perhaps....

GP2 2010: Winning down to an ART?

2010-05-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

Is GP2 beginning to suffer the same fate that eventually befell the old F3000 series it replaced? In its last years, the most promising young talents opted to give it a miss, leaving the road clear for one or two quick drivers signed to the one or two genuinely competitive teams to dominate a grid of also-rans.

Arguably, that is exactly what happened last year with Hulkenberg and ART. Yes, the young German's performance appeared impressive, but who exactly was he beating? Essentially a collection of middling junior racers with the deep pockets needed to pay for a year in the midfield of the most expensive sub-F1 single seater series there is. Meanwhile, a number of ostensibly more promising junior talents spent their time in the Renault World Series, or F2, or the F3 Euroseries, rather than spend silly money on a ride with a middling GP2 team which, no matter how quick the driver might be, could serve only to destroy a young star's reputation. I'm still of the view that such as Alvaro Parente and Andy Soucek were every bit as quick as Bruno Senna or Giorgio Pantano when they raced in GP2 a couple of years back and were held back only by the fact that SuperNova couldn't engineer a car that could consistently match those of ISport, Racing Engineering or ART. Of course, I might be completely wrong. Fathoming the ultimate pace and potential of racing drivers based on their junior series results has long felt more like predicting the movement of the stock exchange by looking at the entrails of rabbits than a science.

It's not quite like that. There is some correlation between a driver's junior formula record and his ultimate potential. Look at how Hamilton or Kubica stood out in GP2 and World Series by Renault respectively. But on the other hand, what on earth is one to make of the star performer in Barcelona last weekend, Sam Bird. Until now, there's been absolutely nothing about the youngster's performances in three years of Formula 3 to suggest he was anything more than a more-or-less competent deep-pocketed kid who, even with a seat at ART, would be unlikely to do any more than, say, Pastor Maldonado managed with the second-string ART seat last year.

But instead, we got a feisty, aggressive performance in which he single-handedly demolished the notion that it is impossible to overtake around the Circuit Di Catalunya in a current-iteration GP2 racer. He put in the kind of performance that we got used to seeing from Hamilton at his most inspired, back in 2006, passing car after car after losing his front wing at the beginning of the feature race, and coming through from 9th to finish 4th in the sprint race, despite damaging his steering in light contact with Dani Clos' car. Was it a one-off or will he be able to do it regularly? And how much of that performance was down to Bird's talent, as opposed to the legendary engineering nous of ART providing him with a car that could do things, find grip on parts of the track, that nobody else could?

We might get more of an idea when they get to Monaco tomorrow, a circuit where the input of the man holding the steering wheel counts a little more, and the work of the engineers and their lap tops matters a little less. Maybe Bird is better than we realised. He wouldn't be the first racing driver in the history of the sport to look underwhelming in over-gripped, under-powered Formula 3 cars, only to come into his own when given something with a lot more horsepower to play with. On the other hand, I can't help but remember than, before he went off at the first corner of the opening race, Jules Bianchi had gone half a second faster than his team mate in qualifying...

Of course, Sam Bird didn't win either race, with the first going to former Renault World Series front-runner, Charles Pic while Formula Master champion Fabio Leimer converted pole in the sprint race into victory on Sunday morning. While I expect that Leimer will not be a consistent front-runner (even if he's faster than I think, and wasn't simply the beneficiary of a clear run on a reverse-grid race, I'd be surprised if Ocean Racing Technology can provide him with the equipment to win regularly), Pic and Arden might be more of a threat. After some years in which Arden has appeared to drift, with team owner Christian Horner seemingly preoccupied with running the Red Bull F1 team, the former F3000 title-winners appear to have been getting themselves on a firm footing again. And Pic is probably the most promising driver they've had on the books since they ran Bruno Senna back in 2007.

Who else might be worth watching? Well despite his failure to score, and despite his race performances being overshadowed by those of his team mate, it would be a fool who wrote off Jules Bianchi. He did, after all, secure pole position by a margin of three tenths of a second last Friday and while he struggled to pick up results in the GP2Asia series over the winter, he did look quick, especially under race conditions. Moreover, he absolutely dominated the F3 Euroseries last year, more so even than Hulkenberg, and with an ART seat, he at least arguably remains championship favourite, in spite of his failure to score last weekend.

The stars of the GP2Asia series, of course, were ISport, and, particularly, Davide Valsecchi. ISport and, particularly, Valsecchi, looked a shade underwhelming at Barcelona last weekend, and it is possible that neither driver nor team is as on top of the newer car as it is at home with the older Dallara GP2 machine used in the winter series. That said, they've shown that they can get the job done, and Oliver Turvey, while never looking super-quick, picked up a decent haul of points and deserves credit for picking up points for 5th in the sprint race in a car which looked decidedly out of sorts. He's a smart guy, and it wouldn't entirely surprise me if he, rather than Valsecchi, emerges as ISport's best prospect over the season.

Dani Clos' inability to pass him in a seemingly much faster Racing Engineering machine in Race 2 was rather disappointing, but he at least had a better time of it than his team mate, Christian Vietoris. After picking up a second-row slot for the feature race, he fell victim to the chaos at the first corner and was eliminated from the opening race. From a lowly starting slot in the sprint race he too seemed unable to pull off much in the way of overtaking, and he could finish only 18th. Nonetheless, that first qualifying performance suggests he might be a name to watch as the season progresses.

Giacomo Ricci seems intent on demonstrating that his late-season GP2 Asia form reflects genuine pace. DPR haven't looked like front-runners in the main series for years, but a combination of Ricci's turn of speed and Andre Herck's millions appear to have effected a genuine change of fortunes for the erstwhile tail-enders.

Regular readers may remember that I have long reckoned Swedish teenager Marcus Ericsson to be a bit special, ever since I saw him making everyone else look amateurish at a Formula BMW race at Knockhill some three years ago. He didn't really show it last weekend, though he did pick up 8th on the grid in a SuperNova car that is probably some way from the class of the field, and he was around a second faster than his team-mate, Josef Kral. I'd be surprised if he didn't threaten the regular front-runners on occasion later in the year.

Sergio Perez was one of a talented crop of drivers in British F3 a couple of years back. He didn't really distinguish himself in GP2 last year alongside Edoardo Mortara but, back for a second season and with the benefit of knowing the tracks (British F3 stars have a relative disadvantage in comparison with Euroseries F3 drivers in that the Euroseries visits many more of the tracks the GP2 series takes in over the year) he may do rather better now, driving for the Barwa Addax team which, with Vitaly Petrov at the wheel, provided the closest thing to real opposition to Hulkenberg last year, and he might even be a good outside bet for the title himself.

It is noticeable that many of the drivers who have appeared semi-permanent features of the GP2 grid in recent years have moved on. Gone are Spaniard Javier Villa, Italian Luca Filippi Austrian Andreas Zuber. Each showed flashes of pace during their time in GP2, but none ever looked like mounting a serious title challenge and I doubt any of them will be much missed. Lucas Di Grassi and Karun Chandhok have moved on to better(?) things at last, with Virgin and HRT. The exception is Pastor Maldonado. At 25, and having been comprehensively overshadowed by Hulkenberg at ART last year, I can't help thinking that this ship has already sailed, and that the F1 paddock has already made up its mind about the mercurial Venezuelan. Even if he were to win the title, he might find that, like Giorgio Pantano before him, he is left with nowhere else to go. Having been outpaced by Luis Razia at Rapax last weekend, this may in any case be a moot point.

So, who's going to win it? Hard to say for sure. At this stage, I see no standout performers likely to stamp their authority over the series in the manner of Hamilton in 06 or Hulkenberg last year. If he's as good as the hype suggests though, the field looks reasonably clear for Jules Bianchi to follow in the footsteps of his ART predecessor Hulkenberg and win the title at his first attempt. And with a Ferrari test contract in his pocket, he's not badly placed if he can get the job done.

The Rise, Fall, Resurrection and Downfall of Donington Park

2010-04-29T04:44:00.001-07:00

Some time back, I wrote a piece on my memories of Oulton Park, the nearest race track to my childhood home and a place at which I spent a good many Sunday afternoons as a child, watching assorted clubman racers getting to grips with the deceptively difficult Lodge/Deer Leap section at the end of the lap. Oulton Park will probably always be my favourite of the great British parkland circuits, but it was not the first.

That honour belongs to Donington Park, situated in nearby Derbyshire. That circuit first saw action in 1928, though it remained a motorcycle dirt track until local motorcycle racer Fred Craner organised the creation of a sealed-surface permanent race circuit in 1933. Until then, the only permanent race circuit in the UK was the banked oval at Brooklands and the idea of circuit racing did not yet really exist in Britain. Donington came to be indelibly associated with the awe-inspiring battles between the Auto Union and Mercedes 'silver arrows' of the pre-war era. This chapter of motorsport history will forever be tainted by the unavoidable truth that both teams were part of a Nazi propaganda operation, intended to underline German engineering superiority to a watching world. Leaving that aside for a moment, though, one can only wonder at the impact that the sight of a 600BHP+ 6 litre supercharged Grand Prix car must have had when they first appeared on British soil for the 1937 Grand Prix at Donington.

In his article on the 1937 race, When the Germans Came to Donington, Rodney Walkerley wrote "A few moments later, Manfred von Brauchitsch, red helmeted, brought a great, silver projectile snaking down the hill, and close behind, his teammate Rudolf Caracciola, then at the height of his great career. The two cars took the hairpin, von Brauchitsch almost sideways, and rocketed away out of sight with long plumes of rubber smoke trailing from their huge rear tyres, in a deafening crash of sound. The startled Pressmen gazed at each other, awe-struck. "Strewth," gasped one of them, "so that's what they're like!""

To put this in perspective, it should be remembered that it would be only with the advent of the turbo era in the early 1980s that Grand Prix cars would again equal, and eventually far surpass, the horsepower being generated by these beasts, and by that time, suspension, chassis and tyre technology had progressed a long way in making such power outputs relatively safe and controllable. Think, if you will, of a GP2 car on skinny crossply tyres, drum brakes and no aerodynamic downforce to speak of. If the intent behind the Nazis' race programme was shock and awe, it succeeded...

Of course, days before the 1939 British Grand Prix was due to be held, the Nazis went from fighting a propaganda war to a land war and Donington was requisitioned by the British military for use as a supplies depot during the war. And for the next 30 years, the circuit lay derelict, until being bought in 1971 by Midlands construction millionaire, Tom Wheatcroft, a race enthusiast who had already used his considerable fortune to set up a Formula 2 team and build up a collection of historic racing cars (which later formed the backbone of the Donington Collection, the largest single collection of Grand Prix cars in the world). Over the next six years, the circuit was completely refurbished and, despite a last-minute attempt to scupper the event by local ramblers claiming the circuit cut across a right of way, the first race on the new circuit took place on 27 May 1977.

The new circuit followed the same approximate route as the original 1933 layout, but omitted the long drag down to the old Melbourne hairpin where Wheatcroft had watched the Mercedes and Auto Unions as a teenager, once remarking "You had to be there to know what it was like. The W125 Mercs and the V16 Auto Unions were doing 170mph by halfway down the straight. The noise and the smell and the speed – we hadn't seen anything like it before." The highlight of the new circuit was the fast downhill sweepers of the Craner Curves, which led down to the big braking zone of the Old Hairpin, both fairly closely modeled on the 1933 circuit. Other sections, like the slightly off camber Druids corner, have elements to recommend them, but it is the Hollywood/Craner/Old Hairpin section which makes the circuit.

In 1985, the 'Melbourne Loop', which extended part of the way down the hill at the back of the circuit towards the old Melbourne hairpin was introduced to bring the circuit up to the required length for Grand Prix motorcycle racing, which Donington went on to host between 1987 and 2009 after which it finally moved to Silverstone.

If Oulton Park is associated in my memory with the Gold Cup F3 race and club saloon racing, then it is Group C sportscar racing and the latter day 'silver arrows' of Peter Sauber's Mercedes sportscar team which most immediately spring to mind. They were dominant at the two WSC races I saw there in 1989 and 1990, in much the same manner as the original Silver Arrows had been fifty years previously. The 1989 race which I watched on a bright summers day from the banking above the Craner Curves I still remember for the wealth of beautiful machinery that cascaded down to the Old Hairpin in the sun, Gordon Spice's privateer sportscars, the Lola-Nissans, a brace of Porsche 962s and the short-lived Proteus Aston Martins. A more beautiful collection of racing cars I don't recall ever having seen.

Aside from the spectator banking above the Craner Curves and the Old Hairpin, the circuit's other obvious spectator viewing point is at the back of the Esses, which gave you line of sight to not one but two of the circuit's main overtaking points, under braking for the Esses and for the desperately slow final hairpin at Goddards which leads onto the pit straight. Not places that a racing car looks especially impressive when circulating at speed on its own, but a great place to watch racing from, and consequently a good place to watch touring car races especially.

Over the years, I saw big-banger Group A Sierra RS500s, close fought battles between various cars from the early years of the 2 litre supertourer era, the 1987 Donington 500km World Touring Car race which seemingly nobody wanted to win, as one after another of the major contenders dropped out, finally handing victory to Roberto Ravaglia and Eric Van De Poele's BMW M3 after the A8 Sierras and Nissan Skylines all failed to go the distance. Another touring car race which sticks in my memory was the visit paid by the German Touring Car Championship some time in the early 90s on a very cold October day, where I remember being sat supping ultra-hot 'rocket fuel' curried soup as my fingers went numb while the big V8 Audis of Frank Biela and Hans Stuck dominated proceedings, perhaps appropriate as Audi began life as the other 'silver arrows' team, Auto Union.

My two most vivid memories of Donington Park, though, come from opposite ends of the racing spectrum. The first, on a hot summer's day, came watching club racing at the bottom of the Craner Curves, and in particular, a race for what were, even then, ancient Renault 5TLs, primitive hatchbacks barely worthy of the designation 'racing car', which had the mother of all battles over ten laps of the shorter Donington circuit, and who came four or even five abreast down the hill, swapping paint and positions every lap, showing that great racing emphatically does not require great racing cars.

The other came, I think, five years later, on a cold, damp Easter weekend at Donington's one and only post-war Grand Prix. I was a huge fan, at the time, of the mercurial Brazilian Ayrton Senna, but things did not look good for him that day. The Williams had locked out the front row and Senna was only fourth, behind the Benetton of Michael Schumacher. Except...except it was raining, and when Senna was around, rain was always a game-changer. And so it turned out to be. Despite a slow start which dropped him momentarily to fifth, he was diving down the inside of Karl Wendlinger's Sauber to grab third by the time the field got to where I was standing, by the Old Hairpin. A lap later, he was clear of both Williams, and as the afternoon wore on, he demolished the field, lapping all bar Damon Hill, who trailed a distant 1m 23s behind on what many regard as Senna's day of days, though the man himself never rated it as highly as his win eight years earlier in the wet at Estoril, as that day he did not have the benefits of traction control.

Now, of course, Donington lies derelict, the unintentional casualty of Bernie Ecclestone's high stakes game of poker with the BRDC over the future of the British Grand Prix and Simon Gillett's dreams of a debenture funded F1 race at Donington. It is a terrible shame that, at the time of Tom Wheatcroft's death late last year, his life's work lay in ruins. His son, Kevin Wheatcroft, to whom ownership of the circuit has reverted following the collapse of Donington Ventures Limited, says they are keen to ensure that Donington remains a working race circuit, but the sad truth is that there is probably vastly more money to be made from turning the circuit over to property developers and as such, we may have seen the last of a race track which hosted some great races, both before World War 2, and in its later, modern guise. I hope I'm wrong.

Mid-Life Crisis?

2010-04-28T05:08:00.000-07:00

You can never step in the same river twice. The old saying struck me with force last weekend when, at the end of a week's cycling around the low countries, I went back to Amsterdam for the first time in ten years. When I was younger, inter-railing my way around Europe, it was, along with Prague, my favourite city. A relaxed party atmosphere, legal dope, decorative burned-out hippies. What was there not to love?

Returning in a fit of nostalgia in my early 30s, though, I found the appeal largely gone. The coffee shops appeared noisy, unpleasant dives and in any case, the idea of getting stoned no longer really enticed me. The crowds of young backpackers swarming about the city merely made me feel, if not exactly old, then no longer really young.

I wonder if Michael Schumacher, returning to Formula 1 after a three year break at the age of 41, is experiencing something similar. Quite what the seven-times world champion was expecting of his comeback I don't know, but I can't believe he's happy at being outpaced by team mate Nico Rosberg at all four of the opening races. Rosberg, after all, has long been regarded as a good, rather than a great, F1 driver and more to the point, in his sixteen years racing in F1 between 1991 and 2006, Schumacher was never regularly outpaced by a team mate. Yes, there were odd occasions when Rubens Barrichello got his Ferrari absolutely hooked up right and was a shade quicker, most memorably and controversially, at Austria in 2002, but these were few and far between. Eddie Irvine outqualified the German in their first race together at Ferrari in 1996 but he would never do so again. Jos Verstappen, Johnny Herbert and JJ Lehto all found their reputation as up and coming stars founder against the rocks when they were paired up with Schumacher at Benetton, and he helped to finish off the careers of Piquet and Patrese at the beginning of his own time in F1.

For Schumacher, explaining to a curious world why he is being beaten by his young team mate is a new experience, and I don't doubt, not an altogether comfortable one. Of course, he has a ready explanation to hand. The car doesn't suit him, the weight distribution is wrong and the Mercedes W01 has an inherent tendency towards understeer that leaves him struggling. But that doesn't sound quite right. Schumacher, at the height of his powers, established a reputation as a man who could drive around problems that left others floundering. He succeeded, after all, in winning races with the hopeless Ferrari F310A, a car which in the hands of Eddie Irvine, appeared to belong in the midfield. And in 1994, he even picked up a podium at Barcelona in a Benetton that was, for much of the race was stuck in 5th gear.

It is perhaps a shade more complicated than that, though. Yes, Schumacher appeared able to coax performances out of less than fully competitive cars of which his team mates could only dream, but for most of his career, both at Benetton and Ferrari, he was the undisputed number-one driver, with considerable influence over the development direction of the car, even, in the days of the Bridgestone/Michelin battle, having influence over the way in which the tyres were developed. By contrast, he has now walked cold into a car whose development he has had no influence over, on control tyres that reputedly don't suit his driving style. Add to that the penalty of three years out of the cockpit and is it any wonder that he has struggled? Think of how difficult testers like Alex Wurz and Luca Badoer found returning to race seats after years on the side-lines as test drivers. They hadn't forgotten how to drive racing cars, but there seemed little doubting that those last few tenths of a second had gone missing.

But still, I wonder if Schumacher's advancing years are catching up with him. Physical fitness does not appear to be a problem in his case. Unlike Nigel Mansell's ill-fated 1995 come-back with Mclaren, Schumacher does not appear to find the demands of driving an F1 car in his forties to be too much for him, still looks relatively fresh at the end of a long race. But mentally, is he quite what he was? Have the years dulled that otherworldly sense of balance, that ability to identify precisely where the limits of adhesion lie? Are his reflexes quite what they were?

I wonder, too, whether he has the motivation required to succeed at the highest level in any professional sport. I don't know what his reasons for coming back are. A desire, perhaps, to become the first 40-something F1 World Champion since Jack Brabham scooped his third title in 1966? A lingering sense of regret that he was pushed into retirement by Luca Di Montezemelo's signing of Kimi Raikkonen, before he was truly ready? An urge to test his mettle against a new generation of F1 stars, Hamilton, Kubica, Vettel et al, widely perceived as being quicker than the men whom Schumacher vanquished in the late 90s and early 00s? Or was he simply bored, at a loose end and unable to think of anything else to do with his life?

It matters because, if he is privately conflicted, or ambivalent about his continued involvement in F1, then I doubt that he'll be able to summon quite the kind of undivided, absolute dedication required to win titles, especially when trying to drive forward a team which isn't quite on the pace. In a Red Bull, it might be enough for a driver simply to turn up and bang in the quick laps, but to get a team focused on closing down the gap to those faster than them requires hard work. I was struck recently by Renault engineer Alain Permane's description of Robert Kubica's ferocious work ethic when talking to Autosport's Mark Hughes

"He will be at the track until well after midnight, even if he's racing the next day. He wants to go through and understand everything. He's always making suggestions, always wanting to know what's happening. He's very demanding, always on your case."

Doubtless, years ago at Ferrari, Michael Schumacher would have been exactly the same. But can a 41 year old family man, with a wife and two children be quite so single-mindedly dedicated to the job in hand, to the exclusion of all else? Especially when he has nothing to prove, when he's already shown 7 times over that he's a World Champion. And is he prepared to take the same risks in the car that he once would have done? Watching the action in the rain of China, it was striking that a man once famed for his incredible wet-weather car control was struggling, and with a car which his team mate led much of the race with, finishing on the podium. He's old enough to be Jaime Alguersuari's father and motor racing is ultimately a young man's game.

Perhaps Michael Schumacher came back because the F1 paddock is his natural home. From the age of 21 until he was 38, that is to say, for almost the whole of his adult life, it was the central focus of his life. But now maybe, he's discovering the truth of the saying that, once you've left, you can never go home. Nick Heidfeld is waiting in the wings...

Worth A Thousand Words

2010-04-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

This week, something a little different. A bit of self-indulgence, a chance to bring together two of my passions, motorsport and photography.

My first camera, a tenth birthday present, was a Miranda ME-Z. With a fixed 35mm lens, I was disappointed to find that cars would appear as tiny dots in the distance, but in those days, before Bernie brought in security with the express intention of keeping people like me out, it was at least possible to get up close to the machinery in the pitlane.

Sixteen years later, came the digital age. The Fuji S3000, with its 1/2.5in sensor, fixed 80ISO and 3MP sensor now seems very primitive, but in 2004, it reintroduced me to the joys of motorsport photography. Here are some pics from various club meets at Knockhill.

An upgrade to a so-called 'bridge camera', the Fuji s9000...

The Isle of Man TT provided some great photo-opportunities...

Another upgrade - this time to a Canon EOS400D SLR, with an 18-200mm lens that produced notably crisper images than either of the old Fujis.

Catching the moment...

I like the way it is possible to simulate the effects of black and white film with digital editing. Unlike my father or my art-college graduate brother, I've never had the patience for life in the dark room.

I'd heard horror stories about the difficulties of photographing modern F1 from the general admission area. But at Spa it turns out to be reasonably easy to get close to the action and away from the catch-fencing...

I even risked taking the camera out in the rain...

Capturing a sense of speed is a hit and miss affair...

And sometimes, racing cars turn up in the most unlikely places, like this Clan Crusader, which I stumbled upon while taking photographs in Newington Cemetery in the South of Edinburgh.

I'll be away out of the country for the next couple of weeks, for beer and bicycling in Bruges, Belgium. Back in May.

Going Through Church On Sunday

2010-04-07T09:56:00.001-07:00

That, in case you are wondering, is Church, the fast right-hander before the chicane at Thruxton. The old Hampshire aerodrome is one of the relatively few British race circuits which I have never visited in the quarter century or so since I first went through the gate at Brands Hatch to watch qualifying for the 1985 European Grand Prix. I had never thought of the place as particularly interesting before, but as I sat watching the opening races of the British Touring Car Championship I began to revise my opinion.

Yes, it's not the most interesting looking circuit layout. From the right hander of Segrave which leads drivers out of the complex, it's essentially a long blast for a mile and a bit down to the chicane at Club. Yet, watching the touring car boys drifting through Noble and Church at between 120mph and 150mph, sometimes in a full-on four-wheel drift of a kind that one very rarely sees in front wheel drive cars, I began to see the appeal of the place. Leaving Rockingham aside for a minute, it is arguably the closest thing that Britain has to a high speed oval circuit, and with Silverstone long since emasculated, is almost certainly the fastest race track in the country (Silverstone has a faster lap record, but one should bear in mind that this record was set by Michael Schumacher in the all-conquering Ferrari F2004, while the Thruxton lap record is held by the rather less feted Earl Goddard, during a EuroBOSS race ten years back. It's fair to say that a modern F1 car in the hands of a professional driver would be frighteningly fast round the Hampshire circuit.

Yes, it's not quite an oval, but the way the cars followed and drafted each other through the series of fast, flowing corners reminded me of the best aspects of oval racing. And the chicane and the slow 90 degree corners near the beginning of the lap add overtaking opportunities which might otherwise be lacking and to my mind add to, rather than detract from, the circuit's appeal. The recent move by the circuit owners to build a spectator banking on the back stretch of the circuit is a big improvement too, providing spectators with an opportunity to watch drivers fight it out on the most demanding part of the circuit.

What, though, of the state of the series which kicked off last weekend? How has the recession hit Britain's most popular national racing series? The most immediate impact has been that a lot of corporate orange has been repainted sponsor-less white. Championship winning West Surrey Racing's BMWs have lost their RAC backing, while Halfords have deserted Team Dynamics, though the latter would appear to have some backing from the Honda works to continue to race their in-house developed Civic Type-Rs. The most telling sign that all is not entirely well in BTCC-world is that reigning champion Colin Turkington has not returned to defend his title because he couldn't find a drive. With teams not interested in drivers who couldn't either bring sponsors, or pay out of their own deep pockets, the Northern Irishman has been left high and dry. The works SEATS and Vauxhalls have gone, although both manufacturers maintain a presence on the grid through private entries, and just as West Surrey Racing continued to race its MG ZRs after the collapse of the Rover Group, Triple 8 racing are pushing on with their Vectras despite the loss of support from the troubled manufacturer.

Despite these losses though, there was some good racing, and while the back half of the grid appears to be made up of club racers with deep pockets looking for a bit of entertainment on a Sunday afternoon, there's enough competitive cars and drivers at the front to keep things interesting. Indeed, the variation in driver ability helps to show how important a factor it, as well as the machinery, actually is. Compare, for example, Paul O'Neill's third and fourth places in his ancient ex-Team Dynamics Honda Integra with what team owner and mobile phone entrepreneur John George was able to achieve with the same equipment. Equally, Mat Jackson and Fabrizio Giovanardi were a lot quicker than their inexperienced team mates. It's unclear whether Giovanardi, who has only a one-race deal with Triple 8, will see out the season, but at first glance, his dominant victories in races one and two suggest that he could well add another BTCC title to his CV if the money is found to enable to continue his campaign.

That, though, is to forget that the Vauxhalls have always been very quick around Thruxton, and Giovanardi's hit rate at the circuit is particularly high. Jason Plato's Chevrolet Cruze, a more modern machine, being run by the same RML team which runs the works cars in the World Touring Car Championship. And it is not only former champion Plato who might be able to take the fight to Giovanardi. Motorbase's Mat Jackson came close to winning the title a couple of years ago in his family-run ex-Priaulx BMW and Team Dynamics appear finally to have got their new-shape Honda Civic well and truly sorted, and Gordon Shedden took pole, while Matt Neal led until both Hondas shredded their tyres in the first race. The way that Neal progressed through the field in the second race suggests that he too could emerge as a significant title contender and I'd be surprised if Honda didn't regularly challenge for race victories later in the year.

In recent years, touring car racing has been tarnished by endless battles over the rules intended to equalise peformance between cars built to different rules. In particular, the WTCC has seen constant disputes over exactly what is required to ensure a fair fight between front wheel drive, petrol powered Chevrolets, rear-wheel drive petrol powered BMWs and diesel powered, turbo-charged SEATs. There are no diesel powered cars in the BTCC this year, but despite this, Alan Gow's TOCA organisation has arguable an even more difficult challenge on their hands. Not only is there the argument over how best to equalise front wheel drive and the theoretically faster rear-wheel drive cars, but there is the conflict between WTCC-spec S2000 cars, unhomologated BTC-spec S2000 cars (such as the Vauxhalls and Honda Civics), ageing BTC-spec cars (there are now only the two Techspeed Integras now, five years on from the move away from BTC-spec cars), the LPG-p0wered Arena Motorsport Ford Focuses and the two privately entered Vauxhall Vectras now running the standard-issue TOCA engine, a detuned turbo-charged 2 litre engine intended to provide more cheaply the same horsepower and all-round performance as the more expensive S2000-spec normally aspirated 2 litre engines.

It was impressive, therefore, that the only complaints to make the press last weekend concerned the long-ratio first gears that the BMW teams were forced to run in order to nullify the startline advantage the rear wheel drive cars had over their front wheel driven rivals. West Surrey Racing and Motorbase were rather upset by the fact that the first gear they were forced to run appeared not only to slow them away from the line, but to place a tremendous strain on their clutches. Certainly it sometimes seemed that the BMWs were actually considerably slower away from the line than their front-driven rivals. Given time, and perhaps orders for stronger clutches from Motorbase and WSR, I'm sure this can be sorted out. All in all, despite the sponsor-less cars, and in spite of the absence of the reigning champion, the BTCC still looks to be in reasonably good health, certainly when one compares it with the state of the series 10 years back, when the 'Supertourer' era came to an ignominous end with grids of just 8 or 9 cars. If nothing else, it certainly beats going to church on Sunday in my book.

Received Wisdom

2010-03-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

There was a fair bit of overtaking at the Australian Grand Prix last weekend, wasn't there? Among the front-runners, there were more moves, quite possibly, than in the whole of the first half of last season. After the soporific anti-climax of the opening race at Bahrain a fortnight ago, it was a much-needed shot in the arm for Formula 1.

But wait a minute... Why was it so? The Albert Park circuit is hardly one particularly conducive to overtaking. The two corners that present half an opportunity, turns 4 and 13, are both preceded by fast 4th and 5th gear corners. Aren't F1 cars supposed to be all but impossible to follow at close range through such corners? Isn't the aerodynamic turbulence coming off the leading car supposed to rob those following of all front downforce, leaving them fighting hopelessly against deathly understeer and unable to get close enough to try a move under braking? Wasn't that why Bahrain, a circuit which for all its flaws, presents rather more of an obvious passing place, at the first turn, than Albert Park does, produced such a deathly procession?

Ah, but of course, the Australian Grand Prix was a wet/dry race, with constantly changing conditions and low grip for all. We all know that wet races provide for much more in the way of action and excitement than dry ones. At the end of the race, I suggested on Facebook that there is really nothing wrong with modern Grand Prix racing that couldn't be fixed by the introduction of trackside water-sprinklers, only to find that over on the BBC's 'F1 Forum', Jake Humphries and Eddie Jordan had been discussing exactly the same thing, with Martin Brundle observing wryly that in the spirit of the X-Factor, they could perhaps be turned on and off by fan phone polls.

It sounds like an idea from the same madhouse that produced such ideas as 'overtaking lanes' and needless compulsory pit-stops, but at the risk of irking the purists, I reckon this is an idea whose time has come. Well, maybe not the phone polls, but bear with me... Unlike the great majority of schemes for 'spicing up the show', it doesn't fundamentally alter the competitive nature of the sport. There's no penalisation of success by forcing winning drivers to start from the back or carry ballast. And no forcing drivers to pit when they know the quickest way round is actually to stay out on the same set of tyres. If someone is absolutely inspired on the day, and able to lap a second quicker than anyone else, then they can get on with it, see if they can beat Jackie Stewart's 4 minute winning margin in the 1968 German Grand Prix (which, by the by, was a wet race.) But if things are closely matched, if the cars are running closely, drivers would at least stand half a chance of finding a way past each other.

And as someone who's always thought the ability to be quick on a wet or half-dry track is the ultimate test of a driver's capabilities it seems to me that it would add to, rather than detract from, the notion of F1 as a contest between the greatest driving talents in the world. The superhuman car control of Hamilton versus the calculating intelligence of Alonso and the silky smooth calmness of Button, and oh, a seven time world champion with a reputation as a Regenmeister, a couple of young kids little more than half his age keen to usurp said man's claim to be Germany's fastest racing driver and an incredibly quick Polish guy pushing a recalcitrant bumble-bee with 'Lada' on the flanks faster than it has any right to be going? On a wet track, every fortnight? People would tune in...

It'll never happen. Not least because F1 seems so keen to go to places where water is in rather short supply, regardless of the utter disinterest of the locals (or at least those locals not paying CVC/FOM's bills). Although I doubt CVC would be keen to fork out for the sprinkler systems either. But it did get me thinking. In the last couple of weeks, the one thing I keep hearing time and time again, is that if the racing is to be improved, something needs to be done to change the balance between aerodynamic downforce and mechanical grip of modern F1 cars. That they have too much of the former, and too little of the latter. I've said as much before myself, but I wonder if we're missing something that's right under our noses.

I'm not a physicist, but it strikes me that there's something obviously wrong with this assertion. Last weekend, the rain ensured that the cars had a whole lot less mechanical grip, but they had exactly as much aerodynamic downforce as they did in Bahrain two weeks earlier. So is the problem of overtaking really all about the downforce the cars can produce, or has it got more to do with mechanical grip? A wet track lessens the amount of mechanical grip the tyres are able to obtain from the tarmac, but it doesn't of itself reduce the amount of downforce generated by the cars' wings. And the drivers could run close to each other, they could pass each other, the racing was some of the best I have seen in 25 years of watching Grands Prix.

I know it's a bit more complicated than that. Yes, the cars are actually producing less downforce because it squares with speed, and the lack of mechanical grip afforded by a wet track meant that the cars were cornering more slowly, and hence generating less downforce, and so were less affected by the turbulence of any car they were following. But the point stands - wet races demonstrate that the problem of cars being unable to follow each other closely, and consequently unable to pass, can be dealt with by massively cutting the mechanical grip produced by the cars. The other advantage is that, by use of a control tyre, it might be rather easier to achieve than cutting downforce. The FIA have been trying that for years, and it appears they are engaged in a battle with the car designers reminiscent of nothing so much as the Lewis Carroll's Red Queen - It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

Do something to successfully limit mechanical grip, and all the downforce in the world will buy only a relatively limited advantage. And short of my water-sprinkers idea (about which I am only being partially facetious) it strikes me that the obvious way to do this would be through producing much less grippy, more primitive rubber. The 'exhibition' tyres Bridgestone provide the teams for street demos and television work might be just the trick, but really the idea should be to move tyre technology back thirty years or so, to produce cars which have about as much grip in the dry as they currently do in the wet.

Made for Television

2010-03-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

After the disappointingly soporific opener to the F1 World Championship at Bahrain last weekend, there has been a lot of talk about what can or should be done to improve the show. And when people talk about the show, what they really mean is the television show. In the flesh, the sight and sound of F1 cars have such a dramatic impact that it doesn't really matter than the racing is processional and the result not in any doubt.

While F1 might be utterly reliant on TV viewing figures to maintain its income stream, the rules are not ultimately written by the sport's promoter, and FOM is not a television company. There are, however, two major world championships which are run by a television company. Both the Intercontinental Rally Challenge and the World Touring Car Championship are run by satellite television broadcaster Eurosport. But does being run by a television company actually improve the quality of the show?

Watching the opening round of the IRC at Monte Carlo at the beginning of the year, I have to say that the answer is, at the very least, a qualified positive. Eurosport, being a specialist sports channel (and a minority interest sports channel at that) can justify broadcasting rally stages live, and this gives much more of a real sense of what rallying is about than the edited highlights packages for the WRC which ITV and Dave have put out over the last few years (I don't have Motors TV, so I don't know if they are doing any better a job of the WRC coverage).

By contrast, their coverage of the latest round in Argentina last weekend was rather more pedestrian. I suppose it is inevitable that, while it may be possible to justify broadcasting the Monte Carlo rally in full, there is rather less appetite for watching an ordinary, common or garden gravel round of the IRC. And to be fair, I was at something of a loose end last weekend, and even then, I doubt I'd have sat through it if they had. Unfortunately, their coverage of the event wasn't even as good as what North One Television used to manage with the WRC. Yes, there were a few brief, quite watchable 'in car' clips, but there was no real attempt to tell the story of the rally. And, while I can perhaps sympathise with the difficulty of commentating from a small room somewhere in London on pre-edited TV footage beamed from the other side of the world, I simply cannot warm to Carlton Kirby. Can't help thinking (quite probably wrongly) that I could hardly do a worse job myself.

It's a shame, because the Argentinian rally, like the Brazilian event which preceded it, looked to have some really fantastic rally stages. It is not only the Monte Carlo rally which leaves me wondering quite how the IRC have pulled off the coup of stealing some of the best rallies from under the WRC's nose, while the premier series goes to such uninspired sounding locations as Jordan, Turkey and Bulgaria (it is of course entirely possible that the Bulgarian Rally will prove to be a classic - I know absolutely nothing about the place as a motorsporting country, though I can't believe there's a huge rallying fanbase waiting eagerly for the event).

What Eurosport and partners KSO have achieved with the IRC, though, is to create a second-tier rally series that has manufacturer support, and which, while it may lack absolute stars, has rather more depth of talent than, say, the old European Rally Championship used to have. In Juho Hanninen and Kris Meeke, winners of the last two rallies, it has two drivers who, if there was any justice, would be in the WRC by now. And it's just possible that, with three different winners from the first three rallies (even if one was a guest-appearance from WRC star Mikko Hirvonen) that will exceed the total for the WRC for the whole season, if as last year, it turns out once more to be a straight fight between Hirvonen and Loeb with nobody else getting so much as a look in. And if Guy Wilks or Jan Kopecky get their act together in their Skodas, or if Stephane Sarrazin or Nicolas Vouilloz reappear for the later European tarmac rounds, there could be more winners.

Certainly, there were far more serious contenders for victory in the field for the opening round of the IRC than there have been in the WRC for many years. A rule-set which allows a well-run privateer with an off-the-shelf car

It's a shame really that Ford aren't running a squad of Fiesta S2000s, and that Fiat abandoned their programme with the Punto Abarth after last year's lacklustre showing with Giandomenico Basso and Anton Alen, because it leaves the IRC with just two serious manufacturer outfits, which is the same problem which has afflicted the WRC in recent years.

Nonetheless, if KSO/Eurosport are really interested in creating a rally series which captures the imagination of television viewers, I can't help but think they've missed a trick. Why not insist on rear wheel drive cars? Inherently much more spectacular to watch than 4WD cars, think back to the early days of the old Group A formula when there were so few 4WD rally cars that a number of rear wheel drive cars were campaigned with some success on the world stage. To my mind, a BMW M3 or Sierra Cosworth rally car was inherently much more exciting to watch than a Lancia Delta or a Mazda 323. Why not do it again? Yes, Skoda, Peugeot and Ford do not market rear wheel drive 207s, Fabias and Fiestas, but chances are, you'd have difficulty getting your local car dealer to supply you with a 4 wheel drive one too. Yes, 4WD is inherently faster than rear wheel drive, but then an unrestricted 3.5 litre turbo rally car is inherently faster than a 2 litre turbo. Doesn't mean that you're allowed to run one in the IRC, or anywhere else in international rallying, for that matter. And besides, if Sebastien Loeb is perhaps getting a little bored of winning everything in sight in the World Rally Championship, the chance to show what he can do in a 280BHP rear wheel drive rally car just might be the thing to persuade him to hang around a while longer...

Underwhelmed

2010-03-16T11:21:00.000-07:00

I've said before that the secret of happiness, or at least contentment, is low expectations. So perhaps that's why I found the opening round of the 2010 Formula 1 Championship last weekend such a disappointment. I had been expecting a close battle between four world champions, with Red Bull, Ferrari, Mclaren and Mercedes all in the hunt for victory. I had expected Renault, Williams and Sauber to surprise. There was the return of Michael Schumacher after three years away. And I had hoped that the ban on refueling might finally force drivers to fight it out on the track.

As it was, the opening race was pretty dreary. There was, to be fair, the threat of a battle for the lead between Alonso's Ferrari and Vettel's Red Bull, but Vettel's Renault engine gave out before battle was really joined, and the experiences of others, further down the field, suggests that even if Alonso's Ferrari was considerably quicker, he almost certainly wouldn't have been able to find a way past.

To be fair, there have not been many close fought races with plenty overtaking between the leading drivers at Bahrain. With the exception of the first turn, there isn't really anywhere on the Sakhir circuit where a modern F1 car is going to find a way past a healthy rival able to lap within a second or two of the chasing car. It's a problem with the design of modern F1 cars (there was plenty of passing in the supporting GP2 Asia race) and I'm not sure there's an obvious solution to it. Those who talk of banning wings or similar such ideas miss the point that, no matter how you write the rulebook, designers and engineers will always find another way of clawing back the downforce, and quite possibly that new way will involve even more turbulence and dirty air than the current one (although James Allen has an interesting article on his blog questioning whether aerodynamic downforce is the problem anyway). The solution is a rule-set which forces teams to run cars much like the first-generation GP2 cars, but for the reasons above, that's far easier said than done.

All that said, I'm not convinced the new rules, or at least the combination of the new rules and the tyres Bridgedstone provided at Bahrain, have exactly helped matters. The tyres appear durable enough to cope with a one-stop strategy, but only provided the driver is pretty careful with them, doesn't push the rubber too hard, doesn't run too close to the car ahead and, certainly only provided the driver doesn't risk flat-spotting them with a late-braking passing move.

Predictably, there have been calls to address this by adding yet more artifice to the rules - a mandatory two pit-stop rule (as if that had added in any way to the DTM where it has been tried) or even, heaven forfend, introducing wacky-races style short-cuts to the circuit which a driver may use a certain number of times a race to overtake (because such moves would really rank alongside Hakkinen vs Schumacher at Spa in 2000 or Mansell on Senna at Hungary in 1989 as great overtaking manoeuvres...) It strikes me that the answer lies in the other direction - fewer rules rather than more. In particular, let's get rid of the rule that a driver has to stop to change tyres at least once. Imagine how Bahrain might have turned out if Hamilton or Rosberg, mindful of the difficulty of overtaking, decided to gamble on running the whole race on one set of tyres. And imagine how determined a freshly-tyred Alonso might have been to find a way past in the closing laps, after his stop. The one rule change which has really produced closer racing in recent years was the one-set-of-tyres-a-race rule of 2005, where we even had passing at Monaco.

Unfortunately, the new rules were not the only thing that left me feeling a little downheartened, watching the GP on Iplayer on Sunday evening (having just returned from spending the afternoon in A&E, but that needn't detain us here). There were disturbing signs that, far from being the eight-way title fight we might have hoped for, we could be looking at a Ferrari runaway on the scale of 2004. Yes, Vettel got pole, perhaps because Red Bull had mastered the art of running a car on empty tanks for a banzai qualifying run while set up to run on a full tank of fuel at the start, but Alonso's fastest race lap was a whole second quicker than anyone else's.

Certainly, it doesn't appear that Alonso will be under any immediate threat from the man behind nearly half of all Maranello's race victories, Michael Schumacher. His return was another minor disappointment. Dieter Rencken this week ran an article on how age should be no barrier to the German, but something, either age or race-rustiness, must be behind his inability to match team mate Nico Rosberg last weekend. In Martin Brundle's words, he appeared a tenth of a second behind the car, and while he put a brave face on when talking to the press, he must surely be wondering whether, at 41, he isn't getting a bit old for all this now. Perhaps it will be completely different in Australia, but if it isn't, I wonder how long he'll stick around. He didn't come back to F1 to be No. 2 to Nico Rosberg, after all.

More generally, qualifying demonstrated that, after several years in which the gap between the fastest and slowest cars has been steadily narrowing, it appears to have opened right back out again this year. Not only the new teams, which we all knew would be miles from the pace, but the midfield appear to have slipped back. There were no surprises from Williams or Renault, while the only thing that was unexpected about Sauber's performance was how woefully slow they were, after showing promising form in winter testing. Shades of Prost in 2001, one wonders whether they were running light to attract sponsors.

Down at the back, it was amateur hour. The new teams are vastly professional organisations when compared to such past embarassments as Life, Forti and Andrea Moda but nonetheless Karun Chandhok's experience with the new HRT brought back memories of such past disastrous efforts. Turning up to the first race with a car which had literally never turned a wheel, and having Chandhok use qualifying to shake down the second car was desperate, and bordering on dangerous.

As was Virgin's seeming inability to bolt all four wheels to their wagon. To be fair, it's something which has afflicted a number of teams down the years, but it doesn't exactly bode well for a new team. The CFD-designed car did at least appear to be the quickest of the new machines, but it remains every bit as fragile as it looked in testing, and by one-third distance, both Di Grassi and Glock were done for the day.

Mike Gascoygne's Litespeed, sorry, Proton, cough, Lotus, was the best put together and most professionally run of the new cars. That said, it is going to require some serious development work if Tony Fernandes' new team is to do anything more than trundle around at the back of the field, getting lapped a couple of times an afternoon. Certainly, if these three new teams are the brave new face of F1, then I find myself in the rather strange position of feeling nostalgic for Toyota, who may have been soulless but could at least build a half-way competitive F1 car.

So, Australia next. A circuit where overtaking was always something of a rarity anyway....

F1 2010: A Golden Age?

2010-03-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

Another new season is almost upon us. It's always a time of excitement and anticipation, when the racing season's big questions remain unanswered, when nobody knows for sure who will be right on the pace, and it is possible to believe that a uniquely close-fought, competitive season awaits us. Sometimes the spell is broken the moment the cars hit the track at the first race, when the dreary reality that somebody, in the first half of the decade it tended to be Ferrari, has built a car which is a second a lap faster than anyone else, and a summer of boring Sunday processions awaits us. But, at the risk of sounding like a screaming Autosport headline, this year just might be very special indeed. Forgive me the lapse into hyperbole, but we just might be right in the middle of a golden age of Formula 1 racing. Hear me out...

The Return of the King

Firstly there's the decision of 7 times World Champion Michael Schumacher to throw his hat into the ring for one last time. Unquestionably one of the sport's all time greats, I still wonder whether his reach might at last exceed his grasp. He's been three years out of the cockpit, he's still nursing a neck injury from a motorbike crash last year, he's the far side of forty, and, dare I say it, he'll be facing a much stronger field of drivers than he did for most of his career. Even if he does have all, or almost all, of his old pace, whether the 2010 Mercedes will be quite quick enough to enable him to fight with Alonso and Hamilton remains open to question. The 2010 car was developed while the team was Brawn GP, running without significant sponsorship, and it's unlikely they'll be able to repeat the double-diffuser trick that helped them to the 2009 driver's and team's titles.

At the very least, though, Schumacher will have to beat team mate Nico Rosberg. Quite how difficult a task that will be is hard to judge. I've never been entirely sure whether Rosberg was a middling driver flattered by a Williams which was far quicker than anyone realised, or whether the Williams was a pretty mediocre car, flattered by a lead driver who is much faster than we realise. If Schumacher isn't quicker than his team-mate, I wouldn't be surprised to see him walk out before the season's end. Though he might cite the lingering after-effects of his neck injury rather than admit he simply no longer quite has it. And nobody will be hoping harder that Schumacher's comeback falls flat than Mr Heidfeld, sitting in the reserve seat at Mercedes.

The Big Guns

Even if Schumacher's return proves a disappointment, we might scarcely notice, because there seems to be so much else to hold our attention. For starters, after a year spent licking their wounds after the bruising 2008 title fight, testing suggests Mclaren and Ferrari have regrouped and will be right at the front of the field this year. And so we have the mouth-watering prospect of the two best drivers of the post-Schumacher era continuing the battle they began as team mates at Mclaren in 2007, this time as the presumed leaders of the two most successful teams on the grid. If, as Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, it's tempting to draw parallels with the intense battle between Mclaren's Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, who had left Mclaren for Ferrari, in 1990. Though there are many differences between them, on track at least, it's not too much of a stretch to cast Hamilton, yellow helmet and all, in the Senna role, and Alonso as the new Prost. One only hopes it doesn't end in such an ignominious fashion.

Battles of the team mates

Except, of course, it might not be so simple as Alonso versus Hamilton, because each faces a fight with a team mate much more able to take the fight to them than either Kovalainen could at Mclaren or Piquet Jr or Romain Grosjean could while Alonso was at Renault. Hamilton, after all, is paired up with no less a man than the reigning World Champion, Jenson Button. Now I'll be honest, I can't help but remember his trouncing at the hands of Giancarlo Fisichella at Renault in 2001, and his inability to get the better of Jarno Trulli there the following year, and I know he's good, but he's not convinced me he's quite in the same league as the other World Champions in the field. But on the other hand, he's undoubtedly pretty quick, and his smooth, unfussed, economical style might pay dividends now that refuelling has been banned and drivers will have to look after their tyres in the early laps. Certainly compared with the aggressive Hamilton, who has had trouble in the past making his tyres last even without the car being filled with 160kgs of fuel.

Then there's Felipe Massa, recovered from the serious head injury he sustained in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix last year. Another driver I can't quite make my mind up about. Just how good is he? Was Kimi Raikkonen never quite as fast as his early years at Mclaren made him look? Or has Felipe Massa developed into a truly first rate driver, one who deserved more credit for getting the better of Raikkonen than he has so far been given. I don't know, but when he goes up against Alonso this year, that question will be answered, one way or the other. If, as seems possible, the Ferrari F10 is the class of the field, let's hope that Massa is able to give Alonso pause for thought.

Where we left off

If we could be sure that this year would be all about Schumacher vs. Hamilton vs. Alonso vs. Button vs. Massa, that would be quite a prospect. But at the end of last season, the fastest car in the field was not the Mclaren, the Brawn or the Ferrari, but Adrian Newey's Red Bull. The last two races were won by Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber, and the team retain this drive line-up going into 2010. Early indications from testing suggest their advantage might have been wiped out over the winter, and that the new car is too hard on its tyres, but it would be a brave man who discounted Adrian Newey. As for the drivers, last year Vettel had the upper hand, but then Webber was nursing a leg injury for much of the season, and it's hard to know just how much that affected him. Now fully recovered, can he re-establish himself as the team leader? Or with another year under his belt, will Vettel underline his dominance to a greater extent than ever before? My money's on Vettel, and he's got to be at least an outside bet for the World Title - the new Schumacher usurping the old Schumacher, but it's far from a foregone conclusion.

Bubbling under

If that's the likely race winners dealt with, then what of the rest? There are, I think, three teams that could spring a surprise this year, and each has their strengths and weaknesses. Let's start with Williams. The pairing of experienced Rubens Barrichello with GP2 champion and rising young star, Nico Hulkenberg looks a strong one. Of course it does rather depend on exactly how quick Hulkenberg is, but if Barrichello is perhaps not quite as quick as he was, he was still a decently quick performer at Brawn last year, and outside of the big four teams, Williams strikes me as having the best driver line-up. They're also a team which still contains that core which challenged for the title back in 2003. If I have doubts about their potential, then it's simply that I'm not sure quite what they have going for them this year that they didn't last season. Perhaps the new Cosworth engine will be better than last year's Toyota (not such an outlandish possibility, it was ex-Cosworth men moving to Mercedes' engine team that made the Mercedes V8 the class of the field) but they didn't capitalise properly on the advantage of running a double diffuser from the start, And they didn't really figure in 2009. We'll see whether 2010 is any different, I hope it is, having always had a soft-spot for the Grove team.

If Williams have the best driver line-up, then it is the other former championship winning team in the group which, to my mind, has the best driver. It is hard to know quite what to make of Renault right now. I suspect that the extent of their decline was masked to a degree by the efforts of Fernando Alonso last year, just as the beginning of the old Lotus team's slide into oblivion was hidden for a time by Senna's genius at the wheel. If that's the case, then the decision to hire BMW-refugee, Robert Kubica might prove to be a very smart one. Certainly, a talented young driver with everything to prove, who's prepared to drive the team forward, just might help them recapture the team's glory years of 2005 and 2006 when, together with Fernando Alonso, they took two World Titles. The team have been 75% sold to a Luxembourg venture capital outfit, have had their former chief designer and team principal barred from Formula 1 for their part in the Singapore crash scandal, have lost most of their sponsors, and are reduced to hiring an unproven Russian with bags of money to fill the second seat. Like Williams, though, they have shown in the past that they are capable of winning races, given the funding and a fair wind. If they don't get their act together, though, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw Kubica in a Red Bull, a Ferrari or a Mercedes in the year ahead.

If Williams and Renault's strengths lie with their drivers but there are doubts about their cars, the reverse may be true of Sauber. The team formerly known as BMW Sauber (and for the minute, now called, somewhat paradoxically, BMW Sauber Ferrari) will have been able to call on the full resources of the BMW car company in designing this year's car, just as Brawn were able to make full use of Honda's largesse to build the car that enabled Ross Brawn's eponymous team to win the title at its only attempt. As a result, it's possible the new Sauber might be very quick indeed, though it's sponsor-less state means it's hard to know quite how much stock to put by its impressive testing times. The trouble is, I'm just not convinced by the driver line-up of newcomer Kamui Kobayashi and 38-year old former Mclaren test driver Pedro De La Rosa. I'm glad Kobayashi has got a slot on the grid. He may not have done much in GP2 (though he was GP2 Asia champion last year) but he showed an impressive combativeness when he was given his late-season cameo at Toyota at the end of last year, in notable contrast with others plunged into the field mid-season. De La Rosa's signing, by contrast, I find harder to understand, unless he's either paying for the ride himself or bringing sponsors with him. During his time at Arrows, and latterly with his occasional appearances for Mclaren, he appeared a competent journeyman, but it would surely have made more sense to keep hold of Nick Heidfeld. A repeat of Brawn's achievements is unlikely, but providing the money doesn't dry up entirely and the drivers are quick enough, they could be regular point-scorers.

Snapping at the heels of the midfield

It's perhaps a little unfair of me not to include Force India in the group above. After all, they very nearly won the Belgian Grand Prix fair and square last year, and both Sutil and last-minute stand-in Vitantonio Liuzzi were right on the pace at Monza too. I can't see them repeating that kind of performance this year, but on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if, while they don't trouble Ferrari, Mercedes, Mclaren or Red Bull, they do cause headaches for Sauber, Renault and Williams from time to time. Last year, I think they capitalised on the failure of some of the bigger teams to get fully to grips with the new regulations and that advantage will probably be gone in 2010. On the other hand, they have had plenty time to fully adapt the car to the Mercedes engine, after having to hurriedly hack away at a car originally designed around the Ferrari V8 last year, so who knows, more points, at least, should be on the cards, and Liuzzi and Sutil looks a pretty solid line-up for a team which is at best a midfield runner.

The same, I'm afraid, cannot be said of Toro Rosso. With a car based on a development of last year's Red Bull, they should be in a position to make a nuisance of themselves from time to time, but I just can't wo0rk up much enthusiasm for the driver pairing of Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari. It's not that they're particularly bad drivers, but equally I see no sign that either is particularly special although Buemi, at least, had his moments last year. In the long run, provided Red Bull remain involved, I would expect to see one or the other of them given the boot to make way for British F3 champion Daniel Ricciardo, who was rather quick .

And Finally...

The Horse Whisperer might have been going a little far, but I'd be surprised if any of the new teams do more than fight amongst themselves this year. Of the two teams which got a car to the pre-season tests, the revivified Lotus team looks to have a much more reliable, and perhaps slightly quicker car than Virgin Racing. But both look to be the best part of five seconds a lap off the pace of the front-runners at the moment, and no team, even one with the biggest development budget in the world, has ever found five seconds over a single season. In the long term, to judge at least by their choice of drivers and the hiring of Mike Gascoygne, Lotus, despite its origins in the no-mark F3 squad Litespeed, looks like it is the more serious prospect, but I suspect that 2010 could be a trying year for all concerned.

It's harder to know what to make of the team formerly known as Campos (and now going by the rather unfortunate moniker of HRT). It's rather ominous that they were unable to make any of the pre-season tests and their decision as a brand new team to run two newcomers, Bruno Senna and Karun Chandhok , is, as Sir Humphrey might have said to Jim Hacker, 'brave'. On the other hand, the car is designed and built by Dallara, who know a thing or two about making racing cars and might be better placed to build an F1 car from scratch than either Virgin or Lotus. If the money's there to do the whole season, they just might surprise us all.

All will become clear next weekend, and, for all that I care little for the tedious, soulless Bahrain Autodrome, one plus side of starting the season in the Middle East is that, in contrast with the more usual Melbourne opener, my sleep patterns won't be disturbed for a second week running after staying up to watch the Oscars last Sunday...

Motorsport on the web

2010-03-01T10:33:00.000-08:00

Just over three years ago, I wrote a quite long piece here on the subject of motorsports journalism. I bemoaned at some length the seemingly inexorable trend towards shrinking word-counts, needlessly sensationalist news reporting seemingly borrowed from the red-tops and, my pet bug-bear, the obsession with breaking up coherent narrative into irritating 'fact-boxes' that get in the way of reading an article. At the end, I added that, if you looked hard enough, there was some surprisingly good writing to be found on the internet.

Things have changed considerably in the intervening years. Last week, I found myself following F1 testing more or less live and as it happened, thanks to Twitter. For a long time I was something of a sceptic about Twitter, doubting that a medium that limits users to 144 characters could possibly communicate anything of real worth. In recent weeks, though, and especially when I've been wanting to find out who was doing what at Jerez and Barcelona, whether through journalists who were there, such as Mark Glendenning, Edd Straw and Jonathan Noble, F1 personnel, including the very prolific Claire Williams (Williams' PR woman) or Lotus designer Mike Gascoygne. Then there's the official team accounts, with everyone from Ferrari and Red Bull to Virgin and USF1 getting in on the act. These may be essentially corporate PR channels, but the very instant, informal nature of twitter is such that they can sometimes be a bit more revealing than might be expected.

Twitter, though, is not the only new development in the world of internet motorsport reporting. The last few years has also seen the arrival of the motorsports podcast. Leading the way with this has been the appropriately named Sidepodcast. There aren't the hours in the day for me to listen to everything they put out (at least not when I'm subscribed to quite so many Radio 4 podcasts, anyway) but I do always make a point of catching their informative and entertaining chats with F1 journalist Joe Saward, in their 'An aside with Joe' feature. Last year, during or after most of the season's Grands Prix, Saward gave an interesting 'behind the scenes' insight into what was going on in the paddock and what F1 insiders were thinking.

My favourite regular motorsport podcast, though, has been the Motorsport Magazine podcast, which first broadcast in the summer of last year. A gathering of four or five middle-aged men, none of whom are any longer active as day-to-day race journalists as far as I know, might not sound like the most enthralling prospect, but I could happily listen all day to Rob Widdows, Ed Foster and Nigel Roebuck chatting through the issues of the day. If nothing else, you should seek out Roebuck's uncanny impersonations of Niki Lauda and Jackie Stewart. They've had a number of high-profile ex-racing drivers join them over the months since they began the podcast. John Watson was trenchant on the subject of Kimi Raikkonen back in Autumn of last year, but for me the real highlight was 72 year old former sportscar ace Brian Redman's appearance on the show this month. I particularly liked his blackly humorous response to the question of why he carried on after so many horrendous accidents "Having been through these three accidents, two of which I was completely conscious through, I know now that if something like that happens, you don't feel anything at the time. So why not, if anything happens, you don't feel anything."

Neither Twitter nor audio-podcasts has been the most fundamental change over the last four years though. My inspiration for starting this blog, at the beginning of 2006, came not from reading online blogs but from reading Tim Parks excellent A Season with Verona, a fan's eye account of following the struggling Italian football squad across a season which left me wondering if I couldn't do something similar with Formula 1. Weblogs existed, of course, but they were relatively new, and still largely associated in my own mind with histrionic teenagers complaining about how nobody understood them on Livejournal.

Four years on, and there are an awful lot of professional motorsport writers keeping their own blogs. Amongst the ones I read regularly are those run by Joe Saward, Adam Cooper and James Allen. The writing is often as good as, if not better than, anything which can be found in the specialist print press. And it's not only blogs. From running basic news websites, professional motorsports journalists have increased considerably their web presence. There's the GP+ magazine (I'm a subscriber, and I recommend it highly) and Autosport's online subscription service has often produced a better quality of writing than can be found in the magazine (not least, I suspect, because writers don't seem constrained to write to such limited wordcounts as they do on the print edition). Tony Dodgins' piece, this week, on what is driving Michael Schumacher to return to the cockpit in his forties is as fine a piece of writing about sport as I have seen in a long time (and an illustration of why he's a professional writer and I'm not - I made similar observations much less well back in December). The news that the print version of Autosport will itself be available in a digital edition perhaps marks a watershed moment in the way that the specialist motorsport press will be going in the years ahead.

All of which begs the question, is there any longer a place for Motorsports Ramblings? Certainly, reader numbers are not what they were in the days before the professional writers began blogging in significant numbers. And certainly the internet is not exactly short of commentary on motorsports. What I have always intended to offer is a fan's perspective, as opposed to that of a journalist or an insider, a sort of Fifth Column or MPH from the sidelines. Of course, anyone could do this, but still not all that many people are doing. This isn't intended as the site's obituary, and I plan to blog at least one more season of racing before I pack it in... I hope it's a good one and I have something worthwhile to say about it.

New Kids On The Block

2010-02-22T12:33:00.001-08:00

Last year, it seemed that the in-season testing ban, combined with the severe restrictions on race-weekend mileage imposed by the limits on engines and gearboxes that a team could use over the course of a season, had together frightened F1 teams away from hiring drivers without previous F1 experience. Doubtless, there was a fear that the lack of opportunity for drivers to get seat time in a Grand Prix car would seriously hamper any newcomers and Toro Rosso were alone in turning up at Melbourne last year with a driver who had never taken a Grand Prix start before - Sebastien Buemi. Others came in over the course of the year, as first Toro Rosso and then Renault became disillusioned with the drivers they had started the year with and replaced Sebastien Bourdais with British F3 champion, Jaime Alguersuari and Nelson Piquet Jr with Romain Grosjean, while Toyota drafted Kamui Kobayashi to fill in for an apparently injured Timo Glock but in comparison with previous years, last season was not a vintage one for fresh talent.

This year, though, there will be at least three drivers making their F1 debut in Bahrain in just over two weeks time, and possibly more if Campos, Stefan GP or USF1 defy the odds and make it to the grid this year. The three drivers who will definitely be there are the men who finished first, second and third in this year's GP2 championship, Nico Hulkenberg, Vitaly Petrov and Lucas Di Grassi.

Forced to pick one of these three as the man most likely to establish himself as a real star of the sport, I'd have to choose Willi Weber's latest protege, Hulkenberg. He is, after all, managed by the man who plucked one Michael Schumacher from obscurity, but more importantly than that, he won last year's GP2 championship fairly convincingly at his first attempt, despite the fact that most of his rivals were in their second or third year in the category, and comprehensively overshadowed his team mate Pastor Maldonado, who had been thought one of the fastest drivers in the series. He's also a previous winner of the F3 Euroseries, and helped Germany to the A1GP title back in 2006/07, while still a teenager.

The Williams seat looks like a good bet for the youngster too. The Williams FW32 should be competitive enough for him to show what he's capable of, but not so quick that he'll face the presssure of being thrown straight into a potentially title-winning team while he's still learning the ropes (although this didn't seem to do Lewis Hamilton any harm). In Rubens Barrichello, he's got a team mate who is vastly experienced, knows how to set up and develop a car, and who is fast enough that beating him will gain him credibility in the paddock, but who, crucially, is now going into his 18th season in the sport and who is almost certainly not quite as quick as he used to be. If Hulkenberg is really as good as his junior career suggests, he should be able to get the better of Barrichello from time to time, at least by the second half of the season.

The man whom he beat to the GP2 title, Russia's first F1 driver, Vitaly Petrov, will have a harder time at Renault. The Renault R30 is, on the balance of probabilities, likely to be about as competitive as the Williams, but if you were a young driver going into his first F1 season and you were given the choice, you'd probably prefer to be paired up with Barrichello than with Robert Kubica, a man whom many (including myself) see as being in the same league as champions Alonso and Hamilton. And that's before you take into account the fact that the second Renault has proven to have been something of a poisoned chalice. Add to that the fact that, unlike Hulkenberg or Di Grassi, he has little previous F1 testing experience, and he faces a very steep learning curve indeed. Perhaps the fact that Petrov Sr. is reported to be putting up £10m for his son's drove will ensure that he gets a decent shot.

But even if he does, is he quick? It's hard to say. When he arrived in GP2 back in the middle of 2006 he appeared to be a rich kid who was desperately out of his depth - perhaps not surprising when you consider that he had little single-seater experience beyond 'Formula Lada Revolution', whatever that may be. He stuck at it and learned the ropes, though, winning his first race in 2007, becoming a more regular front-runner in 2008 and finishing runner-up last year, something which suggests that, whether or not he's really from the very top drawer, he knows roughly what he's doing. And when you consider that he's a late starter, considerably less experienced than most racing drivers of his 25 years, he could yet turn out to be better than his junior career has suggested. There's no doubt he got the drive ahead of more obviously qualified candidates thanks to Daddy's millions, but it's now up to him to prove he deserves to be thought of as more than just a pay-driver.

Lucas Di Grassi wound up third in last year's GP2 championship and is the final member of this year's rookie trio. The Virgin VR01 is a rather less enticing prospect than a Williams or a Renault drive, but the vast pool of young drivers chasing a small number of race seats, an ambitious young hopeful would probably be well advised to take any seat going. And he might be feeling very glad he didn't sign for USF1 or Campos right now. Di Grassi has never struck me as being a really quick driver, a decent journeyman, but not someone whom I'd expect to see emerge as a regular race winner. In GP2 he's always been there or thereabouts, somewhere near the front, but even in the year he spent with multiple title winners ART, he never established himself as a regular winner.

It was a steady points-scoring approach that enabled him to come close to snatching the 2007 title from his Virgin team mate, Timo Glock, but the German driver always looked a good deal quicker, and frankly it would have been a travesty had Di Grassi snatched the title from under his nose simply because his ART machine never broke... He was reported to have been well respected as a development driver when he was a tester at Renault, though, and that could turn out to be more important than those last couple of tenths of outright pace in his new role at Virgin. On the plus side, the car hasn't looked too slow out of the box at Jerez, and it looks as though Nick Wirth's gamble on building a car without reference to a wind-tunnel just might pay off, but so far, the car has proven woefully unreliable.

If he wants to establish a long term future in F1, Di Grassi will have to do what he couldn't do in GP2 and get on terms with Timo Glock. In the first half of the year, he might be given the benefit of the doubt, but F1 is an unforgiving world and if he isn't matching Glock by the second half of 2010, he'll never be anything more than a journeyman in the eyes of the Grand Prix paddock. His task is the same as that facing Hulkenberg, and most dauntingly, Petrov, to get on terms with a much more experienced team mate. It's asking a lot, but since Lewis Hamilton rewrote the rules as far as what can be expected of a talented newcomer, anything less may not be enough.

Money Talks

2010-02-13T14:41:00.001-08:00

A couple of years back, I remember stumbling upon the quite startling claim that the cost of Lewis Hamilton's junior career - from karts to GP2, was on the order of £3mIt's a quite incredible sum of money, and gives some indication of the scale of the obstacles facing a promising teenage karting star who has his eyes set on Grand Prix stardom.

In short, the costs involved in competing in the junior formulae, be it Formula Renault, Formula 3, Formula 2 or GP2, far exceed any sensible estimate of the commercial value to be had in sponsoring a team or driver at that level. A season in British F3, for example, is reputed to cost well north of half a million pounds for a competitive seat, and yet the media coverage and wider public awareness of racing at that level in minimal. Certainly not so great as to be worth spending half a million pounds to have your company's corporate logo emblazoned upon the side of some young gun's car. Millions of potential customers are not going to become aware of your product because it's name is on the side of an F3 car.

So how do racing drivers do it? In many cases, the answer is straightforward - the young racing driver has the backing of vast family wealth. Ever since the earliest days of motor racing, it has been to a significant extent the plaything of the immensely wealthy. In the pre-war days, that might have been the Counts and Lords of the landed aristocracy where these days it is more likely to be the sons of entrepreneurs and city traders. Take for example, Ayrton Senna, the son of a wealthy Brazilian landowner, Niki Lauda, the scion of one of the major movers in the Austrian financial industry, Nelson Piquet, whose father was a senior Government Minister, or, going back further, Stirling Moss, whose father's dental business was sufficiently successful to enable him to buy Stirling a Maserati F1 car to kick-start his career in the sport.

It's not something which has changed. Look at the sponsors adorning the sides of many a young hopeful's F3 or GP2 car and you will see the names of businesses and products with family connections to the driver. Think, for instance, of the Medley Pharmaceuticals logos on anything Xandi Negrao raced, the Conway Engineering stickers on Mike Conway's cars, or the Jelson Builders backing for Stephen Jelley's motorsports exploits. Sometimes it's not quite so obvious, but the backing offered by everyone from Eternit to Highland Spring for David Coulthard's early career is easier to understand when you realise that all these businesses made extensive use of Duncan Coulthard's freight company.

And yet, and yet... Look into the background of the any of the real stars of the last fifteen years or so, Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen, Fernando Alonso, Mika Hakkinen or Lewis Hamilton, and it becomes apparent that they were from ordinary working or middle class families and could never have written their own cheques for GP2 or F3 rides. In fact, it's arguable that Ayrton Senna was the last real star of the sport to have come from a background of serious wealth (though I have to confess to being a little hazy as to Jenson Button's back story).

That's not to say that there haven't been an awful lot of moneyed young men in F1 since then, but for the most part, they haven't been quite at the very front, they haven't been the ones to have won World Championships. The aforementioned Coulthard, for example, won plenty of Grands Prix during his time at Mclaren, but was never quite the match of either Hakkinen or Raikkonen when he was teamed up with them. Is it mere coincidence? Or is it simply that, with rare exceptions like Ayrton Senna, those who grew up in opulent, wealthy surroundings are unlikely to have the killer instinct, the determination, which those who have had to fight tooth and nail just to get themselves into motorsport in the first place?

How did they do it? No two of the motorsport's front runners got there in exactly the same way, but the long and short of it is that all were funded to a significant degree by either an entrepreneurial driver manager with an eye on a share of that driver's future earning potential, or by a team, of more commonly, a motor manufacturer, wanting to have first call on that driver's talents at a future date. Michael Schumacher, the bricklayer's son, was the beneficiary of both - the wealthy hotelier Willi Weber helped him on his way, and then Mercedes, for whose sportscar team he drove, bought him his first F1 drive. Fernando Alonso, whose father was an explosives technician in the quarrying industry, was picked up early by Flavio Briatore, a man who has done remarkably well for himself as a manager of young drivers given his professed lack of interest in the nuts and bolts of the sport.

Kimi Raikkonen had perhaps the most unusual route to the top of the lot, being managed by the father and son team of Steve and Dave Robertson, who talked Peter Sauber into giving the young Finn a drive after just a single season of Formula Renault and a few Formula Ford races, at a time when he was the veteran of only 23 car races. Hamilton, by contrast, was perhaps the best-groomed F1 debutant in the history of the sport. As is well known, he was picked out by Ron Dennis while he was still in his early teens, and a karting star and had the full weight of the Mclaren team behind his junior career. Of the other current F1 front-runners, Mark Webber is another who had help from Briatore, while Sebastian Vettel had backing from both the Red Bull and BMW junior programmes and Robert Kubica was helped by the Renault Young Driver Programme - appropriately enough, as he has now wound up driving for the team this year.

It's fair to say, I think, that not one of those drivers could have paid their own way in their junior racing days, and it is perhaps the widespread existence of junior programmes and mercenary managers prepared to invest their own cash in a driver who has caught their eye, which explains how it is that the current F1 grid has perhaps greater strength in depth than any in the sport's history.

And I wonder if it just might turn out to be the high-water mark. The global recession has forced most of the car manufacturers out of the sport and resulted in the slashing of team budgets. The departure of Toyota and BMW has meant the end of their junior programmes, and surviving teams have little cash spare for that sort of luxury. The economic downturn will have had a double negative impact on anyone hoping to rely on the largesse of a gambling entrepreneur like Weber or the Robertsons - men willing to fund promising but penniless youngsters in exchange for a cut of their future earnings if they make it big. Firstly, such people will be thinner on the ground in the first place, and may have less money, but secondly, the knock-on effect of the economic crash has been to reduce the amount of money sloshing around in F1 and by extension, the kind of salaries that the top drivers can command.

All well and good from one perspective. I can't help feeling that something has gone wrong in the world when the likes of Raikkonen or Schumacher can command tens of millions just for driving cars - no matter how good they may be at it. Unfortunately, though, unless it is accompanied by a fall in the cost of competing in the junior formulae, it could have the effect of making it hard for all but the independently wealthy to raise the kind of cash required to compete in GP2. Given the long odds that any particular youngster will turn out to be the new Schumacher, a significant reduction in the kind of sums that even a new Schumacher could earn might make any young star appear a rather less enticing investment opportunity. And that's before one considers that, increasingly, novice F1 drivers are being expected to bring money to cash-strapped teams, rather than draw a salary. See, for example, Petrov and Renault, or (so it is rumoured) Kobayashi and Sauber, let alone those being lined up to drive for Campos and USF1, should they make the grid at all.

Perversely, then, the effect of big money's disappearance from the sport could end up being to lessen the overall quality of the field, by making it harder from quick youngsters without the backing of family wealth, from ordinary backgrounds, to take on the gilded youth of the world's super-rich. A return, in many ways, to the sport's early days. I hope I'm wrong...

Up and Coming...

2010-02-07T11:58:00.000-08:00

The motor racing season never really ends these days. Time was, not so long ago, when between early November and mid-March, there was a four month dead period in which there was only the Monte Carlo and Swedish rallies and the Daytona 24 Hours to keep race fans distracted. Then along came the GP2 Asia and A1GP series and ensured for a time that the single seater calendar was a 12 month affair.

I was never too sure quite where the money for A1GP was coming from, and with the series hitting the financial skids at the end of last year, it seems perhaps that the money was never really coming from anywhere. The GP2 Asia series, though, is just about keeping its head above the water and the second round of that championship at Abu Dhabi last weekend was the first major event of the single seater racing year. Regular readers will know that I'm somewhat sceptical about the merits of the GP2Asia series as a championship, and that the vast majority of the serious runners appear to treat it as an extended test for the GP2 championship proper, which will get underway later in the year but feeling starved of on-track action, I tuned in all the same.

Thanks to Eurosport's innovative EurosportPlayer software (which has a very reasonable subscription cost of £4/month, worth it for their fantastic coverage of the Monte Carlo Rally on its own!) I was able to follow the event online. The racing was reasonably entertaining, with ISport team mates Oliver Turvey and Davide Valsecchi duking it out for victory in the first race and Charles Pic and Jules Bianchi putting in aggressive drives from the back in race two, showing that overtaking in a modern powerful single seater may be difficult, but its not impossible. On the other hand, with the benefit of reflection I'm not any keener on the new Abu Dhabi circuit than I was when it first appeared on our screens at the end of last year. There are worse race circuits in the world, but given the sheer amount of money spent on the place, it would have been good to have some more elevation change, rather than a glow in the dark hotel that reminds me of nothing so much as the Bullring in Birmingham city centre. That said, it is at least a circuit on which passing is just about possible, and the mile long main straight followed by a very slow slightly more than 90 degree left provided its fair share of action.

Really, though, the main reason to follow GP2 Asia is that it just might give us some hints as to what to expect in the GP2 series proper, and by extension, who might be appearing on the F1 team bosses' radar over the next year or two. Where F3000 ended up being a bit of a dead end for aspiring young racing drivers, GP2's record has been much more promising on this score. Of the series' champions, only Giorgio Pantano, who it could be argued had already been given his chance, did not go on to drive in F1, and other frontrunners, including the two GP2Asia champions, Romain Grosjean and Kamui Kobayashi and series runners up Kovalainen, Piquet and now (with the help of Daddy's millions, admittedly) Vitaly Petrov have secured Grand Prix drives, albeit with varying degrees of subsequent success. And if Campos Meta make it to the grid, one can add 2008 runner-up Bruno Senna to this list to complete the set.

So, on the basis of last weekend, who might be in the running for the 2010 Championship? Despite putting in the best performance of his career to finish second in the Sunday sprint race, I expect that Romanian/Belgian Michael Herck and his family-run team will be more than minor point scorers. Sunday's winner, Davide Valsecchi, on the other hand, is a more intriguing prospect. He's been around in GP2 for a couple of years now, and hadn't exactly stood out prior to the races in Abu Dhabi, but the Durango team for which he drove were hardly front-runners, so his two wins for the team (one in GP2 proper, and on in GP2 Asia) perhaps suggest a driver punching above his weight. With ISport for 2010, he'll have no excuses now.

One thing he'll have to do is beat his team mate and Saturday Feature Race winner, Oliver Turvey. Turvey was narrowly beaten to the British F3 championship a couple of years back by Jaime Alguersuari, but his form improved notably once he'd got his University finals out of the way and by the end of the year he looked quicker than the man who did win the title. He was generally a shade quicker than Alguersuari when they were paired up in the Renault World Series, come to that. With top level motorsport an immensely technical discipline, having a good engineering degree won't do him any harm either. Against Valsecchi, he'll be at a disadvantage in that this will be his first year in GP2 and he won't necessarily know all the circuits or be as familiar with the car. On the other hand, Nico Hulkenberg this year demonstrated that if you're quick enough, that shouldn't matter and Valsecchi aside, most of the other potential front-runners will be in their first year too.

One of those, on the basis of his previous record, the fact he'll be driving for 3 time champion team ART, and the fighting drive he put in last weekend, is F3 Euroseries winner, Jules Bianchi. Bianchi, like Hulkenberg and Hamilton before him, arrives in GP2 with ART, having won the Euroseries the year before and must therefore be considered one of the favourites to win the series. Last weekend, in his first GP2 drive, he picked up a podium in race one and then, perhaps even more impressive, drove through the field after starting dead last, having stalled on the dummy grid, to finish seventh, passing people left, right and centre as he did so.

If Bianchi goes in as an obvious favourite, his compatriot, Charles Pic was not a man who had much impinged upon my consciousness prior to this weekend. All I knew of him was that he had won the odd Renault World Series race, though he had been around there for a couple of years. He didn't stand out in the first round of the series, last year, but this time round, he grabbed pole in the hitherto unfancied Arden car and would probably have finished in the top three or four had he not been punted off the road by Luca Filippi at around half distance. In the second race, he was again impressive in the way he cut through the field from the back, if not to quite the same extent as Jules Bianchi. Whether this was a one-off weekend from Pic, or whether he's going to be a future star, only time will tell.

Anyone else? Well American Formula BMW graduate Alexander Rossi looked pretty handy in the second Meritus car, though he didn't appear to be quite able to live with the very fastest drivers in the field. I'd not heard of Vladimir Arabdazhiev before last weekend, but the Bulgarian looked pretty racey with the new Rapax team, and certainly when set against his countryman, Plamen Kralev who keeps up Trident Racing's reputation for being willing to take on anyone prepared to offer them cash to play at being a racing driver for a few weekends. Marcus Ericsson (previously championed here, some 2 years back) has shown flashes of pace, though whether his SuperNova team will be in a position to threaten the front runners remains to be seen.

So, will these drivers all make their way to the F1 grid? At the first race of 2012, in Bahrain, or Australia, or who knows where, will Valsecchi, Turvey, Bianchi, Pic, Ericsson and Rossi all be there? Almost certainly not. There will be others, in the more junior formulae right now, most likely, who will emerge and have a stronger claim on a shot at Grand Prix superstardom than some of these. And some will disappoint. Remember how quick Asmer looked until he got to GP2? Or how Pastor Maldonado showed early promise only to be comprehensively destroyed by the less experienced Hulkenberg when they were paired up at ART last year? All the same, I'd be very surprised if one or two of the above didn't make it to F1 over the next couple of years. Most likely? Forced to choose, Jules Bianchi looks the most promising of the bunch. With the champion team, if he proves as quick as he looked to be in F3, and with a Ferrari testing contract already in his pocket, I'd be surprised if he's not going places...

Endnote - 144 characters? Can you really say anything worthwhile in 144 characters? As someone with a tendency towards the verbose, Twitter is probably not for me. But I've decided to succumb, all the same, and Motorsports Ramblings now has its very own twitter feed...

Champion Versus. Champion

2010-01-26T12:59:00.000-08:00

The news that reigning World Champion Jenson Button will be joining 2008 World Champion Lewis Hamilton at Mclaren to form an all-British superteam is one of many interesting prospects we can anticipate this season, a year which leaves us with very many intriguing unanswered questions. It's been more than 20 years since a team last fielded two champions alongside each other. That team was Mclaren, when it ran Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost together for a second year in 1989, after the Brazilian had wrapped up his first title.

Perhaps it was the sheer fractiousness of relations between the two champions that year which has subsequently dissuaded any other team from following suit. Certainly, Martin Whitmarsh will be hoping that history does not repeat itself for the team in 2010. It's tempting to draw parallels. I've always seen a hint of Senna in Hamilton's all-out attacking approach, and I don't think that's just my brain playing tricks on me because Lewis has copied Ayrton's distinctive yellow helmet. And as for Jenson, his smooth, unhurried style, his deceptive pace, well, that's more than a little reminiscent of a certain French driver.... In the end, though, for reasons I'll come to later, I don't think Whitmarsh et al should lose too much sleep. As a pairing, Button and Hamilton just doesn't strike me as having quite the same combustible potential as Senna and Prost did.

When Senna was hired by Mclaren in 1988 to partner their double World Champion, Prost, though, he had yet to win the first of his three titles, and was merely a promising youngster who had won six races for a Lotus team which no longer looked to be quite what it once was. You have to go back another few years to 1986 to find the last time a World Champion was hired to drive alongside another. Again, the team in question was Mclaren, and the driver line-up featured the reigning world champion, Prost, and 1982 title-winner Keke Rosberg, seen by some as the outright fastest driver in the world at the time. As it turned out, the Finn proved to be no match for Prost, who snuck between the warring Williams boys, Piquet and Mansell, to win the 1986 title in a car which was not really the equal of the Williams Honda. Rosberg, by contrast, failed even to win a race, never at home with the understeery MP4/2B.

If one wants to be really pedantic, though, one could point out that, at the time at which Mclaren signed Rosberg to drive for them in 1986, Alain Prost had not yet wrapped up the 1985 title. Yes, it seemed unlikely that Michele Alboreto would succeed in denying Prost the title yet again - after coming so close in 1982, 1983 and 1984, but it was not impossible...

No, the last time that a team made a conscious choice to hire two World Champions was all the way back in 1967, when Colin Chapman signed 1962 World Champion Graham Hill to drive alongside Lotus stalwart and double champion Jim Clark. And it's this pairing, which to me, most closely echoes Mclaren's 2009 line-up. Hamilton in the role of the supremely naturally gifted Clark, an integral part of the Mclaren team as Lotus had been built around Clark. Each seen by many as the great talent of their age. And Button? A solid, quick racing driver, comfortable in the spotlight, but whose ultimate ability, whose fitness to sit alongside the sport's real all-time greats, remains a matter of debate. The parallels with Graham Hill, whom many did not see as being in quite the same league as his Scottish contemporaries, Stewart and Clark, are certainly there. Hill and Clark didn't fall out as Prost and Senna did and perhaps in part it was because it was a more relaxed age, but I can't help thinking that fundamentally, they got on because there was no doubt as to who was quicker. And I don't necessarily see the pairing of Button and Hamilton being any different.

When Clark and Hill teamed up in 1967, it was Clark who decisively got the upper hand, winning four Grands Prix that year, while Hill managed but a solitary second place. That doesn't tell the whole picture, though, for the Lotus 49 was a fast but very fragile machine, and Hill got the lion's share of their considerable mechanical misfortune. Nonetheless, while he went on to win the 1968 title, few saw him as being truly a match for Clark.

So will Button get his comeuppance at Mclaren? Maybe. If I was a betting man, I'd certainly be putting my stake on Hamilton to win that intra-team battle. But history doesn't always repeat itself, doesn't always tell the same story. There is, I think, still a chance that Button could up-end the form book and establish himself as Mclaren's lead driver. One thing that could just tilt the odds his way is the ban on refueling. All bar Rubens Barrichello and Michael Schumacher will have to learn for the first time what an F1 car with 180kgs of fuel onboard is like to drive, and an ability to be smooth, gentle on brakes and tyres, will pay dividends. I for one am convinced that Hamilton is an out and out faster driver than Button, but Button has a mechanical sympathy and a smooth, silky style, reminiscent of Prost or De Angelis. Will Hamilton's improvisational aggression prove too much for the tyres with a full fuel load aboard?

Another factor is that Button is coming in, not as a man who won a title five years back like Hill did, but as the current, reigning World Champion, carrying the Number 1 on his car. Among sportsmen competing at this level, it really shouldn't make a difference, but all the same, the extra self-assurance and confidence that comes from knowing that, right now, you are the World Number 1, maybe, just maybe, it can be enough to unsettle Hamilton, to leave him wondering whether he's still Mclaren's number one man. It was interesting to see veteran F1 journalist Maurice Hamilton remark on his twitter feed that Button looked much more comfortable and at home on the stage at the launch of the MP4-25 than Hamilton, and Joe Saward passed on the comment of one reader of his blog that "the body language of Hamilton and Button was interesting...there's no love lost between those two..." Another leap - it's just possible that might have a negative impact on his driving, unsettle him, lead him to over-drive as he did at Silverstone in qualifying in 2008 when Kovalainen, just for once, appeared to have the upper hand.

It's probably a forlorn hope for Jenson. Button will doubtless remember what happened the following day in the wet race at the Northamptonshire circuit. Hamilton drove perhaps the single greatest race of his career so far to win comfortably. Kovalainen was nowhere. No, the chances are, if Button wants to win back to back titles, even assuming that Mclaren can produce the car to enable him to do it, he's going to have to raise his game to a level well beyond even what was required to net him last year's championship. It's going to be interesting to see whether he can do it, and if not... If the Mclaren battle turns out to be a walkover... Well, there's a Brazilian guy been flying round Jerez teamed up with a double world champion who really doesn't take well to being beaten by his team mates. That Ferrari line-up looks very intriguing, doesn't it...

Winning Is Not Enough - Book Review

2010-01-19T12:34:00.000-08:00

To be honest, I've never been a great fan of Jackie Stewart. Though I'm too young to have seen him race, I'm well aware that he was one of the sport's all time greats. You don't win three World Championships without being very special indeed, and you certainly don't win by four whole minutes - in the rain - at the Nordschliefe, without otherworldly talent. No matter how good Dunlop's wet weather rubber might have been....

But out of the car, or more to the point, in his post-F1 career as a team owner, sponsor's 'representative' and pundit, I never warmed to him. To me, he came across as hectoring, self impo0rtant and someone who had played a part in the sport's becoming more corporate, more sanitised. I've never met the man, though, and to judge him solely by his public persona is being more than a little unfair. Nonetheless, it was with some ambivalence that I picked up his mammoth 500+ page autobiography, Winning is not enough.

Stewart's Tyrrell 001 - the car in which he won his first World title.

The book left me with a somewhat revised, and perhaps more positive opinion of Stewart the man. Reading his account of growing up, the son of a garage owner in a small conservative Scottish town in the early 1950s, it becomes clear that he's very much a product of his time and his place. A fastidious, serious-minded and honest man, from a culture which believed in the virtues of hard work, of being careful with money, of not taking unnecessary chances. His account of his early struggles with dyslexia, and of his later work to encourage the UK and Scottish Governments to do more to assist children with the condition left me with a newfound respect for the man - it is hard to imagine many of today's pampered sportsmen - racing drivers or otherwise - being prepared to put in the time and effort required to influence Government policy.

The problem I had was not so much with Stewart the man, but with the book. Fundamentally, people will pick it up because Jackie Stewart is a triple Formula 1 World Champion, a winner of 27 Grands Prix, who later went on to establish his own team with his son, which itself went on to win the German Grand Prix of 1999 before he sold up to Ford. Yet his racing career takes up, I think, less than a third of the book.

Now I suspect that Stewart himself does not regard his F1 titles as necessarily the greatest achievements of his life, and he perhaps does not want to be defined by them. I doubt I'm alone though, among likely readers, in not being especially interested in Stewart's post-F1 business career. And an awful lot of the book is given over to his later work for Ford, Rolex and sundry corporations. For the most part, it's not terribly interesting stuff. His account of his work for Ford advising them on new models is mildly diverting and shows how the skills he learned on the race track could be put to use elsewhere, but I fail to see why anybody should be particularly interested in his role as an 'ambassador' for the Royal Bank of Scotland and his friendship with its disgraced former Chief Executive, Fred Goodwin. More than anything else, this was a book crying out for a good editor to impose some discipline, get rid of some of the more tiresome name-dropping and the life-advice that reminded me of nothing so much as a mother reminding her son to wash behind his ears...

There's some good stuff lurking in this book though. A paean to the Tyrrell 003, the car with which Stewart won 8 Grands Prix and the 1971 World title, and arguably the most successful individual chassis ever produced in F1. A moving tribute to his 1973 team mate Francois Cevert, who was killed in practice for the final race of that season at Watkins Glen is just one illustration of quite how much more dangerous motorsport was in Stewart's day. He was one of many of Stewart's contemporaries - Clark, Mclaren, Rindt, Siffert and many more besides, who died at the wheel. For all that Denis Jenkinson never entirely forgave him for it, Stewart deserves much credit for his single-minded drive to improve safety standards in the sport and probably there are not a few drivers who would not be alive today but for his work.

If Stewart can dedicate a whole chapter of his biography to his dogs, then you can surely forgive me one picture of my old Setter...

Unfortunately, there's not nearly as much detail about his racing career as I would have liked to have seen. The 1968 and 1972 seasons get only a few dismissive lines - which in a book of more than 500 pages, seems hard to justify. Especially when he's quite happy to dedicate more than 20 pages to a meeting with King Hussein of Jordan, and a whole chapter to his pet dogs. There are aspects of his post-F1 career I would have liked to know more about though. The establishment of Stewart F1, the last real independent Grand Prix team to emerge before the manufacturer teams took over at the turn of the century, was an incredible achievement. That, together with his son, Paul, he created a team which won a race in only its third season and did so without ever going into debt is, in the context of the litany of expensive disasters that is the history of new F1 teams over the last 30 years, scarcely credible. And yet there's only a fairly brief potted account of how he actually did it.

A 1998 Stewart F1 car - now resident in the National Museum of Scotland

His reluctance to provide more than a summary of his time as BRDC president is more understandable. As he himself remarks, that chapter of his life really needs a book in itself, and given some of those involved, a veritable phalanx of lawyers to go over it prior to publication. He makes a spirited case for the Government lending financial support to the British Grand Prix, though in the end, I remain unconvinced, and left wondering if he fully appreciates how politically difficult it would be to pour taxpayers' money into CVC's coffers, no matter how many jobs the race might ultimately sustain.

Perhaps it is Jackie Stewart's very success, the sense of a life well lived, which is the downfall of this book. I was struck by how much more interesting the last racing biography I read, Tommy Byrne's Crashed and Byrned, was - but perhaps that is only because the reasons for Byrne's ultimate failure at the highest level of the sport make a more intriguing tale than Stewart's success.

In the end, while I didn't dislike the book as such, I can't really recommend it wholeheartedly either. If you're a huge Jackie Stewart fan, there's probably enough to hold your interest, but if you're looking for a racing biography, there are better books out there. Aside from the aforementioned Crashed and Byrned, Niki Lauda's biography, To Hell and Back, is similarly comprehensive, in covering his life outside racing, but, perhaps because Lauda was always a more outspoken, less polite man, its a more interesting read. And that's the problem with this book. Stewart, a man who settled easily into corporate life after his retirement, is not a man to dish the dirt, to tell untold stories. And in a man, that is perhaps admirable, but in an autobiographer, it left me feeling a little short-changed.

Show Business

2010-01-18T12:19:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went down to Birmingham for the Autosport International Racing Show for the first time in twenty or so years. Its heavily promoted through Autosport, who make it out to be something not to be missed by any real race fan, though this is hardly surprising given that it is organised by the 'exhibitions' wing of Haymarket Publications. But the fundamental reason I've not bothered paying a visit in a very long time us that I couldn't work up much enthusiasm for what is essentially a trade fair with a few celebrity guest appearances thrown in. Of course, its a motorsport trade fair, so it's more my cup of tea than a show for the farming trade might be, but as someone not involved in the industry, I was never that convinced of its merit as a public entertainment event.

I'm not alone. There was an article over at Sidepodcast last week in which Mr C explained why they weren't bothering this year, and to judge by the comments left on the article, it appears there's a fair degree of scepticism about the value of the event for people like myself - race fans, with no intention right now of hopping the fence and becoming competitors.

Nonetheless, as I was in Birmingham for the weekend anyway, and a couple of old friends were dropping by the event as a break from their house-hunting mission in the city, I thought it worth paying a visit. Two things struck me instantly on arrival. The first was that, at nearly £30 for basic admission, it's on the pricey side. That's more than I paid for to see the BTCC at Knockhill - and all for an event that doesn't feature any actual racing - the more so as they'd sold out of tickets for the Live Action Arena by the time I got there. The second thing that hit me was that the venue - the NEC, is absolutely huge - it has the cavernous feel of a vast aircraft hangar and is much bigger than I remember it being when I last went as a 12 year old child.

Still, as the selling out of the 4,700 seater arena shows demonstrates, it's a popular event with the fans. I'm sure it helped that world champion Jenson Button was putting in an appearance, and yes, there's not a lot else happening in the motorsport world at this time of year, but all the same, I was surprised just how busy the place was. Perhaps, in this modern age in which Formula 1 is so uptight about letting ordinary fans get anywhere near the cars, it was simply the chance to see the cars up close. F1 Racing Magazine's stand had succeeded in collecting examples of all ten of 2009's F1 cars to display.

That said, it's hard to ignore the fact that, if you're not in the market for a racing car yourself, there isn't much to do at the show besides gawp at the machinery. There was some seriously tasty machinery on display with Lotuses of various vintages being among the highlights. Ronnie Peterson's Lotus 72, as fine a racing car as ever there was made, was joined by a Jim Clark Lotus F2 car, Martin Donnelly's 1990 Lotus-Lamborghini (which despite the vile yellow livery, looked rather better than it went) and Mario Andretti's 1978 title winning machine. There was quite a collection of rally cars to ogle too - from the elegant Lancia 037 to the brutal looking Metro 6R4, with plenty of more recent machinery on show too - including the title winning Subarus of both of Britain's late World Rally Champions, Richard Burns and Colin McRae. And, if, like me, you have a taste for curios and oddities, there was a red GTP Nissan Group C car, a Lotus Carlton and a fair smattering of stock cars and drag racers hidden away at one end of the vast hall.

To be fair, staring at parked cars wasn't quite all there was to do at the show. The Autosport Stand did a fine job of interviewing as many people as they could get hold of, and Martin Brundle's observations on the upcoming F1 season were well worth catching, even if his racing-driver son, who was sat alongside him, didn't seem to know quite what to do with himself. Richard Noble enthused on the subject of his plan to break the 1000mph speed barrier, and Oliver Gavin and Johnny Mowlem talked about their year in sports car racing. Though, as it happens, you didn't have to be there, because Autosport have kindly uploaded the interviews to Youtube.

People with a lot more money to spare than I have could even buy a historic racing car. Coys were auctioning off assorted exotica on the Saturday afternoon and the friends I had met up with were keen to watch because, in amongst the Ferrari sportscars and Surtees F2 cars, was a Mark 1 Capri very much like the one that they have slowly rotting in a garage, and they were intently interested to see how much it might be worth if they ever got around to restoring it.

Those with considerably more patience and willingness to stand in line than I had could also queue up to drive assorted racing simulators - the most impressive of which involved a six-poster rig which threw its 'passengers' around quite violently as they drove a Ferrari F430 around a virtual Elkhart Lake.

So, all in all, it was a reasonably entertaining way to kill a couple of hours, but if I had gone all the way to Birmingham solely to see the Autosport show, I would probably have felt a little cheated. Unreasonably perhaps. After all, what, besides the chance to have a look at a few parked racing cars, can one really expect from a racing car show? But I don't think I'll be hurrying back next year...