GP2 2010: Winning down to an ART?

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 Young Pretenders

It can't have escaped the many young drivers aspiring to make the breakthrough into Formula 1 next year that there could be a number of seats available in the near future. Nelson Piquet Jr, Sebastien Bourdais and Kazuki Nakajima have all underperformed thus far this year and questions have to be asked as to whether they will last the season let alone retain their seats into next. One wonders, too, whether Giancarlo Fisichella and perhaps even Rubens Barrichello are now into their final season of racing now. If all of the above go, that's five seats opening up, compared to the one this year, and of course there is always the possibility that the FIA's efforts to bring new teams into the sport will come off and USGPE, or ISport or whoever, could be looking for drivers too.

In recent years, the vast majority of F1 debutants have come up through GP2. There have been exceptions - most notably Sebastian Vettel and Robert Kubica, but all the same, if you are looking to get a Grand Prix drive, then the FOM-owned feeder series appears to be the place to be. All of which begs the question, with the series kicking off in Barcelona last weekend, who might be near the top of the F1 bosses' shopping lists?

Even ahead of a dominant display at the weekend, Renault development driver Romain Grosjean, who won the previous year's GP2 Asia series, had to be one of the title favourites. A pole, an error-free victory in the feature race and a second place in the sprint which perhaps ought to have been a win (Edoardo Mortara on one occasion at least played very fast and loose with the 'one move' rule in defending his lead) - it was a marked contrast to his performance at the opening round last year, where he looked the fastest man on the track most of the time, but threw away a possible sprint race win in a moment of impetuousness.

I've said before that, for a driver to really stand out, he needs to win the GP2 series at his first attempt, especially if he's with one of the top teams as Grosjean was last year. But I wouldn't write him off just yet. Last year, he had the pace, but made too many errors - if he can demonstrate this year that this was down to youthful inexperience rather than a fundamental character flaw, he could yet be in for a race seat at Renault in 2010. Perhaps the one thing casting doubt on his performance was that the hitherto rather unremarkable Vitaly Petrov was able to finish second in the feature race in the sister-Barwa car, suggesting that, for all that GP2 is supposedly a spec-formula, the team may have played as big a part as the driver in their success last weekend.

For Lucas Di Grassi, it may already be too late. He's now going into his fourth season in GP2, and his failure to win the title for ART in 2007 was probably enough to lead many of F1's movers and shakers to write him off as not quite the real deal. That said, he's not quite in the same boat as Giorgio Pantano, who took nearly a decade to win the title (he first arrived in F3000 in 2000...) If there are enough seats available at the end of the year, then a good run at the title in his amusingly-named 'Fat Burner Racing Engineering' machine (and to think, last year, the Repsol liveried Racing Engineering cars were the prettiest on the grid...) just might be enough to secure him a drive.

In GP2, you can never write off Frederic Vasseur's ART squad and it will be interesting to see what the highly rated F3 Euroseries Champion Nico Hulkenberg can do with them this year. He had an oddly anonymous weekend in Barcelona, though he was hamstrung by his failure to get off the line on Saturday afternoon. Still, it's hard to ignore the fact that in the Sunday morning sprint race, his team mate Pastor Maldonado looked a good deal more racy, climbing back up to 6th after falling to 10th away from the start, in spite of the fact that passing at the Circuit di Catalunya is notoriously difficult.

That though, may be a reflection as much of Maldonado's potential as any shortcomings on Hulkenberg's part. The Venezuelan driver has looked intermittently quick ever since arriving in GP2 in 2007 - he's particularly quick at Monaco and showed increasingly impressive pace through last year at Piquet Sports - his performance in the wet at Spa standing out in my mind. He's never been talked about before as an F1 prospect though, perhaps because of an erratic, wild side. If he can put all that behind him and win the title, it's possible the GP team principals will sit up and take notice, but now he's with ART and into his third season, he has no excuses.

What of the rest? Who else will be worth watching? The DAMS squad won the GP2 Asia series comfortably over the winter and while series champion Kamui Kobayashi looked rather anonymous all weekend, Belgian Jerome D'Ambrosio, the former Formula Master champion, looked a good deal more impressive. He may not quite have had the pace of the Barwa-Campos-Addax cars, but two podium finishes in the opening two races suggests that he could be a factor as the season goes on. Whether or not he's really quite F1 material I'm not sure, but he came on increasingly strong as the GP2 Asia series progressed earlier in the year...

What of 2007 Champions and rumoured F1 aspirants, ISport? For the second year running, I'm not entirely convinced by their driver line-up. Giedo Van Der Garde won last year's Renault World Series title, but has thus far looked all at sea in GP2, something I find hard to understand. Was last year's WSR field second rate? Were P1 Motorsport putting together a much quicker car than their rivals? Have ISport gone dramatically backwards since last year? Or is it simple a case of car and driver failing to gel? Sometimes it is hard to understand why a driver can be so quick in one series and so lost in another....

Diego Nunes looks a shade quicker thus far.He sometimes impressed last year in the unfancied DPR entry and was in a points-scoring position before becoming an innocent victim of the Di Grassi/Parente collision in the feature race. He looks like someone who can win races, but I wonder if a title might be beyond him....

Arden were once the kings of F3000, and with Heikki Kovalainen, they had a serious run at the very first GP2 title in 2005. Since then, the team appear to have fallen from their perch. Perhaps it's because owner Christian Horner has other things on his mind these days. Perhaps they've just not had the drivers to get the job done - although that Sebastien Buemi has looked pretty handy in an F1 car. This year, they've got Euroseries runner-up Edoardo Mortara and British F3 front-runner Sergio Perezat the wheel. And while Perez had a torrid time last weekend, Mortara was able to hold off Grosjean and win the reverse grid event in his first GP2 weekend (if you discount the GP2 Asia series anyway). I'd be surprised if he mounts a serious title bid, but he might just get the best of his old F3 rival, Hulkenberg.

Of the rest? There are a fair few race winners in the field. Andi Zuber is back for yet another year, but after failing to make a serious impression with Piquet Sports last year and never quite matching Timo Glock at ISport the year before I can't now see his career going anywhere. Luca Filippi was back on form at SuperNova last weekend, running near the front after a miserable and lacklustre year spent at ART and Arden in 2008, and he's teamed up with Javier Villa, who seems to have been around forever despite only being 21 years old. Karun Chanhok, having failed to get the measure of Bruno Senna last year at ISport, is unlikely to do any better teamed up with Alvaro Parente at Ocean Racing, the team that as BCN generally brought up the rear last year. Parente I once had a higher opinion of - British F3 Champion, Renault World Series Champion and winner of his first race in GP2. Since then, though, he hasn't really made an impression and his SuperNova team mate Andy Soucek usually got the better of him as the season wore on.

The bottom half of the GP2 series seems to me to be made up of those with few qualifications to race at this level beyond the connections or family wealth to pay for the drive. What Ricardo Texeira, Nelson Panciatici, Alberto Valerio or Michael Herck have done to suggest they have a future as professional racing drivers is beyond me. Come to that, even some of the aforementioned former race winners are probably still on the grid only because they have money and connections - does anyone really still believe Javier Villa is the next Fernando Alonso? Or that Andi Zuber will be picked up by an F1 team?

The shame of it is that while the bottom half of the GP2 grid is made up of makeweights, a number of potentially seriously quick drivers can't, or have chosen not to, join GP2 at all. Jaime Alguesuari, Oliver Turvey and Brendon Hartley, the three stand out drivers from British F3 last year, have all gone to WSR instead. And when one looks at the sheer cost of GP2, it's hardly any surprise. Why would Red Bull or Racing Steps Foundation (who pay the bills for the above three) pay perhaps three quarters of a million to place their driver in one of the weaker teams in the GP2 field? How much could any of them really do with a seat at DPR or Durango? How serious a measure of future up and coming talents is GP2 if it is restricted to the very best-funded young single seater racers?

To go back to the question I started the article with, I wouldn't be surprised to see Romain Grosjean make the move up to F1, and if Nico Hulkenberg lives up to the promise he has shown in F3, he too might find an F1 berth. But it wouldn't surprise me if, after a few years in which GP2 has been de rigeuer for would-be F1 drivers, we revert once more to the situation which had prevailed in the dying years of F3000, where the best drivers skip the category altogether and are plucked straight from F3, from the Renault World Series, and perhaps even from the new Formula 2 category.

If at First You Don't Succeed... GP2 In Review

When Giorgio Pantano made his F3000 debut, back in 2001, Juan Pablo Montoya was just beginning his Grand Prix career at Williams and Fernando Alonso was a fresh-faced teenager doing remarkable things with a hastily put together Minardi. Lewis Hamilton was still racing karts and F1's newest winner, Sebastien Vettel had not long turned 13 years old. Save for a single, rather disappointing season with the failing Jordan team in 2004, he's been plying his trade in F1's premier feeder category every year since.

Last weekend, at his 7th attempt, he finally lifted the title, and became the GP2 series' fourth champion. Pantano had been competitive throughout his time in F3000 and GP2, but had never quite looked like a potential title winner before. The closest he had come was all the way back in 2002, when he wound up second, behind Sebastien Bourdais though only after Enge was stripped of the title following a positive test for marijuana - a drug which it is hard to imagine could improve a racing driver's performance. The question is, though, did Pantano win because he finally came good, or because the quality of the opposition he faced was rather lower than in years past?

The answer, I suspect, is a mix of the two. Giorgio Pantano was undoubtedly, for the balance of the season, the quickest driver in the field. The fact that he was driving for Racing Engineering, a team which, until now, have not been true front-runners. His four feature race wins illustrate the point that, over the course of the season, nobody was as consistently quick as Pantano. But for misfortune in Spa and Valencia and a silly mistake exiting the pits at the final round at Monza, Pantano could easily have won 7 of the 11 Saturday afternoon races this year. He still continued to make those unforced errors though - at Spa, at Monza, at Valencia and at Monaco he cost himself points with moments of madness. If he were a young gun of 21 or 22, that might be understandable, but at nearly 30, it seems to point to a more fundamental limitation in Pantano as a driver.



Champion at the 7th attempt. Giorgio Pantano.


So who was he up against? Well, the answer to that question perhaps explains the degree of cynicism, at least among those who might otherwise sign up a GP2 champion for F1, that remains about Pantano. In fact, the only man to win more than one feature race all season was Brazilian Lucas Di Grassi, who joined the championship only at the fourth round, after Ben Hanley and Campos Racing had parted ways. After a 2007 season with ART in which Di Grassi proved slightly disappointing, he went some way to repairing his reputation, looking like a serious title contender for a while, despite missing the opening six races. On balance, he was my choice for driver of the season, not least because his team, Campos, were hardly among the front-runners in the past. While Pantano peppered his season with a number of small errors (including the mistake at Spa which cost Di Grassi any remaining chance of the title) it is hard to point to any similar mistakes on Di Grassi's part.

Of course, the man who did take the title fight to the final round was Ayrton's nephew, Bruno Senna. He's talked of as the man most likely to move up to F1 next year, though one can't help but feel that his name plays no small part here. Bruno didn't do a bad job in his second season in GP2, but didn't really stand out in the way that Hamilton, Rosberg, Glock or Kovalainen did. There were days when he was imperious - Silverstone in the rain on Sunday morning springs to mind - but in the end, he won but one of the 11 feature races, and was only able to add one sprint race to that tally. Given he was driving for ISport, the reigning champions and arguably the best prepared team on the grid, it seems fair to say that more would be expected of a potential F1 star. That said, unlike more or less everyone else on the grid, he didn't spend his teenage years in karts, and perhaps has more scope for improvement than most of his rivals.



Senna was too inconsistent to take the fight to Pantano.

Before the start of the year, I had predicted that Romain Grosjean would end up running away with the championship. He seemed to have it all. He had dominated the GP2 Asia series, and he was signed up with double champions ART. In the event, it didn't work out that way. The year started badly, with his qualifying down in 11th for the opening race at Barcelona. Come the race, though, he looked far and away the quickest man on the circuit, and despite the fact that the new GP2 cars were clearly not as conducive to overtaking as the old ones, he clawed his way up to 5th. The Sprint race should have been his for the taking, but following a safety car, he screwed up his entry to the final chicane, allowed Kamui Kobayashi a run on him and then practically had the Japanese newcomer off the road in retaking the lead. It was a stupid move which earned him a drive through penalty and cost him a points finish - probably a win. That was just one weekend, but it was somehow reflective of a season which yielded just two wins. He always seemed quick on race day, but his qualifying was erratic and there were just too many mistakes.

So what of the rest? I have to confess to being more than a little surprised to discover the unpredictable Pastor Maldonado had climbed to a comfortable 5th place in the drivers' standings by the season, snapping at the heels of such as Grosjean and Senna in the points tables. Sometimes he was anonymous, and other times, most particularly at Monaco and whenever he found himself on a wet track - his performance in the rain at Spa on Sunday morning springs to mind. Perhaps a sign that, while he may be mentally fragile, his innate car control is of the highest order.


Maldonado came on increasingly strong in the second half of the year.

Sebastien Buemi took over Javier Villa's role as the master of Sunday morning sprint race wins - he picked up 2 wins and another 3 podiums. He's talked about as a potential F1 driver, but in all honesty it's hard to see why he'd be a better bet than Bruno Senna. Arden may not be quite the force that they were when the scooped one F3000 title after another, but they're still a competitive race team, and I wouldn't hire a man who had never even won a GP2 Feature race.

Of the rest, Alvaro Parente showed himself, on balance, the most promising of the complete GP2 rookies (i.e. those newcomers who had not raced in GP2 Asia). He won the opening race, which turned out to be the highlight of his season, but intermittently, he ran at or near the front for much of the rest of the season. His greatest weakness seemed to be an inability to get to grips with qualifying on occasion - twice he made the front row, but twice he was as far back as 21st on the grid. Whether the lion's share of the blame lay with him or with SuperNova was never entirely clear. His team mate Andy Soucek's form was similarly up and down. Vitaly Petrov was the season's other Feature race winner, picking up the pieces after Pantano ran out of fuel in Valencia. He looked a much improved driver this year (as indeed his performances in the GP2 Asia series had hinted he might be) and certainly the best racer ever to come out of Russia. Whether he is potential F1 material in another matter.

If the above drivers were the cream of 2008, then there can be little doubt that nobody had a worse year than Luca Filippi. Widely touted (not least on these pages) as a potential title contender with ART, the wealthy Italian never really figured all season. He was unable to get any kind of a handle on Grosjean and parted ways with the team for Arden. There, he was scarcely any more competitive - only at Valencia did he get anywhere near the pace, and there he ended up disgracing himself by running his former team mate off the road and out of the race. If his family put up the money, it is possible he could redeem himself next year, but I would imagine the F1 teams will already have written him off. He ended the season 19th, with just 6 points to his name.


China will have to wait a little longer for a truly first rate race driver. Ho Pin Tung was an also-ran.


If Filippi was desperately underwhelming, Marko Asmer's year was worse still. The Estonian who had dominated the 2007 British F3 championship seemed utterly lost at Fisichella Motorsport when he joined the team mid-season. A BMW tester, he clearly knows roughly what to do with a racing car, and his inability to climb off the back couple of rows of the GP2 grid all year was something of a mystery, at least from the outside looking in. FMS may have looked a bit of a mess this year, but it is worth remembering that Adam Carroll was able to pick up a 2nd row starting position with the team in Turkey.

At the very back were the usual suspects. Christian Bakkerud appeared no more convincing than last year, and after injuring himself at Monaco, he made way for Andy Soucek at SuperNova. Michael Herck looked out of his depth at DPR, and none of the various lost souls who drove the second BCN Competicion car had any real business being in GP2.

I suspect that, in the fullness of time, the 2008 season will not be remembered as a classic year for GP2. In the first three years, the series had at least one - and in 2005, two standout drivers who looked like real F1 material. This year, one couldn't help feeling there was nobody in the Vettel/Hamilton/Kubica class, or even at the level of Rosberg or Glock, come to that. The racing wasn't helped by a new chassis which didn't seem as well suited to wheel-to-wheel racing as the old GP2 car had done, being too sensitive to turbulence and dirty air from a car in front.

2009 might be a different story though. The GP2 series organisers have shown before that they are willing to tweak the chassis rules, and one hopes that they might spend the winter working out how they can improve overtaking in the series. More importantly, though, there are some really promising drivers looking at moving up into the GP2 series next year. Niko Hulkenberg, F3 Euroseries Champion elect and the latest prodigy of one Willy Weber will be one to watch. Oliver Turvey and Sergio Perez, currently battling it out for the British F3 championship, both have tests lined up, and rumour has it that the man who beat Vettel to the 2006 Euroseries Crown, Paul Di Resta, might be returning to single seaters after 2 years marooned in the DTM. 2008 might not have been a classic year, but the average GP2 race was still the best place to see big powerful single seaters really racing. Here's hoping 2009 will produce a crop of real talent.

Two 'til the end?

It has been an odd year for the GP2 series. The first year with the second generation GP2 machine has not provided quite so much of the close, wheel to wheel racing that made the championship's reputation in its first few years. One suspects that Dallara have simply got the trade-off between aerodynamic downforce and mechanical grip wrong with this year's car and that the drivers are encountering the same problems running close together in "dirty air" that the big boys have long been used to in F1. Let's not get it out of proportion, though. There were overtaking manoeuvres at Hungary in the GP2 races last weekend, and that is more than can be said for the Grand Prix after the first 3 laps were in the book.

In each of the GP2 title race has boiled down to a 2-way fight. In 2005, it was Heikki Kovalainen fighting it out with eventual winner Nico Rosberg. A year later, Nelson Piquet was the Lewis Hamilton's sole serious opponent, and last year, it was Timo Glock and ART's Lucas Di Grassi who were still fighting it out as the series entered it's final rounds. After the Magny Cours race, at which all the other major title contenders self-destructed, I wondered if this year was going to prove an exception and Giorgio Pantano was going to have it all sewn up with several races in hand. Two further feature race wins, at Silverstone and in Hockenheim, appeared to confirm that the title was going to the Italian single-seater veteran.

However, a single disastrous weekend in Hungary, where Pantano fell victim to an over-aggressive piece of defending from Romain Grosjean in the feature race has been enough to enable ISport's Bruno Senna into contention. Bruno Senna appears to be adopting the same steady and consistent approach that wasn't quite enough to bring Di Grassi the title last year. He may have won just one feature race, set against Pantano's impressive four wins from seven, but he has been racking up podiums (not to mention a sprint race win) with such consistency that he is just seven points behind in the title race. Had the dogcatcher at Istanbul been doing his job properly, the gap might be even smaller.

Given that, for the last 3 years, the GP2 champion has ended up graduating to Formula 1, the question must be asked - what are Pantano and Senna's chances of making the step up? Pantano, I'm afraid, I simply can't see being picked up by an F1 team next year. He had his chance in F1 back in 2004, and to be brutally honest, he looked rather out of his depth. He's been racing in GP2 and it's predecessor, F3000, since 2001. His best result remains his second overall behind Sebastien Bourdais, all the way back in 2002. There's no doubt that he's matured into a very competent single seater racer, but after his messy year with Jordan, I doubt he'll get a second chance at F1.

In the case of Bruno Senna, the answer is more complicated. There have been rumours that Toro Rosso is taking a serious look at the Brazilian, not least because of his highly marketable name. To my mind, though, he has been good, rather than exceptional, thus far in GP2. He's been consistent, but on the other hand, he's hardly been the consistent race winner that such as Glock, Hamilton, Kovalainen and Rosberg were in GP2. In normal circumstances, I'd say we'd seen enough of Ayrton's nephew to say he wasn't quite F1 material. In his case, I'm not quite so sure though. Unlike almost all his rivals, he did not spend his teens in karts, and he only began racing in 2004. As such, there's a fair argument that he has more room for future improvement than anyone else at a similar level. Certainly, he has come a long way from the rather underwhelming driver I saw in a Formula BMW race at Knockhill four years back.

So that's the likely title contenders out of the way. What of the rest? At the start of the year, I had predicted that GP2 Asia champion, Romain Grosjean, would take the title. Oh well. Grosjean, to be fair, has looked as quick as anyone this year, especially in race conditions, but has shown this year that there are still a lot of rough edges to be smoothed away if he is to make the step up. In Spain, he qualified poorly but looked quicker in race trim than anyone else - and was the only driver who seemed to be able to overtake with the new higher downforce cars, but he threw away what should have been a sprint race win with a plain stupid move on Kamui Kobayashi. There have been mistakes, too, in Monaco, Magny Cours (though he really should have won the feature race) and the other weekend in Hungary. Lack of attention to yellow flags cost him what would have been a fine feature race win in the wet at Hockenheim. Perhaps, in the knowledge that he is with one of the best teams on the grid, the more he falls behind, the more desperate he gets, and the more he falls behind.

He can at least console himself with the thought that he is not Luca Filippi. The young Italian's lack of pace has been utterly baffling. This is, after all, a man who won races with Super Nova last year, looked quick in the GP2 Asia series with the inexperienced Meritus squad and was signed up in 2008 for ART - the most successful team in the series. Yet he has been nowhere all season - scoring just one point for ART before walking out and moving over to Arden after Silverstone - where he has been no more competitive. About the only comparable mystery has been the way British F3 champion Marko Asmer has looked so utterly out of his depth since he walked into the Fisichella Motorsport drive in France.

What, then, of the rest? It says something about the lack of stand-out drivers in this year's GP2 field that the man who lies 3rd in the title chase is Lucas di Grassi - despite the fact that he missed the first 3 rounds of the championship, only stepping in when Campos and Ben Hanley parted ways. He's done a good job this year - much more so than he did when he was fighting for the title last year with ART in my opinion - but the door to F1 probably shut on him when he didn't make the impact he really should have done last year. Though if Alonso walks out on Renault, their options might be limited...

Alvaro Parente, of course, won the first race, but has looked pretty anonymous since then. To be fair to him, it is not clear that SuperNova is capable of making a GP2 car run as quickly as some of their rivals, but his form has been rather erratic. That said, he is in his first season of GP2, and unlike Grosjean, he didn't have the luxury of doing the GP2 Asia series as a warm-up. Discounting those who raced in that series, he's done better than any of the championship's other freshmen. His credibility would, I think, be intact if he could come back and win the series next year.

The same cannot be said of a lot of other drivers having rather up and down seasons. Karun Chandhok has been intermittently fast, but has never really matched the pace of his ISport team mate Senna, suggesting that the world will have to wait a little while longer for a really first-rate Indian driver. Russia, too, would appear not yet to have found it's man. Vitaly Petrov has been decently quick, and had no problem disposin of Hanley, but it took the arrival of Di Grassi to mark Campos out as a race winning team. Javier Villa's progress appears to have reached an abrupt halt and gone into reverse. While his team mate Pantano has been racking up the feature race wins, Villa has not even been able to continue his Sunday sprint-race winning streak. Andreas Zuber has recovered, to a degree, from a massively disappointing and frustrating 2007 season, but hasn't really shown the kind of pace that marks him out as something special. The same can be said, to a considerable extent, of Mike Conway, who has been consistent over at Trident, but has never quite been on front-running pace.

Pastor Maldonado, on the other hand, has been as maddeningly inconsistent as ever. He could be accused of being a one-trick pony, but when that trick is lapping Monaco several tenths quicker than anyone else, it makes you stand up and pay attention. Sadly, he's also had more than his fair share of very silly mistakes, and there have been times when he has really been pretty anonymous. On the other hand, his drive through the field to 5th from the very back at Hungary was one of the stand-out performances of the year.

So not a classic GP2 season, by any means, but it does seem that we are once more set for an intriguing denouement to the championship. My money is on Pantano, but there is little doubting that ISport will be doing everything within their power to win a second driver's championship.

GP2 2008 Preview - Winning down to an ART?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awaking from a winter slumber

Time was, not so very long ago, when there really wasn't a whole lot to keep us race fans amused during the winter months. The Monte Carlo and Swedish rallies were about all there was happening in the racing world, besides the Daytona 24 Hour Race, at least until mid-March. The racing season, though, spluttered into life early last weekend. In addition to the Daytona enduro, and the Monte we had the opening rounds of the Speedcar and Asian GP2 series over in Dubai.

The catalyst for much of this has been the emergence of Asia as a significant player in the world of motor racing. Even the most cursory glance at the news helps to illustrate why this is happening. While banks in Britain and France totter, and the US heads towards recession, the Middle and Far East is doing really rather well (and buying up a lot of those troubled Western businesses at knock-down rates). Motor racing being an expensive business, it's no surprise that the sport is following the money.

The weather may be far from ideal for racing in Europe at this time of year, but in the Middle East, Malaysia, Indonesia and China conditions are considerably better. Or at least they are meant to be. Qualifying for the inaugural round of the GP2 Asia series had to take place on the short course at the Dubai Autodrome after heavy rain left part of the long course underwater. If this had been Silverstone we might not have been so surprised. As the rules don't allow for the racing to be held on a different circuit configuration from that used for qualifying, we were stuck with the race on the short track as well.

It didn't do wonders for the quality of the racing. The short track perhaps has more in the way of passing places than, say, Valencia, but that is about the best that can be said for it. In fact, the greater problem is that the Dubai Autodrome is fundamentally a dull, soulless venue where the endless acres of tarmac runoff areas and total absence of gradient change lend the impression that the circuit has been hurriedly laid out in an empty car park. One can't help feeling that if the racing world is going to flirt with authoritarian dictatorships and corrupt third world regimes, they could at least ensure that the circuits are interesting. Say what you will about the money that the Malaysian government has poured into hosting a Grand Prix at Sepang, but at least the track's good.

What then, of this new series? It's evident that the overall quality of the field is rather lower than we are used to seeing in the GP2 series proper, even in comparison with the slightly second-rate field we had last year. A few of the big names are present - Romain Grosjean is getting up to speed with ART; Bruno Senna is accustoming himself to changed surroundings at ISport, and Luca Filippi is out on secondment at Meritus, prior to joining ART for the GP2 series proper. Vitaly Petrov is continuing to learn his trade with Campos, after showing unexpectedly well towards the end of last year, and even winning a race. Andy Soucek struggled last year with a DPR team that were fighting to keep their heads above water, but on his junior-series form, he ought to be up to the job if Dave Price has sorted out his end of things. Senna's team mate, Karun Chandhok can't be entirely discounted, and I've always thought that Hiroki Yoshimoto has greater potential than BCN ever allowed him to show. The last two have the added cachet of actually being Asian - and are probably the only two Asian drivers in the series with any realistic hope of winning races in the GP2 Asia series.

Behind these men, it has to be said, the field seems to be made up of journeymen and rich kids wanting to play at being serious racing drivers over the winter, before the heavy-hitters come off their holidays. Armaan Ebrahim and Adam Khan have never done anything to suggest that they belong at this level, having looked hopelessly outclassed in A1GP. Stephen Jelley needed three years in the best team in the field to win one solitary race in British F3. Now his father's construction fortune at least provides us with an illustration of how ART's success isn't all down to the car. With Jelley at the wheel, they were right at the back of the field. Grosjean lapped him in race one! That Jason Tahinci is back for another year is another disappointment. This time, he drew attention to himself only for severely delaying Luca Filippi by aggressively defending his position as the Meritus driver came up to lap him. Michael Herck, Alberto Valerio, Davide Valsecchi and Harald Schlegelmilch are all drivers of whom I know little. On the evidence of last weekend, it is unlikely we will ever come to hear much more of them either - although Valsecchi did a decent job in the sprint race. All in all, it might be for the best that the GP2 Asia series runs with more severely rev-restricted engines than it's big brother. One can't help but suspect that some of the drivers further down the order would be a liability to themselves if they had full throttle to play with...

The first pair of races went to Romain Grosjean, who got off to the ideal start to his GP2 career at ART. It is fair to say that, while his domination of the feature race was impressive (albeit helped by the fact that Bruno Senna lost a lot of time behind Soucek, before finishing second) his second win owed something to luck, as well as ability. He did well to find a way past Yoshimoto and surprise second-place man Fairuz Fauzy, but one can't help but feel that Luca Filippi might have offered a rather sterner challenge had he not fallen out early on with gearbox problems. Whether this promising introduction to the world of GP2 works in the Swiss/French man's favour, or merely lures him into a false sense of security before the season proper gets underway remains to be seen.

Perhaps the most important thing for him is that he had the upper hand over Bruno Senna throughout. I've yet to be entirely convinced by this latest scion of the Senna family. I first cae across him on a cold day at Knockhill in a Formula BMW race a few years back, and he didn't really stand out there. He's done a reasonable job since, but he was soundly beaten by Mike Conway when they raced together in F3 in 2006, and after an early win in GP2 last year, he faded considerably towards the end of the year. Either way, though, he has a seat at ISport, and alongside ART, they have got to be the team of the moment in GP2. One can't help but feel that if ISport are to retain their crown, it is going to have to be Senna, rather than Chandhok, who brings home the bacon.

Beating Luca Filippi won't do him any harm either. Filippi will be joining him at ART come April, and it could be argued that the fact that Grosjean has got his feet under the table first at the French squad will work to his advantage. Against that, though, one must factor in Filippi's two previous seasons of GP2. After a rather underwhelming debut season, he came on in leaps and bounds during 2007, and came closer to putting Super Nova right back at the top than anyone has since the days when they took Montoya and Bourdais to F3000 titles. That said, Filippi is with a brand new team who have no previous experience of the car, and so he too can take positives from the opening round.

They're off to Sentul, in Indonesia next. The track is another rather narrow, twisty affair and like the short Dubai circuit, is perhaps not the best place to take big powerful single seaters to. On the other hand, judging by the A1GP race, at least the locals are a bit more interested in what is going on than was the case at the deserted Middle East venue last weekend. There's grass, rather than oceans of tarmac, at the side of the track, and who knows, maybe they'll have a monsoon to enliven proceedings. I'm in two minds about the GP2 Asia series, but at the least, it's something to keep us amused over the winter

Trusting to luck

Its a cliche often repeated that "bad luck tends to balance out over the season". Its true as often as not. A driver may emphasise a misfortune in explaining away his failure to win a title, but all too frequently, the rival who beat him to the championship will have suffered an identical misfortune at another race. One might point to Michael Schumacher's engine failure in Japan last year, but that would be to forget Fernando Alonso's equally costly wheel nut disaster in Hungary. When a championship is particularly finely balanced, as is the case this year, it is possible for luck to play a decisive part in determining the winner. Usually, however, luck evens out, and other, more decisive factors come into play.

It isn't always so. The law of averages dictates that from time to time, someone is going to end up being repeatedly, and persistently unlucky. You don't have to give credence to voodoo, or witchcraft, or the idea that some people are just "born unlucky". Its just a logical consequence of the idea that misfortune is randomly distributed. Most people will suffer an average amount of bad luck, but a small minority will, by sheer chance, suffer a very high number of such "unlucky events". We see it from time to time in Formula 1. Remember when, in the early 1990s always seemed to be Johnny Herbert's Lotus that ended up broken by the side of the road? Or think about the sheer number of times that plain misfortune kept Chris Amon from winning a Grand Prix. Come to that, but for luck, might Kimi Raikkonen have been a double world champion by now? (I'm thinking 2003 and 2005, in case you're wondering).

Clive and Alianora have been having an interesting conversation about the GP2 series over at F1 Insight. I agree with much of what they say. Certainly, the category dies not seem to be producing a driver of the calibre of Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg or Heikki Kovalainen this year. What strikes me most, though, is that the championship appears to be developing into a fight between a very good racer who has had more than his share of bad luck, and a rather mediocre driver who has consistently had the cards fall in his favour.

Lets deal with Lucas Di Grassi first. The Brazilian comes with a rather uncertain pedigree. He arrived in GP2 last year with Durango having taken third in the Formula 3 Euroseries in 2005. Durango were thought of as one of the series' weakest teams, and Di Grassi's smattering of points finishes looked respectable enough and was certainly more than his team mate managed. A deal with ART for 2007 was therefore something of a make-or-break moment for the young Brazilian.

To my mind, its been a matter of his having been broken rather than made. ART have been the team to be with for the past two years. There's no doubt that their driver line-up hasn't exactly hindered them. Rosberg, Premat and Hamilton were all seriously quick drivers. Nonetheless, I think its reasonable to assume that if you can't win with ART, you probably can't win at all.

The problem is, Di Grassi hasn't been winning. His victory at Turkey last weekend was his first all season. Given he's a second year driver with one of the top teams, and given that the GP2 series has seen no less than 10 different winners, that doesn't exactly suggest he's been doing an outstanding job this season.

Nonetheless, that win was enough to haul him, briefly, to the top of the points standings. Why? Unlike almost all of his rivals, he's not been unfortunate enough to get caught up in silly accidents, and he's had impeccable reliability from his car while others have struggled with persistent gearbox woes (seemingly the fault of suppliers Mecachrome, rather than the teams themselves, for the most part). The end result is that he has been able to gather points by stealth, to the point where he is now the only realistic challenger to Glock in the battle to be GP2 champion. Of course, to a degree, the old saw is true, and you really do make your own luck. Di Grassi may not have been especially quick, but he has made few mistakes, at least until the sprint race on Sunday saw him hit Pantano, pick up a drive-through penalty and finish outside the points for the first time since the opening round in Bahrain.

In the end, though Di Grassi's position owes an awful lot to the fact that he has retired from just one race, while Glock has failed to finish on 5 occasions. The bare statistics indicate that Glock has won 3 of this year's 15 races. That figure really ought to be higher. Glock picked up steering damage at the opening corner of the opening race in Bahrain, and claims that only this prevented him taking the fight to Luca Filippi there. His performance in Barcelona suggests this might well have been more than mere bravado. The only front-running driver not to pit under the safety car in the opening laps of the feature race, he was left having to find 30+ seconds over his rivals. Despite this, he clawed his way back to beat all except Bruno Senna. He then promptly won the sprint race from 7th on the grid - just to ram the point home. Qualifying in Monaco didn't go quite to plan, but a steady, consistent drive brought a podium finish.

Then his season began to fall apart. Pole at Magny Cours came to nothing when his race ended in a silly startline collision with fellow front-row man and team mate, Andy Zuber. Neither were entirely blameless, but in my eyes, it was Zuber who must take the lion's share of the responsibility for the accident. Such was Glock's pace at the circuit, that it was still possible he might score in the sprint race, but a gearbox failure early on meant that we would never know.

The Silverstone race brought two further non-finishes. A likely podium finish in the feature race fell by the wayside when his electronics packed up, and a fantastic drive through the field from the back in the sprint race was ended by a braking error from Zaugg, which saw Glock punted off the road. There was more strife in Hungary, where again Glock looked far and away the quickest man on the circuit in the sprint race, but a wheel-gun error at his mandatory
pit stop sent him tumbling down the order, and he ended up spinning still further back, probably in sheer frustration.

Turkey brought a sprint race win, but it really should have brought a feature race win too. Again, Glock found himself a victim of a bad call during a safety car period, and was left with the difficult task of building up such a lead that he could afford a tyre stop and still retain his position. In the circumstances, his fourth place was a very remarkable achievement indeed.

There's one area, though, where this kind of misfortune counts for little, and that's reputation. People know that Glock is quick. Sebastien Bourdais reckoned that, had he stayed in Champ Car (where he made Rocketsports look like far more of a serious operation than in fact it was), Glock might have been the one man who could have posed a serious threat to him. He's bagged a BMW test drive, and Toyota are rumoured to be giving serious consideration giving the young German Ralf Schumacher's race seat next year. Di Grassi, on the other hand, shows no sign of progressing beyond GP2, even if he does luck into the title.

END NOTE: Something that's always bothered me about Blogger is the difficulty of producing a complete post index. I've decided to bite the bullet and create my own list here. All the previous Motorsports Ramblings articles in date order.

GP2 2007: Back down to earth?

If F3000 never had much success when it came to discovering new talent (just 2 F3000 champions ever went on to win Grands Prix), the early signs are that GP2 may be doing rather better. In the first two years, we've had Nico Rosberg, Heikki Kovalainen and Lewis Hamilton make the jump to F1 with serious teams, and Nelson Piquet Jr is waiting in the wings at Renault.

The question is whether the category can keep up this remarkable run of form as it goes into its third year, the last with the current car, at Bahrain in just over a week's time. Picking out favourites for the title seems a little more difficult than in the first two years. Last year, there were several established front-runners going into their second full season in the category and, in Lewis Hamilton, a standout F3 champion who looked like he might prove a match for any of them. This year, its hard to pick out anyone so obviously promising from among the sophomore drivers (the entry list, by the way is here). Reigning champions ART have two second year drivers, in Michael Ammermueller and Lucas Di Grassi. Both looked competent enough in their first year, given that Di Grassi was not with one of the more highly rated teams and Ammermueller had come straight up from Formula Renault, but neither man has so far done anythint to suggest that they are in the same class as Hamilton or Rosberg.

Luca Filippi, the former Euro F3000 champion is also back for a second year, but while team boss Dave Sears reckons he's quick, and he's topped the timesheets in testing on occasion, he didn't really do anything to suggest he was really from the top drawer last year. Andreas Zuber is back for another season but he is yet another driver who was neither fish nor fowl last year - winning a race on one occasion, but frequently looking utterly anonymous next to team mate Gianmaria Bruni at Trident. The same can be said of series returnee and former Spanish F3 champion Borja Garcia and of the rest Nicolas Lapierre has already failed to grasp too many opportunities and neither Javier Villa nor Jason Tahinci are likely to bother the top half of the grid.

What, then, of the newcomers? British F3 champion Mike Conway and fellow front runner Bruno Senna are both making the step up this season. Conway, in particular, has impressed me in the past when he used to race in Formula Renault, but I can't help but think that neither appeared to be in the same class as 2005 champion Alvaro Parente. What the Portuguese driver would give for a recognisable surname eh? Talking of recognisable surnames, Kazuki Nakajima, son of Satoru, the man who partnered Bruno's late uncle at Lotus some 20 years ago, is among those graduating from the Euroseries this year. He's got a Williams test drive too, though one can't help but feel his Japanese nationality and Williams' Toyota engine deal must have played a part (ironic really, because 20 years back, Williams lost their Honda engine deal in part because of their refusal to employ his Dad). His fellow countryman Kohei Hirate is also making the step up, and is probably marginally the quicker of the two new Japanese drivers (his testing contract is with Toyota...) but one can't help thinking that he hung around for a long while in Euro F3000 without achieving much.

A couple of potentially very quick drivers are making the jump over from the Renault World Series. Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado may be best known for receiving a multi-race ban after running down a marshal at Monaco, but he is quite possibly a much better prospect than Ernesto Viso ever was. Former Spanish F3 champion Andy Soucek is also a driver very much worth watching. Either of these two, who have much greater experience of racing powerful single seaters than most of the debutants, might make a good each way bet for this year's title.

What is perhaps most striking though, is the list of drivers not in this year's championship. There's no place for Euroseries champion Paul Di Resta, nor for his close rival, teenage prodigy Sebastien Vettel. While, for Vettel, a World Series driver and a BMW testing contract doubtless softens that blow, one suspects that Di Resta's drive in a 2 year old Mercedes DTM car alongside fellow Scot, Susan Stoddart might justifiably leave him feeling a little hard done by.

Renault World Series champion Alx Danielsson was talked about as a candidate for the BCN drive, but that never materialised (the seat has now gone to Sino-Dutch driver Ho Pin Tung, who deserves his place more than many on the grid) and Alvaro Parene remains stuck in career limbo. British F3 championship runner-up Oliver Jarvis has had to go off and ply his trade in Japanese F3, and will have to console himself with the thought that this did Adrian Sutil no harm and Spanish F3 championship winner Ricardo Risatti is yet another driver who didn't get the second BCN drive.

The upshot is that the field of promising young talent is neither as promising nor as talented as it should be, or as it was in the first two years of the category. This might just open the door for one of three drivers I haven't mentioned yet to take the title.

Ex F1 drivers Antonio Pizzonia, Timo Glock and Giorgio Pantano have borken the mould by getting paid drives from teams with corporate sponsors who are keen to wrest the title away from ART. Some have suggested that it is unfair to allow ex-F1 drivers to compete against the up and coming drivers. Personally, I think this is nonsense. Ivan Capelli and Roberto Moreno both won the F3000 series with prior F1 experience, and their presence provides a very useful barometer of the overall talent level of the series. Suffice to say that if the young guns can't beat the likes of Pantano and Pizzonia, they probably don't deserve to be too far up the F1 team bosses' wish lists.

The contrasting motivations of the 3 ex F1 drivers are intriguing in themselves. Pantano has been around seemingly forever, and must surely be keen to win a title of some significance. For him, F1 can surely no longer be a realistic possibility - he was was mediocre in his single season with Jordan, and left that team under something of a cloud.

Pizzonia, by contrast, probably does still harbour F1 ambitions but he is very much in the last chance saloon in this regard. He showed pace on occasion both in his drive at Jaguar and in his one-off races with Williams, but he was far too inconsistent to merit a full time frontline drive. Only a serious show of dominance in GP2 is likely to revive interest among the F1 team bosses, but its just possible that he is capable of it.

Timo Glock, by contrast, is still very much a young hopeful. He showed a fair amount of promise in his one-off drives at Jordan despite being seriously inexperienced at the time, and was pretty quick in the unfancied Rocketsports Champ Car in 2005. Most importantly, though, he was capable of giving the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Nelson Piquet Jr a fright in the ISport GP2 car last year, and he remains with Paul Jackson's team for his second full season of GP2. At the risk of looking very foolish at season's end, he's my tip to become the third GP2 champion. Its just a shame he's not up against the sort of opposition he should be.

GP2 in review - Hamilton at a canter......

If nobody quite knew what to expect in the first season of GP2 last year, then this time our hopes were high. Close fought racing between almost F1-quick single seaters with no electronic trickery or driving aids and most of the best aspiring young would-be F1 drivers at the wheel. With slick tyres this year, they edged still closer to the back of the F1 grid in performance terms - on occasion they might have been in a position to give at least the earliest version of the Aguri F1 car a fright in lap speed terms. In other words - more often than not the most interesting part of the Grand Prix weekend. I think its fair to say that GP2 entirely lived up to these elevated expectations this year.

At the start of the year, I predicted that the title battle would be fought between between Premat, Lapierre, Carroll and Piquet. Which shows how much I know. In my defence, I can only point out that, of the newcomers, I did single out Glock and Hamilton as the series debutants most likely to upset the applecart. Certainly I didn't expect Hamilton to take the championship by the kind of margin that he eventually did.

If the championsip battle was not as close fought as that between Kovalainen and Rosberg last year, the same could not be said of the individual races, some of which were very hotly contested indeed. The battle between Jose Maria Lopez and Timo Glock in the sprint race at Hockenheim stands out in particular, while the last lap of the feature race at Barcelona, where ART team mates Premat and Hamilton fought it out was a graphic illustration of how close it sometimes got.

In all there were 9 different winners in the 22 races this year. For sure, the feature/sprint race split, with the latter being run with semi-reversed grids, probably inflated this number a little (neither Andreas Zuber nor Michael Ammermuller ever really looked like winning a feature race) but there were still 6 different winners in the 11 feature races - not a bad total when compared with F1, or especially with this year's world rally championship.

With 5 wins, three of them in feature races, and a further 9 podium finishes, Hamilton was clearly the dominant force this year, and the way he dominated his second-year team mate, Alexandre Premat (who, after all, was not really any slower than Nico Rosberg last year, merely a little less consistent) indicates that he is something really rather special indeed. Whether or not he gets the Mclaren seat alongside Alonso next year, it seems pretty clear that this is a young man who is going places.

To my mind, the numbers are about right in placing Nelson Angelo Piquet best of the rest. Like his father, he seemed happiest when out in front, and never really seemed to have the same racer's instinct as Hamilton. Neither was he as consistently quick, but on the other hand, it was hard to evaluate the competitiveness of his team (Xandi Negrao never really figured in the other Piquet Sports car) and he perhaps didn't have as good a car as ART were able to provide Hamilton with. He also showed impressive speed in the wet at Hungary, winning both races, and wet weather speed is always a sign that there is something special about a driver. He deserves his Renault testing role, now that Heikki Kovalainen has been promoted to the race team for 2007. Whether he has the mental toughness and racer's instinct to be a really first rate F1 driver, on the other hand, remains to be seen.

There remains the tantalising thought that had Giorgio Pantano done all the races, or had Timo Glock started the season with ISport, rather than with BCN, with whom he never really seemed to gel, one of these two ex-Jordan F1 drivers might have given Piquet and Hamilton a serious run for their money. The numbers suggest they probably would not quite have been able to, but Glock, in particular, looked more than a match for anyone in the second half of the season. Certainly it is a mystery why he was quite so slow in the BCN Competition car, and does beg questions about the degree to which team, rather than driver ability, plays a part in a series where the cars are supposed to be identical.

Equally intriguing were the sheer number of occasional one-off outstanding performances that were witnessed over the course of the year. Franck Perera, for instance, might not generally have made much of an impression, scoring just 8 points all season - but he got all 8 of those at Monaco, where he started and finished 2nd, behind Hamilton. There was another front row start for him at the Nurburgring - just enough perhaps, to suggest that the Toyota junior driver might make rather more of an impression if he gets another run next year - but still very much against the run of form. On other occasions, Hiroki Yoshimoto, Tristan Gommendy, Adrian Valles and DPR boys Olivier Pla and Clivio Piccione all showed flashes of real front running pace (Gommendy's front row start at Valencia, Valles' podium at the same, Yoshimoto's performances at Imola and the Nurburgring and the DPR drivers' performance at Monaco. None though, were able to threaten the front runners on anything like a regular basis - though whether this boiled down to inexperience, the limitations of their team, or their own foibles as drivers was very hard to tell. Yoshimoto, though, does look a rather more sensible bet for a Super Aguri drive than either Yamamoto or Ide did.

There were a few notable disappointments this year as well. Arden failed to recapture the form that took them to so many F3000 titles, and perhaps have lost the momentum they had before team owner Christian Horner took up Dietrich Mateschitz's offer to run Red Bull Racing. Of course, it might be the fault of the drivers. I, for one, expected Nicolas Lapierre and fellow Frenchman Alexandre Premat to figure a little more strongly after their dominant winter double act over in A1GP, but Premat was rarely close to his team mate Hamilton, while Lapierre came no closer to actually winning a race than he did last year. He was at least a little closer to the front than he had been last year, though an injury at Monaco put paid to any kind of a serious challenge.

Another man to struggle despite high pre-season hopes was Racing Engineering No1 driver Adam Carroll. In race trim he was as aggressive as ever, but he was often off the pace in qualifying, seemed to be harder on his tyres than just about anyone else in the field (for which he often paid a heavy price in the longer feature races) and, in the first part of the season at least, simply made too many mistakes. Whether the problem lay with Carroll, or Racing Engineering (whose other driver, Jose Villa looked utterly lost after being talked about as the 'new Fernando Alonso' in F3 the year before) was hard to tell. Perhaps it was a combination of the two - Carroll has always struck me as being a 'seat of the pants' kind of racer, and he might have suffered for not having an experienced team mate to help get car set up pointing in the right direction. Champ Cars seems the obvious place for him, if you as me.

Of the rest, Ferdinando Monfardini occasionally impressed, Lucas DiGrassi had a reasonable mid-season run, Felix Porteiro looked like a driver who might shine given a little more experience, and that was about it. Jason Tahinci, Fairuz Fauzy, Sergio Hernandez and Vitaly Petrov, in particular, seemed to represent a waste of a good cockpit.

So, not a bad sophomore year, all in all - the series did a pretty good job of establishing itself as not only the most important European single seater championship outside F1, but as being at least as competitive and suffused with talent as the IRL and Champ Car series. With the big names once again moving on to bigger and supposedly better things, lets hope that 2007 proves as exciting.