Received Wisdom

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.

Brawn Spring a Surprise

The grid that confronted us in Melbourne wasn't quite the surprise that the qualifying order for the opening race of the 1990 season in Phoenix had been. Nothing quite so downright bizarre as an Osella in the top 10, or Andrea De Cesaris' Dallara ahead of Senna's Mclaren, both Ferraris and both Williams.

Still, a month ago, you'd have got very long odds on the remnants of the old Honda team locking out the front row. In fact, many, myself included, were far from convinced that the team would even be on the grid, and the bookies were offering 100/1 on Jenson Button winning the opening race.

The odds didn't really shorten much when it emerged that Nick Fry and Ross Brawn had brokered a deal to put the stillborn Honda on the grid as a Brawn, with Mercedes supplying the engines. A car with next to no testing, hastily adapted to take a different engine from the one it was designed for, built by the guys responsible for the awful RA107 and RA108? It sounded like it would be making up the numbers and no more.

The picture began to change when the new car started topping the times in winter testing, but still there was a nagging doubt - Was the pace real or were the team running the car underweight to set headline grabbing times in the hope of attracting sponsors? As time went on, the doubters began to change their minds - Alonso talked of the Brawns being the favourites for victory, and ahead of last weekend, the bookies had had a radical change of heart and installed Button as favourite to win.

Qualifying in Melbourne gave us a definitive answer. Sebastien Vettel, in third, was six tenths away from Jenson Button's pole time, despite being fueled lighter. The Brawn appears to have at least half a second on its rivals at the moment, at least around Albert Park. On race day, they brought the cars home one-two, so completing the most remarkable turnaround I can remember seeing in the sport. The word miracle seems inappropriate - there are no miracles in the real world and Brawn's success was down to a lot of hard work from some very clever people in difficult circumstances. Still, it makes for quite a story.

I do wonder, though, whether their very success might make life more difficult for them later on. The sport's financial structure and deal-making remains as opaque as ever, but it appears that Brawn are on the grid only thanks to the FIA, FOM and FOTA having all put aside any differences to make sure that they got there. The FIA agreed to waive the $30m bond required of new teams, FOTA and FOM are thought to have agreed to treat Brawn as being entitled to Honda's share of the prize money and Mclaren waived their right to veto a supply of Mercedes engine for the Brackley team.

They might have been happy to do this when it was assumed that they were ensuring the survival of a team that would struggle at the back of the grid, not giving a helping hand to a team that had stolen a march on all of them in terms of understanding the new regulations and built a car which, at least for now, seems to have every bit as great an advantage over its rivals as Ferrari's F2004 did. And of course, after Robert Kubica and Sebastien Vettel did for each other's weekends and Jarno Trulli picked up a 25 second penalty for passing under the safety car, it was only the two Brawn cars that stood between Lewis Hamilton and a shock victory from the back of the grid! I do wonder, too, how Brawn's success is going down at Mercedes. Sure, the Brawns have the German car-maker's engines in the back, but you'd have to be a fan to know it - there's no Mercedes logos on the cars, and the casual viewer might have had no idea that their engines were actually in the back of all of the podium-finishers' cars.

Can Brawn get by without moral support from FOTA and Mclaren? Perhaps, after all, the deals are done now, but there is still the problem of money. The team are getting by for now with a dowry from Honda, but the Japanese car giant's support was almost certainly a one-time payment, and running a racing team is an expensive business. The more so if the team want to match the likes of Ferrari and Mclaren in the race to develop their 2009 car. The victory in Australia will be bittersweet for the 250-odd employees at Brackley who look set to lose their jobs. Can the team shed a third of its workforce without adversely affecting their performance? Only time will tell.

Fundamentally, the problem the team face is that in these straitened economic times, it may be hard to attract significant backers even to a team which is out in front and winning races. Maybe I'm being cynical, but I can't help but wonder whether Richard Branson didn't pull of a tremendous publicity coup for his Virgin brand without actually signing any cheques last weekend. Certainly if a major deal had been signed, it was a little odd that the team were sporting only a few small Virgin decals as they set about dominating the weekend's sports pages.

Perhaps the team's best hope is that, if the new, supposedly cheaper F1 is more than a mere mirage, the idea of picking up a well-run team with a car might just appeal to one of the car manufacturers not currently involved in the sport. One of the Korean car makers might be tempted by the opportunity to raise their profile worldwide, and perhaps Volkswagen-Audi Group might finally tire of toying around with diesel sportscars and join the party. They'd have a lot of work to do - Mercedes is unlikely to provide engines to them - but on the other hand, Cosworth have a pretty effective 2.4l V8 sitting around gathering dust, that they could probably be persuaded to sell for the right money.

The trouble is, for all that it might make a lot of sense, especially compared with the way some car-makers have gone motor-racing, it still looks unlikely given that the motor industry has been amongst the hardest hit by the current global recession. Discretionary spend, of any kind, is unlikely to be on the agenda when the fundamental problem facing car makers is the disappearance of the market for their primary product. Maybe, after all, Brawn's best bet is to "do a Williams" and try to run the team according to the conventional business model of selling sponsorship as was once the way almost all F1 teams operated, before the appearance of the car giants, billionaire soft drinks magnates and India's richest businessman changed the rules of the game.

I'd like to believe that if the results come, then one way or another, the team will survive. If a team can win races but still not raise the money needed to survive then something really is wrong with the sport. Can they go on winning races? If you believe what some are saying, much will depend on the outcome of the appeal against the Brawn's diffuser which Renault's Pat Symonds reckons is worth half a second a lap. For all that I'm sure they'll want to win their case on 14 April, it might not be the end of the world if they do lose the appeal though. For one thing, even if it is worth half a second a lap, the scale of the Brawn's advantage at Melbourne suggests they will still be amongst the front-runners. Secondly, I'm not entirely convinced by Symonds' claim anyway. Brawn's closest challenges last weekend were not the other members of the so called 'diffuser gang', Toyota and Williams (though both teams ran well) but the more conventional Red Bull and BMW.

No, I reckon what might swing it one way or the other for Brawn is the question of whether KERS will turn out to be an expensive dead end, or whether once teams have gotten to grips with it, it will turn out to be every bit as essential for anyone running at the front as semi-automatic gearboxes, active suspension or traction control was when first perfected. So far, the evidence is mixed. Only one team ran their cars in both KERS and non-KERS spec, and it was Kubica's KERS-free BMW which went quicker. But on the other hand, Kubica was quicker than Heidfeld last year too. In fact, the two men giving Button pause for thought last weekend were running cars with no KERS and conventional diffusers. It was noticeable though that those drivers running KERS, and in particular Lewis Hamilton, appeared to have an easier time overtaking people than the rest of the field around Albert Park, and Ferrari might have been up there too had they not dropped the ball in terms of strategy and then encountered reliability woes.

If KERS turns out to offer no advantages, at least when configured to the current rules, then I wouldn't be surprised if Brawn are able to remain among the front-runners all year. If, on the other hand, it turns out to offer a significant advantage, the team are likely to be in trouble. For reasons best known to themselves, Honda didn't leave their KERS system with the team when they pulled out of the sport and Ross Brawn say they are very unlikely to run the system in the car this year.

Ross Brawn has already achieved something any life-long racing afficionado would surely dream of - scoring a one-two in his first race as a team owner with a car bearing his own name. Whether his team can mount a tilt for the world title, and whether they can ensure their long-term survival remains to be seen, but the fact they've got this far surely augurs well.

A Step Into The Unknown - F1 2009 Preview

Anyone's game?

In the more than 20 years I've been following Formula 1, I honestly can't remember there being so much uncertainty as to who would be at the front going into the first race of the season. For the last couple of years, it has been pretty clear from Winter testing that the battle at the sharp end would be fought out between Ferrari and Mclaren, and so it proved to be. This year, though, there is no such certainty.

Through the Winter,, Ferrari, Toyota, Williams, Red Bull, BMW, the new Brawn GP team, Renault, and even, right at the last gasp at Jerez last week, the seemingly troubled Mclaren, have shown flashes of real pace. The trouble is, it's hard to read too much in testing times. Without knowing who has been running what fuel loads, who have been concentrating on simply getting miles on the new car, and which teams, if any, have been running low-fuel qualifying-simulation 'glory runs' in order to attract headlines and sponsors, it is hard to know what the times tell us.

A real upset?

Perhaps the biggest question left unanswered by the winter tests has been just how real the apparently scintillating pace of the new Brawn-Mercedes is. If the stopwatch is to be believed, then they've got a car which is kind to its tyres, and about half a second quicker than anyone else round Jerez and Barcelona. But are they running underweight to attract backers? Ross Brawn says they're not, and to be sure, it doesn't seem the sort of thing that an old hand like Brawn would be doing, but, of course, if they were running light, there would be little sense in admitting as much. And if the car isn't underweight, is it legal. Red Bull have already indicated their intention to protest the team's diffuser and if as Helmut Marko claims, it is really worth half a second a lap, Brawn's chances this year are going to hinge on the outcome of that appeal.

But assuming, for a moment, that Brawn really are the team to beat going into 2009, the battle between Rubens Barrichello and Jenson Button could be rather intriguing. Barrichello had six years in a Ferrari, so it can hardly be said he's never been given a chance in a title-winning car. However, throughout that time, he had Michael Schumacher as a team mate, and, leaving aside the fact that Schumacher was probably the single most consummate driver of the last 20 years, it's not clear whether Barrichello was often even allowed to race him. So in a sense, this might be his first real run at the F1 title, in his 17th season in the sport.

When he was first paired up with Jenson Button in 2006, it was the younger Button who had the edge and won Honda's only Grand Prix win (in that incarnation, the previous works Honda team, too, also scored a single GP win with John Surtees back in 1967) but last year, it was Barrichello who, in what we had assumed to be the autumn of his career, generally had the edge in the awful RA108. Truth be told, that's of a piece with Button's career as a whole. Given a good car, he's tended to be quick, but in a bad one, like the 2001 Benetton or last year's Honda, and he tends to lose interest.

If the Brawn really is as quick as it looks, then, aside from being a final ironic coda to the disaster that was Honda's return to F1 as a factory team, the battle between two men who, just a couple of months back looked to be out of work, and who must surely have thought their time at the top of F1 was over could be hard fought indeed.

Massa vs. Raikkonen - the Rematch

It is usually fairly safe to assume that Ferrari will be somewhere towards the front of the pack. Neither the loss of Rory Byrne, Jean Todt and Ross Brawn nor the departure of Schumacher appears to have affected that. The winter testing times have been promising too, and it is probably a fair assumption that they will be somewhere near the front this weekend. What will be interesting to see is whether Felipe Massa will be able to retain the upper hand over his better paid team mate into 2009. He certainly had the edge for much of last year, but then Raikkonen was clearly never entirely at home with the understeery 2008 Ferrari. The reckoning is that the 2009 slick tyres will leave the cars more prone to oversteer, with the rear tyres wearing faster than the fronts, and that could give Kimi the upper hand. The only remaining question is that of whether his motivation is quite what it once was, with a world title in the bag and untold millions in the bank. All said, for all that this year looks very open, I think over the season as a whole, with Mclaren seemingly in trouble, Ferrari stand a good chance of seeing off the pretenders to their crown. Which of their drivers will have the edge, though, is another question entirely.

All according to plan at BMW?

Mario Thiessen, BMW’s master planner, had always pencilled in 2009 as the year that the team formerly known Sauber would make a serious bid for the world title. There were moments last year when it seemed they might hit their target a year early, but Kubica’s brief period at the top of the driver’s table notwithstanding, the team abandoned development of the 2008 machine to concentrate on this year’s car. Will that pay off? It’s too early to tell. On the plus side, they are reputed to be further ahead in the development of KERS than any other team, and have had their 2009 car up and running very early on.

On the other hand, though, the car hasn’t stood out in testing – it’s been decently quick, but not on the same pace as the Ferrari. And if they’re going to lodge a title bid, it’s surely going to have to be with Kubica, which might pose a problem on two fronts. Firstly, as one of the sport’s tallest and heaviest drivers, he’ll be more heavily penalised by the extra weight of KERS than most. Secondly, his lacklustre 2007 season was put down in part to a car too oversteery for his liking – and, of course, received wisdom is that the 2009 cars will tend to oversteer. In spite of all this, I still see Kubica as a dark horse for the world title, especially if the other front-runners run into reliability troubles.

The car in front…at last?

Toyota have spent a lot of time and money in F1 since the turn of the decade without achieving much in the way of anything. There are signs that this might be about to change this year. The team appear cautiously confident that the TF109 will be right at the front, and Timo Glock hinted in a recent interview that he thought victory in Melbourne not beyond the bounds of possibility. The team will have benefited more than most from the ‘reset’ provided by the rules changes, and despite budget cuts, they still have more resources than more or less anyone else on the grid.

After an uncertain start, Timo Glock has matured quickly into a very solid F1 performer – about the only team mate Jarno Trulli has ever had who has troubled him as a qualifier on occasion. Trulli, meanwhile, remains the master of the single quick lap. If the latest rules don’t make overtaking easier than it has been in recent years, then given a half-way quick Toyota, that might be enough to secure Trulli Toyota’s first win.

The Renault-powered quartet

None of this year’s F1 cars would win beauty contests, but nothing else is quite so downright ugly as the stubby-nosed Renault R29. Early pace in testing suggested the car might be as bad as it looked, too. Since then, though, Flavio’s team appear to have sorted out the car’s rumoured lack of downforce and Fernando Alonso has been sounding a lot more positive with regards his chances than he did at the same time last year. Certainly if the Renault is anywhere approaching competitive, Alonso can be relied upon to get the most out of it. His troubled year at Mclaren notwithstanding, anyone who can win two races with last year’s R28 can be relied upon to get the job done.

Nelson Piquet Jr’s retention I can only guess is down to the team not being confident that Di Grassi or Grosjean were likely to be any better. There was little indication in 2008 that he will follow in his father’s footsteps though unlike Hamilton, he is at least unlikely to unsettle team mate Alonso to the detriment of the team as a whole.

Renault will also benefit from having been allowed to update their engine to achieve parity with the other engine-makers after they took the engine-freeze regulations a little more literally than anyone else last year. It’s reckoned that alone might give them another couple of tenths of a second, and that will be good news not only for Renault, but for the Renault-powered Red Bulls.

If the Renault is the ugliest car on the grid, then a strong case can be made for the Adrian Newey-designed Red Bull RB5 being the prettiest. After flying in the hands of Sebastian Vettel soon after being unveiled at Jerez, they haven’t really stood out since but all the same, surely it’s time for Adrian Newey to build another world-beater. Perhaps they’re just taking a little longer than others to get on top of their car. However fast the Red Bull does or doesn’t turn out to be, though, the battle between team mates Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel is going to be one to watch. Neither man can afford to be outpaced by the other. Both are clearly quick, but questions remain as to whether either is absolutely first-rate. Webber, the 21^st Century Chris Amon, lost much of the winter to a broken leg picked up in a cycling accident – not what he needs as he faces the sternest challenge of his career. On the other hand, Vettel wouldn’t be the first highly rated youngster to come off second best to the Aussie. Ask Pizzonia. Or Wilson, Or even perhaps Rosberg. As I say, one to watch…

Woking in trouble?

It doesn’t matter how much money you have, or how long your pedigree, building a racing car is a tricky business, and the scope to get it horribly wrong is considerable. Early indications are that the 2009 Mclaren is simply not working as it should – that it has fundamental aerodynamic flaws. With the in-season testing ban, it’s going to be very difficult for the team to make up for lost time and ground, though if anyone has the resources to do it, it is Mclaren.

That said, those 1.17 laps at Jerez right at the end of winter testing – are they a sign that the team have got their problems licked? Or just a glory run on a day when the circuit was particularly quick?

If the car is as bad as it seems it might be, it will be an interesting test of Lewis Hamilton’s character. There’s no doubt that the young Briton is outstanding in a good car, but in his whole career, he’s never really experienced the dispiriting feeling of being in an uncompetitive car. If he rises to the occasion, and transcends the limitations of his equipment, as say, Schumacher did at Ferrari in 1996, his reputation will be well and truly sealed. If his head goes down, and he allows himself to be outpaced by Kovalainen, or if he begins to take his frustrations out on the team, his reputation might be destroyed as quickly as it was made.

The pressure is on for his team mate, Kovalainen too. Last year, he seemed to be within reach of Hamilton over a single lap, but could not stay with him over a race distance and Mclaren’s failure to capture the constructor’s title from Ferrari could be said to be down in part to their number 2 driver’s lack of race pace. If he’s to remain with Mclaren, or another front running team beyond the end of the season, he’s going to have to be a lot closer to Hamilton than he was in 2008. That said, he does have more experience with bad cars. Perhaps his troubled debut year with the difficult Renault R27 might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

More of the same for Frank’s boys?

Williams seem to go well every winter, and every season since they fell away from the leading teams around 2004, they have suggested that this time it will be different, and the team will be back at the front. It never seems to work out that way. Recent Williams have tended to be quick out of the box, and with their good mechanical grip, they usually run well on the streets of Melbourne, but the team have been behind the curve when it comes to aerodynamic efficiency, and it’s not clear whether the rules changes will help. The testing times have been encouraging, but then they always are. The team abandoned development of the 2008 car early to concentrate on the 2009 machine, but that would be more likely to pay dividends if it weren’t for the fact that Mclaren and Ferrari aside, pretty much everyone else did the same thing.

On the driver front, it’s crunch time for Nico Rosberg. After a promising couple of years in 2006 and 2007, he struggled to rise above the limitations of his car last year, and with the emergence of Kubica, Hamilton and Vettel, no longer looks like he’s necessarily one of the stars of the future. Kazuki Nakajima acquitted himself well last year, but unless he ups his game this season, he’ll only be in the sport as long as engine-suppliers Toyota think its worth paying to have him drum up interest in the sport in Japan.

Supporting cast

Toro Rosso are unlikely to match the highs of last season, which saw them beating parent-team Red Bull and winning their first race. Whatever happens this year is likely to be something of a come-down. Which is a shame, because there is real potential here. They will still be running a Ferrari-engined Red Bull, which with Giorgio Ascanelli heading up the engineering side, should provide the team’s latest pair of Sebastiens with the means to embarrass the front-runners on occasion. Bourdais has been retained for another year, which was probably the right decision. Armchair enthusiasts might have been keen to see the return of Takuma Sato, but in all honesty, the Japanese driver has had more than his fair share of chances in the sport already, and failed to make the most of them.

The choice of Sebastien Buemi to partner Bourdais seems rather odd, and the only way it makes sense is that he was the only driver on the Red Bull junior ladder with the experience needed to make the switch to F1. He was unexceptional in his time in GP2, and if he doesn’t deliver quickly, the likes of Brandon Hartley and Jaime Alguesuari will be knocking at the door. That said, if he excels in F1, he wouldn’t be the first driver to prove quicker in F1 than in his junior career.

It’s hard to believe that a Mercedes powered Force India is going to be any quicker than a Ferrari powered one, really. Team owner Vijay Mallya has been making optimistic noises which leave me wondering whether he really understands the sport and the sheer scale of the task facing the former Jordan outfit. Giancarlo Fisichella and Adrian Sutil are back for another year. Both are competent enough, but I must confess to feeling a little disappointed that the team aren’t bringing on another promising youngster. Sutil no longer entirely convinces me – a driver who’s really going places shouldn’t struggle to beat Fisichella, and it would have been interesting to see what Grosjean or Di Resta could have done in the car. Expect them to bring up the rear again.

So who’s going to win it?

Pretty much the whole thrust of this piece has been to admit that for once, I really don’t have a clue (not that I’ve got a brilliant track record of picking driver’s champions anyway). At the risk of putting a curse on the Maranello team my hunch is that Ferrari will have the edge over the season as a whole. Brawn might appear to be the quickest of the bunch right now, but there have to be question marks both over the legality of the car, and over whether they have the money to fund the kind of development needed to keep them at the front over the whole season. Toyota have looked promising, but even if the Toyota can match the Ferrari on pace, are Trulli and Glock really able to take the fight to Raikkonen and Massa? Kubica, Alonso and Hamilton all certainly can, but with the possible exception of Kubica, I’m not convinced that any of those three will have the car they need to make a bid for the title. So, forced to choose, I’d tip Ferrari, and forced to pick one of Massa and Raikkonen, I’d back Raikkonen to secure a second driver’s crown. But I can rarely remember feeling less sure….

Known Unknowns

That was a breath of fresh air, wasn't it? Whether it was the sight of Fernando Alonso ragging his ill-handling Renault in hot pursuit of Sebastien Bourdais in the closing laps, the rear end hanging out over the kerbs, or Heikki Kovalainen's inspired move on Alonso into turn 13, two laps from the finish, this felt like a race.

Sometimes you can end up feeling jaded, and wonder if the magic has gone. After too many line-astern processions last year, and talk of Ferrari domination this year, I was not as keyed up about the new F1 season as I have been in the past. Hell, I didn't even stay up to watch the race live (though in my defence, I'd just come in from best-man duties at a friend's wedding at 2am, and collapsed straight into bed). What I saw in Melbourne this weekend helped to reawaken my interest, though.

I'm not talking about the accidents. Jonathan Meades may once have opined that the unspoken appeal of all motorsport was gratification of the appetite for crashes, but it ain't so. Rather, what gripped me was that this was a race which was hard fought all the way down the field. Maybe not at the front, but elsewhere down the order, the Ferraris of Massa and Raikkonen had to force their way up through the pack - though both made themselves look rather foolish in the process. Fernando Alonso showed why, whatever you may think of his behaviour last year, he is still a very formidable force, throwing the Renault around like a man born to it. In keeping a double world champion behind him in the closing stages, Sebastien Bourdais demonstrated that, while he may lack the outright pace of young team mate Sebastien Vettel, he's picked up considerable racecraft in his time in Champ Car. So Lewis Hamilton ran away with it serenely at the front? Well, we'll see if he can do it again in Malaysia. I wouldn't put too much money on it.

What the weekend didn't do, however, is answer the many questions all race fans have been asking over the winter. Let's start with the big one. Is Mclaren going to be a match for Ferrari?
It's hard to know, as Ferrari and their drivers made such a dog's breakfast of the Melbourne weekend. First there was Raikkonen's fuel pressure problem in qualifying, which relegated him to 15th on the grid. Then Massa became the first victim of the traction control ban, losing the back end of his Ferrari at the first corner on the opening lap and falling behind even Raikkonen.
Raikkonen made steady progress up the field, only to throw it away by going off at turn 3 not once but twice. And to cap it all, both Ferraris went out with engine failure. Mclaren must feel their chances of stealing back the constructors championship are off to a good start. So we're left with two contradictory fragments. On the one hand, Raikkonen's mid-race pace, and the way he was all over the back of Kovalainen, suggests that had he qualified at the front, he might have disappeared off into the distance. On the other hand, Massa, in the other Ferrari, qualified behind both Mclarens and a BMW. A sign that the new F2008 isn't the car to beat after all? Or that the Brazilian is lost without traction control?

Talking of traction control, is the standard ECU and the loss of traction control and intelligent 'engine braking' going to make a difference to the racing? The initial evidence appears to be positive - there were more mistakes from drivers, and the cars appeared to visibly slide around rather more than they did last year. Appearances may be deceptive, however. Cars may have lacked grip more because of an unusually 'green' track than because of fundamental changes to the cars' electronics. And the driver errors might have had more to do with the intense heat in Melbourne over the weekend and a degree of race-rustiness from the winter break than anything else. The jury, I think, is still out.

If the loss of driver aids appeared to make some guys look rather foolish, then few looked more out of their depth than Nelson Piquet Junior. Is this a sign that the scion of the Piquet family has just been found out - that he isn't really up to F1 standards? Well maybe. But maybe not. He did, of course, qualify only 21st, but even Fernando Alonso could not get the difficult Renault any higher than 13th on the grid. Piquet had the lion's share of the team's problems in practice and got little running in on a track he had never been to before. And let's not forget that Piquet is a man who gave Lewis Hamilton a run for his money in GP2 a couple of years back - which you can't imagine Ricardo Rosset or Gaston Mazzacane having been able to do. It's early days. That said, few really great drivers look so hopelessly out of their depth on their debut...

There's a couple of other newcomers, or near-newcomers over whom question marks still hang. Sebastien Vettel looked mighty in second qualifying, but that was about the last we saw of him. His Toro Rosso never took to the track in Q3, and then he was eliminated on the opening lap in the race. Testing has tended to suggest that he has the measure of the Red Bulls, but then testing tended to suggest that BMW were in trouble. Vettel's pace rather put Sebastien Bourdais in the shade. A shame for the 4 times Champ Car champion who has waited so long for his F1 chance - who looks like he might just have been paired up with the next big thing. Thing is, though, that Bourdais is convinced that he could have been through into Q2 had he not been caught out by the yellow flags during his qualifying run. An excuse, or an explanation? Time will tell, though if Bourdais doesn't want to be written off as a nearly-man, he will have to make an impression quickly.

Where do Williams stand in the scheme of things? Pre-season, the talk had been that they would be leading the chasing pack behind Mclaren and Ferrari, but in Melbourne Rosberg found himself outqualified by both Sauber BMWs and a Toyota. He dealt with the Toyota easily enough in the race, but never quite looked the equal of the BMWs on pace. Was this the result of a Friday practice session lost to car problems, or a sign that the Williams just isn't quite on the pace of the BMWs? Maybe Malaysia will give us a clearer idea.

Then, perhaps most intriguing of all, there's the question of quite where BMW stand in the pecking order. Robert Kubica surprised us all by grabbing a front row slot at Albert Park. It probably would have been pole had he not gone off onto the grass at turn 12 on his fast lap, too. Ah, we nodded sagely...the effect of a light fuel load. Well, sort of. But not that light. Kubica came in for fuel a few laps before pole-man Hamilton did, but then but for his error, he would have been a couple of tenths quicker than him in qualifying too. It does rather point to the possibility that, over a single lap if not over a race distance, the BMW might be right on the pace of Mclaren and Ferrari. Which will certainly make things interesting at some of the tracks where overtaking is more difficult.

I'm left with the impression that Melbourne gave us pointers. We learned what the questions are, but we have not found out what the answers will be. We are in the terrain of Donald Rumsfeld's known unknowns. A good thing we've only a week until Malaysia and a chance to find out more.

Stranger than fiction

It's got action, drama, suspense and danger. In other words, it's got everything that a Hollywood scriptwriter is dreaming of. So why have films about motor racing been so uniformly awful?

I remember seeing the trailer for the Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman NASCAR-fest, Days of Thunder as a 12 year old kid and thinking, even then, that it was all but guaranteed to be terrible. When I finally got round to watching it, years later, I must say that my suspicions proved to be on the money. Ridiculous, implausible 'racing action' melded together with an absurdly cliched love story so lacking in chemistry that it's frankly amazing that the lead actor and actress were actually married in real life. And that's leaving aside the question of how Kidman was supposed to be a 'top brain surgeon' at an age when most medical students would not yet be out of college.

OK, you might argue, Days of Thunder was a real rotten tomato of a film, but what about the others? The awful truth is, Days of Thunder is not even the worst example of the genre. More recently, we had the diabolical Driven. If 23 year old Nicole Kidman as a brain surgeon stretches credulity, a 55 year old Sylvester Stallone as a racing driver simply threw reality out of the window. The film was nominated for no less than 5 of Hollywood's ignominious Golden Raspberry awards (for worst screenplay, worst performance by a supporting actress, worst on-screen couple, worst picture and worst supporting actor - twice! in case you're wondering.) This after all, was meant to be the Grand Prix film that had Bernie Ecclestone's backing. Bernard, however, evidently knew enough about show business to spot a giant turkey when it came calling. and so the producers had to go running off to speak to the guys at Champ Car, who must have figured that any publicity is good publicity.

What of the rest? Talladega Nights, I am told, is a reasonably entertaining comedy if you like that sort of thing, but as someone with an abiding loathing of both Farrelly Brothers films and NASCAR, I've never actually seen it. Going back a few decades, John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix has achieved quite a reputation among motorsport fans of a certain age, though more for its innovative use of special effects than for the quality of the story or the acting. The film, which I have to admit I am not overly fond of, is a reasonable period piece, but as someone who grew up in the era of the onboard camera, the special effects have rather lost their sheen. That leaves a rather predictable plot, and one can't help noticing that at nearly 3 hours, this is a very long film, and it feels it.

To my mind, the best racing film ever made was Steve McQueen's vanity project, Le Mans. Unlike the movies mentioned above, it doesn't really even try to impose much of a plot on the event, and feels in places more like an art-house documentary about 70s sportscar racing than a Hollywood feature. The first half an hour or so features literally no dialogue. It was not especially successful at the box office. Steve McQueen may have been a major star, but the Le Mans 24 Hour race has never really meant all that much to the cinema-going public in the USA. The film is, by the way, quite possibly the origin of the famous quote "When you're racing, it's life. Anything that happens before or after...is just waiting" (it has been suggested that the line was stolen from something which Maurice Trintignant said). If you are at all interested in motor racing of the era. this is the one motorsports film I would recommend making time for.

So why don't they work? It's hard to say for sure, but I suspect that it is because they are essentially redundant. Name a really worthwhile sports movie? It's not easy. The problem is that there is very little that you can do in fiction that you can't do in real life. Why watch a film about Grand Prix racing when you can simply watch a Grand Prix? It is interesting that, just as there have been few successful films about motor racing - in fact, I'd say there has been precisely one - so there haven't really been many novels in which it features either. Years ago, as an impressionable 7 year old, I read Four Wheel Drift, a children's book set around Le Mans by Bruce Carter, but to be honest, I don't remember much about it. Some years later, I also read some of Bob Judd's F1 based novels, but found them far-fetched even in comparison to the kinds of thriller one typically finds at airports (Monza wasn't too bad, though).

As an aside, I'm currently participating in a rather hare-brained event by the name of National Novel Writing Month. Amongst other things, it's the reason this post is a day late. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. It will, of course, be of awful quality, but the point is to write something from beginning to end. I've attempted it twice before, but have never got beyond the half way stage. This year, I thought I would have a go at writing a "Dick Francis on wheels" to steal a line Murray Walker used to describe Bob Judd's books. Its early days yet, but I feel if there is one thing I'm learning, it's why successful authors don't generally write fiction about sport...

POST SCRIPT: Anyone see Nigel Roebuck's Top 10 drivers of 2007 in Autosport this week? I was amused to see that his list featured exactly the same drivers as mine, and in a somewhat similar order to boot! Do think he rather overestimated Kubica though...

The Curious Case of Felipe Massa

So did you stay awake through the Spanish Grand Prix? I did, but I must confess it was something of an effort. After the first lap, there was, by my counting, just one 'on track' pass through the whole race, when Jarno Trulli made a move on Adrian Sutil into turn one, early on. The Circuit di Catalunya has never been especially good for overtaking (memories of wheel to wheel battles in the early years of the circuit's existence notwithstanding, but both the 1991 and 1992 races were wet). The current F1 cars, with their combination of high downforce, aerodynamic instability and relatively low power, merely serve to emphasise the problem.

The Spanish Grand Prix was, thus, the dullest Grand Prix in some while. It was, though, a soporific race which provided a very interesting story. Namely, Felipe Massa is beginning to emerge as Ferrari's lead driver and, perhaps, the favourite for the World Championship. I think its safe to say that pretty well everyone assumed that Kimi Raikkonen would emerge as the de facto team leader at Ferrari. The team were, after all, paying him perhaps as much as six times what they pay Massa. The Finn had built up a reputation during his time at Mclaren for being the outright fastest driver in the world. It was simply assumed that Felipe Massa would pose no serious threat. Even when Massa went quicker in testing, many of us (certainly myself) thought that this was indicative only that Raikkonen was sand-bagging. At most, we thought, he was perhaps taking a little time to get used to the Ferrari and to the working methods of his new team.

And yet here we are, 4 races into the new season, and, except at Australia, where Massa was handicapped by a one-stop strategy and a pre-race engine change, he has looked the quicker of the two Ferrari drivers. Perhaps this is nothing more than an anomaly. Perhaps, come the season's end, we'll be musing about Kimi Raikkonen's strange, slow start at Ferrari. Maybe we'll even be wondering whether this was what let Alonso, or even Hamilton, through to the title. But perhaps not...

I was scouring through Felipe Massa's resume, trying to find any hints that he was a potential front runner in the way that Raikkonen is. Its far from obvious. When he came into Formula 1, in 2002, he was occasionally quick, but wild and erratic. He scored 4 points, which in a 2002 Sauber was a respectable enough haul for a newcomer, but he was outqualified 12-5 by team mate Heidfeld, and ended his season with a sadly characteristic error at the Degner Curves at Suzuka.

He spent a year testing with Ferrari, during which time it is claimed he matured considerably, but when he reappeared with Sauber in 2004, I well recall one Autosport journalist remarking along the lines that "He's so wild he looks like he's going to have an accident at every corner, but his car control is so incredible, he usually manages to keep it to one every race. Which is still not much use." In 2004, he was back at Sauber and paired with Giancarlo Fisichella. He had matured somewhat since his wild opening year but still, he was usually outpaced by the Italian and scored only half his number of points. If one was looking for a potential future world champion, then a man who, after a full season of F1, and another testing with Ferrari, was still being blown away by perpetual underachiever Giancarlo Fisichella surely wouldn't be the obvious bet.

The following season, his third and final at Sauber, saw him paired with a returning Jacques Villeneuve. It was here that perhaps, in retrospect, we began to see signs of what Massa might be capable of. Initially, he considerably outpaced his former world champion team mate, and as the season wore on, Villeneuve was eventually able to get on level terms with the Brazilian, but never really established superiority over him. Having said that, I've always thought Villeneuve one of the luckiest world champions there has ever been, and that by 2005, he was probably some way past his best. It must also be borne in mind that Nick Heidfeld, on balance, fared better against him the following year when they wered paired at BMW.

So, on balance, Massa's 3 year stint at Sauber did only enough to suggest that he was a decent racing driver - a good number 2 for a top team perhaps - and no more. When compared to what Alain Prost, Michael Schumacher or Ayrton Senna were able to do in second rate machinery in their first season, it can't be said that Massa stood out as the kind of driver who might frighten Raikkonen and emerge as a serious title contender.

What, then, of his time at Ferrari, alongside Michael Schumacher? On paper, the qualifying performances at least, seem to suggest that he was really rather close to the 7 time world champion - much more so than anyone might have expected. However, Mark Hughes, a man who frankly knows his stuff, is pretty sure that, when corrected for fuel load, Massa was on average 0.4s a lap slower than Schumacher. By contrast, the fuel-corrected gap between Alonso and Fisichella was just 0.2s My own analysis of fastest race laps last year suggest a similar margin of superiority was enjoyed by Schumacher on Sunday afternoons, too. Perhaps the one thing that can be said is that a more nuanced analysis of their relative performances shows Schumacher way out ahead in the early part of the season, but Massa much closer to him later on in the year. I have seen this put down to a change of race engineer - with Rob Smedley seemingly able to understand what Massa wanted from a car in a way that his previous engineer could not.

And if there is an explanation, perhaps this is it. Rightly or wrongly, Massa has never struck me as the most technical of drivers. I could be wide of the mark, but he doesn't strike me as someone who would simply know what he wanted from a car. Perhaps in Smedley he has finally found someone who has been able to work it out for him - or at least work with him much more effectively. The two wins towards the end of 2006 have convinced Massa that he is capable of winning Grands Prix, and that confidence, combined with a car and team with which he is familiar, has enabled him to really raise his game this year.

I was trying to think of a precedent for what has happened at Ferrari. For sure, illustrious drivers have been matched or even outpaced by newcomers before. One thinks, for instance of Nelson Piquet against reigning champion Niki Lauda at Brabham in 1978. Or, with neat symmetry, of Michael Schumacher against three time champion Nelson Piquet at Benetton some 14 years later. Perhaps by the end of the year, we might be adding the names of Hamilton and Alonso to that list. Its something which happens from time to time. It might happen still more often if inexperienced drivers more regularly walked straight into front running teams.

But an established star being outpaced by a well established number 2, a known quantity? That is actually rather rarer, by my reckoning. In fact, Massa's performances remind me of a very different personality with a very similar reputation some 20 years earlier.

By 1986, Nigel Mansell had been knocking around F1 for several years. There was no doubt that he could be fast on his day, but he didn't seem to be really quick. He was, for instance, generally outpaced by Elio De Angelis, a good rather than great driver, at Lotus in 1984. He also had a reputation for bottling it when the really big opportunities came - most notably at Monaco in 1984. Towards the end of 1985, in his first season at Williams, however, he began to show real signs of promise. First came a mightily assured second place in treacherous conditions at Spa. Then there was his first win, at Brands Hatch. Two weeks later, he repeated the trick at Kyalami.

For 1986, though, he was paired with Nelson Piquet, a double world champion who had made the Brabham team his own over the past seven years. It was simply assumed that he would put the upstart Mansell in his place. Piquet had acquired a reputation for being the fastest driver in the world at that point, after all. Yet, that wasn't the way it played out. In the first part of the season, Mansell was generally comfortably quicker. And in the second half, Piquet succeeded only in closing the gap - he never established superiority. The following year, the gap between the two seemed even greater, and it is only sheer blind luck which gave Nelson his third and final title that year.

It is hard to think of two more disparate people than the sunny Massa and the perpetually sullen, chippy Mansell, but their remarkable similarities in their early careers. Neither was an instantly fast and consistent, natural. Both struggled to shake off a reputation for being fallible under pressure. And now I wonder if the comparison might be an omen. Because, of course, in 1986, Piquet eventually fought back against the upstart and began to take points of him. And that battle enabled a little Frenchman by the name of Alain Prost to sneak through and win the title. He, of course, drove a Mclaren....

Mind Games

Mid race, the Australian Grand Prix. A yellow helmet in a Mclaren, visibly on the limit, using every inch of the road. Behind him, in the sister Mclaren, a double world champion, the most accomplished driver in the world today. He's less visible "on it" than his team mate, further from the walls and the kerbs, but the stopwatch shows that this is deceptive - he's going every bit as quickly. For Ron Dennis, and for those of us who have been following the sport for a long time, there is something eerily familiar about the current Mclaren line-up.

Their glory years with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost brought the team six driver's titles, but the two years in which Senna and Prost drove together for the team were fraught with tension. Ron Dennis' man management skills were tested up to, and ultimately beyond, breaking point. For all that there are similarities, though, the parallels with Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton are far from exact. Senna may have been the junior partner when he joined the team in 1988, but he was no beginner. He had made his debut four years earlier, and had racked up six wins and an awful lot of pole positions already. While Fernando Alonso may be a double world champion, just as Prost was as the 1988 season dawned, he is new to the Mclaren team, having won his two titles at Renault (by coincidence, the team for whom Prost drove in the early 80s, when he first emerged as a serious contender).

I can't help feeling though, that this is a potentially explosive driver pairing. When Alonso signed for Mclaren, there was every possibility that a safe number 2 such as Pedro De La Rosa would end up in the second car. Instead, they went with Hamilton. Even when that was announced, I doubt many thought he would be able to offer any serious opposition to Alonso in his first season. On the evidence of Melbourne, though, he's almost as quick as the Spaniard straight away. A glance at the race lap times suggests that Alonso still has the edge in terms of consistency (his times were up-and-down rather less than Hamilton's) but the gap between the two appears vanishingly small, less than that which separated Raikkonen and Montoya last year.

So how will the two drivers cope with it? Will Hamilton resent being made to play second fiddle to the more experienced Alonso if there is a tight battle for the driver's championship between Mclaren and Ferrari this year? Or will he find that, unable to fight his team mate, his motivation begins to fade?

Or will it be the other way around? In some senses, Alonso is a hired mercenary at Mclaren, new to the team. Lewis Hamilton, by contrast, is a Mclaren man through and through - the protege of Ron Dennis since he was barely into his teens. Will Alonso wonder whether the team is as truly committed to him as it is to a man whom they have trained for the job for over a decade? Or will he start to wonder where Mclaren's priorities really lie? It might not affect his driving, but one wonders how it will play with the team. After all, he has previous form in this regard, accusing some in his Renault team of attempting to sabotage his world title bid last year in the tense closing stages of a year long battle with Ferrari and Michael Schumacher.

There are perhaps a couple of factors which help to keep the team on an even keel though. Neither Alonso nor Hamilton come across as being quite such complex, intense characters as Senna and Prost were. And in the fullness of time, it may transpire that Hamilton's performance in Australia came about thanks to a hefty dose of beginner's luck, and he simply won't be able to perform to Alonso's level over a whole season. And if not, Dennis and Whitmarsh can always console themselves with the thought that its a nicer problem to have than that of getting Fisichella to get his finger out, or Kovalainen to keep his car on the island....

There were a couple of moments after the race on Sunday which gave an interesting insight into Kimi Raikkonen's character. First was a brief clip of Lewis Hamilton confidently going up to the race winner to shake his hand - whether to congratulate him, or to announce his arrival on the scene to the Finn. Raikkonen barely acknowledged his existence. In any other field, it would be simple rudeness, but in such a intensively competitive environment, it has its own logic. Refuse to even acknowledge the new kid... A few minutes later, Ron Dennis was being interviewed by ITV's pitlane reporter, Louise Goodman, on how he felt about the team's performance, and at the end he said of his drivers "...and the best thing is, they're two such nice chaps" - the implication being his previous star driver was not.

So how will his new team cope with their allegedly 'difficult' new charge. Certainly, Ferrari's driver management problems are likely to be rather different from those at Mclaren. It is hard to imagine Kimi Raikkonen being riled by anything his team mate does, and he comes across as the kind of person who can live without an especially close relationship with his own team. Or indeed with anyone.

In fact, It is hard to think of a driver in recent times who has come across as more independent, less concerned with what other people think, than the laconic Finn. When other drivers were getting used to the time difference and climate of Australia in the run-up to the opening Grand Prix, Kimi Raikkonen was competing (and winning) in a snowmobile event, the Kopparberg King, in his native Finland - under the pseudonym 'James Hunt' no less. Some say that it was a sign of his lack of commitment - that he was stupid to be taking such risks just days before the Grand Prix (certainly, one is more likely to be injured on a snowmobile than playing tennis), and that he compromised his preparation for the opening race. Kimi would probably simply retort that he won the race anyway.

While I had no idea that Kimi Raikkonen had any interest in motor racing's past, its easy to see why he identifies with the free-wheeling hard-living 1976 world champion. Hunt famously refused to bow to the demands of his sponsors to dress up for corporate events, and led a lifestyle far removed from his ascetic rival of the time, Niki Lauda. Raikkonen's fondness for a drink or two is well documented, and his behaviour in a London lap-dancing club (or rather the reaction of the Mclaren team to it) is widely thought to lie behind his decision to move to Ferrari. As one Mclaren insider put it "Kimi listens to no one. no one at all" and suggestions that the team had any right to control what he did on his own time were anathema to him.

What Ferrari, after ten years with Michael Schumacher, will have to learn to live with is a lead driver who may be every bit as fast as the German, but is not anything like the team player that Michael was. As Niki Lauda said "Kimi can drive a car very fast, but that's all he can do.". Jean Todt is left with a dilemma: Does he attempt to tame the worst excesses of his new charge, and risk ending up on the wrong side of him in the same way that Martin Whitmarsh and Ron Dennis did at Mclaren? Or does he accept that Kimi is exactly as he is, and concentrate on getting the Ferrari team to adapt to its new lead driver? To accept that the motivation, the team spirit, will have to come from the team alone, and that their driver's contribution will be solely to drive the wheels off the F2007. Which can be motivation enough...

Felipe Massa has his own concerns. With the Ferrari looking comfortably the quickest car on the grid at the moment, and with, in theory at least, equal number 1 status at Ferrari, he should be a potential title contender. Something about his body language after qualifying at Melbourne suggests he already knows otherwise. By sheer misfortune, he started the year on the back foot, and on the back of the grid, while Raikkonen became the first driver to win his first race for Ferrari since Nigel Mansell back in 1989. Something about his demeanour suggested there was more to it though - that Raikkonen had finally shown his hand, and that Massa had realised his apparent superiority in testing was a mirage. We'll have to wait until Sepang to find out, but I have a feeling the Brazilian already knows...