Romain Conquest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The black round things

Interesting race at Bahrain, eh? I don't mean interesting as in exciting, in the breathless, wheel to wheel action sense (although David Coulthard, of all people, did his best to oblige with a drive from the back in his Red Bull) No, the point of interest, for me, is that I had assumed this season would be about Ferrari and Mclaren, and by extension, Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso. And yet in Bahrain, both of the established stars, the men we assumed would dominate the sport now that Michael Schumacher has taken his leave of absence, were overshadowed by their team mates. Felipe Massa and Lewis Hamilton qualified 1-2 and finished in the same order. Raikkonen trailed in third, while Alonso ended up unable even to keep the rather promising BMW of Nick Heidfeld behind.

I can't see things staying that way all season, but then, a few weeks ago, I'd have had a hard job believing that as early as Bahrain, Alonso would end up being outpaced by Lewis Hamilton. It does rather appear at this early stage in the season that we might have a genuine four way battle for the world championship on our hands between both Mclaren drivers and both Ferrari drivers. How each team handles what could prove to be a very delicate situation could be one of the points on which the season turns. Bahrain also served to illustrate that tyres could also be crucial this year, even in this post-Michelin era.

As a long time follower of the Champ Car World Series, I have to say I've never been a great fan of the 'red tyre rule'. This, for those not so interested in moribund American single seater series as I, is the rule by which Bridgestone bring 2 types of tyre to each race (the 'black sidewall tyre' and the softer 'red sidewall tyre') and each driver is required to run both at some point in the race. It always seemed gimmicky, and when combined with Champ Car racing's overfondness for the use of full course cautions, it can sometimes contrive to turn races into lotteries.

I was therefore rather disappointed over the winter to discover that a version of this rule has been adopted in Formula 1 this year. The requirement for teams to use both the 'hard' and the 'soft' tyre during the course of every race struck me as the kind of artifice that F1 would do well to avoid. More than anything, it seemed a cynical attempt to keep the commentators talking about tyres after the end of the tyre war, so maximising the publicity for Bridgestone. On closer examination, the rule does make a certain amount of sense, though.

Given that the rules require Bridgestone to bring 2 types of tyre to every race, the requirement to use both types of tyre in the race does have the significant logistical advantage of reducing the number of tyres brought to each meeting. Which given that all the tyres have to be shipped out from Japan, represents a significant cost saving for Bridgestone (and in environmental terms, of course, is of rather more consequence than painting the globe on the side of your car).

At Bahrain, we saw an intriguing hint that the rule might play a significant part in this season. In Champ Car racing, everyone uses the same chassis, so in theory, everyone is in the same boat, relative to each other, when it comes to tyre choice. In Formula 1, however, it is entirely possible that one team may have the fastest car on the hard tyres, while another team has the best car on the softer tyres. At Bahrain, this appeared to be the case, and it added considerably to the quality of the race. On the soft tyres, especially once the track had rubbered in, the Ferraris of Massa and Raikkonen clearly had the legs of the Mclarens of Hamilton and Alonso. Indeed, Alonso's Mclaren was so unsettled on the softer tyres that Heidfeld's BMW ended up getting past him on the track - the only passing manouvre between the top 6 to take place on track all day.

Come the final third of the race, though, and the switch over to the harder tyres, the situation appeared to reverse. Suddenly, Hamilton began to pull away from Raikkonen and start reeling in Massa, while his team mate Alonso was right onto the back of Heidfeld, and had he been able to find a way past him, might quickly have pulled up to Raikkonen's gearbox.

This could be very good news for the season as whole. With the tyre war ended, there is a danger that Grands Prix, especially under the sprint/stop/sprint/stop format, simply involve the car/driver combination that is fastest in qualifying racing off into the distance on Sunday and everyone following on behind in formation. It is not a formula which does anything to increase the likelihood of different cars being fast at different points in the race.

The tyre war between Michelin and Bridgestone did this to a degree. Sometimes, one tyre-maker would have a better tyre for qualifying, and another would have a better race tyre. Other times, one would have a tyre which worked better on a rubbered-in track, and the other on a green track. The effects of this were limited, but at the very least, last year it resulted in considerable variation in the performance of the Bridgestone-shod Ferraris and Michelin-shod Renaults from one race to the next.

Think back a couple of years to 2005 though, and there was notably more overtaking. Hell, there was even overtaking at Monaco. Why? The one tyre rule. Because drivers were forced to run the same set of tyres for the whole race, really significant variations in performance could emerge through the course of the race. A driver might be quick in the early laps, but kill his tyres in the process, struggling seriously as the race progressed. Indeed, this is pretty much exactly what happened in Monaco, with Fernando Alonso struggling and ultimately failing to hold off the Williams pair of Heidfeld and Webber as the race neared its conclusion.

Thinking back much further, to the days before refuelling, races could end up as nail-biting tortoise and hare battles between drivers hoping to take advantage of track position to do the whole race on one set of tyres, against others intending to make up time lost in the pits with the advantage of fresh rubber. With fuel stops thrown into the mix, a no-stop strategy is never going to be effective (although it did net Mika Salo points for Tyrrell in 1997) but back in 1987 it led to two classic duels - at the British Grand Prix between non-stopping Piquet and his team mate, Nigel Mansell, and in Monza, where it was Senna who attempted to go the whole race on one set of tyres, and Piquet who eventually chased him down after stopping. Sadly, while I've never been a fan of fuel stops, it seems that they are here to stay in F1. It doesn't yet seem to have dawned on the powers that be that such stops actively discourage passing on the track, as passing at the stops is almost always the safer option. Formula 1 has been the poorer over the last decade or so for it.

That said, with what just might be a four way battle for the world title, and perhaps even a six-way fight if BMW can make big strides in the month long break before the late-spring flurry of races that begins with the Spanish Grand Prix, this could still be a very interesting season.