Formula 2: The way ahead, or a dead end?

After a break of a quarter of a century, the Formula 2 Championship sprung back into life last weekend at Valencia. The new formula doesn't really bear much resemblance to the old Formula 2. Where the old F2 was an open chassis and engine formula, in essence, Formula 1 with less horsepower, the new Formula 2 takes the 'spec formula' concept further than it has been pushed before and is the first serious 'arrive and drive' racing formula.

Gp2, which it is fair to say is the 'real' spiritual successor to the old F2, as the single seater formula sitting immediately below F1, has a spec chassis and engine, with individual teams having little freedom to modify the basic Dallara-Mecachrome design. Nonetheless, it is a competition between independent teams and the technical know-how required to run a GP2 car competitively is considerable. Even the most cursory comparison of the results of established front-runners like Barwa-Campos, ISport, ART and Racing Engineering with backmarkers like DPR, Durango and Trident shows that for all that they are all running the same basic car, there is a considerable role is played by the team.

The FIA's new F2 concept, heavily pushed by Max Mosley (much to the irritation of his supposed ally, Bernie Ecclestone, who part-owns GP2) does away with the concept of independent teams altogether. All the cars are prepared and run centrally by Jonathan Palmer's Motorsport Vision operation - the people behind the 'Formula Palmer Audi' category, which runs along similar lines. In this it differs, from virtually every other serious junior single-seater category in existence. GP2 and the Renault World Series might have standardised engines and chassis, but the cars are run by independent teams with dedicated race engineers. F3 is perhaps the formula most directly comparable with F2. The lap times of the cars are very similar - the F2 cars having a bit more power and the F3 cars being aerodynamically superior, but F3 is an open chassis and engine formula. For all that Dallara have all but cornered the market, it is open to anyone to try, and Mygale and Lola have both built cars which have won the odd race. Within an admittedly tight rule book, it is also open to the teams to develop their cars independently, too.

So is the Formula 2 concept a good or bad thing? The future of sub-F1 level single seater racing or a a dilution of the very essence of what the sport is meant to be about? I'm in two minds myself. Let's look first at the case for the new Formula 2. The first big mark in its favour is that, by running the cars centrally and doing away with the arms-race between independent teams, costs have been brought down dramatically. While a season of GP2 costs as much as £1m, and even a year in F3 is reckoned to set a driver back more than £500k these days, a season in F2 costs around £200k.

That's still an awful lot of money - vastly more than the average early 20-something is likely to be able to lay his hands on, it is at least a slightly less daunting figure for a promising youngster to attempt to raise from sponsors and backers. Still more than an awful lot of very promising youngsters in karting are ever going to be able to lay their hands on, but probably less than the cost of running competitively in, for example, the British Touring Car Championship. It should to help to open up the sport to a few more people who don't have the backing of lavish driver development schemes, vast family wealth, or the ability to call favours in the business world.

For the money, a driver knows he's getting the same equipment, prepared to the same standard, as everyone else. And that's good news for the driver, or at least for any young driver with the self-confidence to believe that he needs only a level playing field to emerge on top. My hunch is that most aspiring would-be F1 drivers believe they have what it takes and they need no unfair advantage, even if, almost by definition, most of them must be wrong. Compare that with GP2. Is Romain Grosjean the stand-out driver in that championship right now? Certainly he appears to be doing a good job, but it's hard to know for sure. Perhaps Barwa-Addax-Campos, or whatever they're called this week, are just making their driver look quicker than he is. Maybe Nico Hulkenberg, or Lucas Di Grassi, or who knows who else, might have won in the Barwa car. All we really know for sure is that Grosjean is quicker than Vitaly Petrov... The same is true, to a greater or lesser extent in all the junior formulae. Try to recall the last time that anyone won the F3 Euroseries in anything other than an ASM/ART car...

In one important way, Formula 2 promises to be much more interesting than its rival series. Thanks to the way it is run, we should know with reasonable certainty that the guys at the front reallty are the quickest drivers in the field, and not simply those with the best prepared cars, the smartest race engineers and the cheque books to procure access to them.

And yet there's a part of me that really doesn't like what the new F2 represents, an insistent voice in the back of my head telling me that it is the logical end-point of what is said to be Max Mosley's desire to turn F1 into a single-chassis formula. Motorsport, for me, has only ever been partly about the drivers. It's about the teams, about the cars, too.

The old F2 gave teams considerably scope to develop their cars. Some teams went so far as to build their own chassis. It was a valuable training ground, not only for drivers, but for designers, engineers, mechanics and team managers wanting to make the step into F1. A number of F2 teams went on to F1 having begun building their own cars in F2. AGS, Minardi, Osella and Toleman all started out as F2 constructor-teams (though of those, only Toleman, which would eventually become today's Renault F1 team, found any long-term success).

By contrast, the latter-day F3000 series with it's single chassis and engine (the uninspiring Lola Zytek) and the current GP2 championship simply don't provide the kind of technical challenge required to enable teams to progress on to F1, and with the teams solely concerned with running, and not designing, the cars, it doesn't provide an opportunity for budding designers and engineers either. To be fair, there's an argument that F1 is in any case now so expensive and so far removed from any junior category that it wouldn't matter what the rules are for GP2 - the last team to make the leap from F3000 to F1 were the Italian Forti team, and their experience appears to have deterred anyone else from having a go in the last 10 years, but a more technically free formula might at least have served as a place in which individual engineers and designers could gain experience which could prove useful in F1.
To some extent, that is still the case, at least for race engineers and mechanics. It's far less clear how the new F2 will do any of this.

There is a related problem - one F3 team bosses were keen to emphasise in a recent Autosport article. The new series, with its' pooled race engineers, limited scope for set-up changes and centrally-run cars provides little opportunity for a driver to learn the art of developing a car - of working with engineers to identify and solve handling and set-up problems and work as part of a team to optimise a car's performance. Motorsport, at the top level, is about more than simply the ability to take a well-honed car and lap quicker than anyone else can - a driver needs to be able to work with a team to develop a car over a season. How interesting will F1 or Indycar teams be in drivers who have never learned this black art? To be fair, F2 is unlikely to be anyone's last stop before F1 anyway, but if that is the case, then to what extent does the reduced budget really help young drivers?

In the end, the question of whether the new Formula 2 championship will prove to be a success will depend much on where the champion and other front-runners go in 2010. Will it prove to be a launch-pad for those seeking to establish a professional racing career, or is it little more really than a slightly faster Formula Master with only the cachet of the F2 name to recommend it? I don't know whether it will succeed, and I can't even make up my mind whether it would be a good thing if it did. I've seen what appear to me to be talented drivers whose careers have stalled for lack of funds to get a seat in a top team in GP2 or similar, and it will be good to see who comes out on top in a championship where the equipment really is equal. On the other hand though, motorsport for me has always been about more than just the drivers - and that certainly isn't true of the new F2. I suppose we'll see how it turns out...

Racing Through The Recession

The last few months have seen an awful lot of ink spent in the motorsport press contemplating the effects of the global economic downturn on Formula 1. Barely a week has gone by without news, or at least speculation, concerning some new cost-cutting measure or another, or rumours that a major team is in financial trouble, or a car manufacturer considering pulling the plug.

In truth though, the rest of the motor racing world is probably at least as badly affected. In the final analysis, motorsport is discretionary spend, nobody needs to race cars, and discretionary spend tends to fall away in hard times. The other week, I was down south paying a visit to my family and hearing tales of woe from my mother regarding the lack of sales at the trials bike importer where she works. What is true in the world of trials bike competition is almost certainly true of the club racing scene as a whole. People uncertain about whether they will be in work come summer are going to be cutting back on expensive hobbies like motorsport. I'll not know for sure until I have time to drop by Knockhill and catch the SMRC races at some point over the next couple of months, but I expect grids will be down on last year.

Of more interest to the casual racing fan here in the UK is how the country's premier racing series are coping with the downturn. The British Touring Car Championship, certainly the most popular and arguably the most prestigious of Britain's national racing series kicked off the other weekend at Brands Hatch the other weekend, and here the picture seems mixed. On the plus side, a championship which, a few years ago, was struggling to pull grids of more than 8 or 10 BTCC-spec cars had a field of 20 cars for its opener, and while it is difficult to judge these things definitively from the TV coverage, it looked as though Brands managed to pull in a decent crowd too.

Look a little closer, though, and it becomes clear that the BTCC has taken some big hits over the winter. The Triple-8 Vauxhall team is now the only full works team on the grid, with SEAT having packed their bags and handed over their Leons (but not the all-conquering diesel engines) to independent Clyde Valley Racing. Series runner up Mat Jackson is missing from the grid at present, and his website has gone awfully quiet since New Year. It would appear that with the withdrawal of sponsors Accident Exchange, there simply isn't the money to put his BMW on the grid. A shame, as he would surely be a potential title contender if he were. Team Dynamics have lost principal sponsors Halfords, and are effectively a one-car team, with Scot Gordon Shedden surely the team's only serious prospect now that the second car is taken by BTCC stalwart and longtime privateer David Pinkney, who must reckon buying a ride in a race winning team is better value than funding his own entry.

On the plus side, there are a few new entries. The aforementioned Clyde Valley Racing weren't exactly at the sharp end with their SEATS but they were at least within a second of being on the pace, though Brands is a very short circuit, so they'll have to find some time if they are to threaten the front-runners at all this season. In Adam Jones and Dan Eaves, they do at least have a pair of proven drivers. Also new, though it remains unclear whether it will prove to be anything more than a one-off entry, was the RML Chevrolet Lacetti. Ray Mallock's team haven't been around in the BTCC since Proton canned their BTCC effort, but with Jason Plato at the wheel, the team picked up a lucky win in race 3, and their driver lies 4th in the points table. That said, when a professional team like RML and a past champion with a media profile like Jason Plato can't be sure of raising the budget for a full season, it doesn't bode well for the championship's health.

Less promising is Arena Motorsport's efforts with self-built Ford Focus STs. In Tom Chilton and Alan Morrison, they have two drivers who can get the job done, but the cars would seem to be so hopelessly off the pace that it hardly makes any difference who is behind the wheel. The team will say that the opening race was effectively a test session, but sadly, I've never seen a car that slow out of the box go on to achieve much. Think, for example, of the hopelessly slow WTCC Focuses or Peugeot 407s of a few years back, or VLR's uncompetitive 307s. Of the privately built S2000 cars, only the Dynamics Hondas have ever been really competitive, and there have been persistent rumours that the team were quietly helped out by Honda themselves. Of the rest, I'm afraid that Liam McMillan's ancient SEAT and Martin Johnson's still older Astra Coupe are there solely to make up the numbers, while Nick Leason's BMW 120D goes only to show that a diesel engine is no guarantee of success in touring car racing.

If the works Vauxhalls aren't to have it all their own way, I think we're going to have to rely on the privately run BMWs to take the fight to them. They started well at Brands Hatch. Jonathan Adam, the Kirkcaldy based racer who impressed me when I saw him in action last year in the SEAT Cup, picked up a second place in his first race in the BTCC and can surely only improve as the season goes on in the Motorbase BMW. Rob Collard I've never thought of as more than a competent amateur, but he too won a race the other week, while Colin Turkington was consistently near the front. It might be a false dawn - the BMWs have always tended to run well around the Indy Circuit, and it is hard to avoid the fact that it was the SEATs that proved the most consistent threat to the Vauxhalls last year - or, come to that, that it was Mat Jackson's machine that was quickest of the BMWs. I hope I'm wrong - the BTCC has provided good, simple entertainment for the last few years and doubtless helped raise the sport's profile in the country more generally. It would be a shame if it lost its way.


Last weekend, it was the turn of the British F3 championship to get underway, with the traditional Easter Monday date at Oulton Park. The F3 series has to contend not only with the effects of the recession, but with the seemingly ever-multiplying options confronting junior drivers wishing to make their way to F1 these days. A number of those who might have been expected to make the jump to F3 this year have gone elsewhere. Formula Renault champion Adam Christodoulou is off to Star Mazda in the US, Alexander Sims has gone to the Euroseries, while Henry Surtees has joined a number of drivers opting for the new, and considerably cheaper FIA Formula 2 Championship (which would appear to be a more serious rival to F3 than to GP2.)

The result, last Monday, was that there was no obvious challenger to Red Bull's latest protege Daniel Ricciardo. Yes, Max Chilton and Walter Grubmuller grabbed a pole position each, but neither was able to convert that into a win. Both have been around in F3 for a while now without having previously much troubled the front-runners (Grubmuller was team mate to Marko Asmer back in 2007 and never won a race, while his Estonian team mate won the title) and one can't help but wonder whether their appearance near the front is a sign that the strength in depth of previous years simply isn't there in 2009.

It doesn't help that F3 has become terrifically expensive, in comparison with, for example, Formula 2 or Formula Master. In Autosport last week, in an interview with Ben Anderson, a number of the team bosses defended this both by pointing out that drivers get much greater mileage than in other series and that they learn to work with an engineer and develop a car - something which the Formula 2 approach of running the cars centrally makes impossible. It's a double edged sword, though. On the one hand, F3 might better teach a driver about the engineering aspects of the sport, but on the other hand, the very strictly standardised cars of Formula 2 ensure that the guys at the front are the quickest in the field, and not simply those who have the best equipment and the smartest engineer. Where the balance lies between the two must surely be influenced, to some extent, by whether drivers have the budget to do F3 properly.

Perhaps I've got it all wrong. Perhaps, in spite of their rather underwhelming starts, Formula Renault front runners from last year such as Adriano Buzaid and Riki Christodoulou, or the much hyped Formula Ford Champion Wayne Boyd, will come into their own. Or maybe I've simply underestimated the likes of Chilton and Grubmuller. All the same, I can't help but think that the F3 championship looks weaker than for some years, and I do wonder whether it is the global economic outlook, or the emergence of Formula 2 (leaving aside, for a moment, the American open wheel series, with their largely European driver line-ups), which has done the greater damage.

Park Life

Over at Fastest Lap a while back, Neil asked an interesting question in a post on his recent trip to Bathurst. How many of the online motorsport community actually go to see races in person?

In my case, the answer is not nearly as often as I would like to. For the last eleven years, I have lived in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh. It's a wonderful city in many ways, and despite the appalling weather, sky high property prices and countless other minor niggles, it regularly tops UK quality of life surveys as the best place in the country to live. It is not, however, very conveniently located for watching motor racing. Only the 1.3 mile Knockhill circuit, over the water in Fife is within easy reach.

That said, I have been to a good proportion of the UK's racing circuits over the years. At first, when we lived in the south east of England, my father used to take me to regular trips to Brands Hatch. Later, when we moved north, we would substitute Silverstone, Donington Park and Oulton Park. I've also been to a couple of race meetings at Croft. Do I have a favourite?

Yes, I do. The two and a half miles or so of tarmac that snakes its way through the Cheshire countryside at Oulton Park. For those of you who have never seen the place, Oulton is a relatively short, narrow circuit in the north-west of England, not far from the Welsh border. There's plenty of gradient change, some really tricky corners with odd camber changes and a pair of really big stops (although, yes, one of them is a chicane). Though on a much reduced scale, there is a certain resemblance to the majestic Road America circuit, as numerous graduates of the British Junior Formulae who have gone to ply their trade in the States have noted.

Older afficionados assure me that the place has been ruined by the appendage of ungainly chicanes at Foulstons and at Knickerbrook. I can't comment. I don't remember what the place was like before these chicanes were added. Though I went to several race meetings in the mid-1980s before Paul Warwick's tragic death led to the insertion of the Knickerbrook chicane, we usually watched the action from Old Hall or Lodge, and so I don't actually know what Knickerbrook used to be like. Whatever, much as I often moan on here about the bastardisation of great racing circuits, I think the essential features of Oulton Park have survived more or less unscathed. Old Hall, the downhill sweep of Cascades, the tricky blind corner at Lodge that leads into the dip at Deer Leap - they're all still there.

Too small to host major international events, the place is instead the ideal venue to watch F3 and the multifarious categories that make up the UK club racing scheme. The Blue Riband event was always the annual Oulton Park Gold Cup. This started out as a non-championship Formula 1 race - I understand that F1 journalism's eminence gris Nigel Roebuck's first taste of motorsport came from a family trip to such a race in the mid-1950s - but by the time I was a regular at Oulton Park, the Gold Cup was a round of the British F3 championship. This might sound pretty uninspiring, especially when compared to the kind of machinery that Nigel Roebuck would have seen on his first trip, but while an F3 car might look rather tame and unexciting on the wide expanses of the Silverstone GP circuit, it's ideally suited to the more confined Oulton Park. It helped that in the years when I was there regularly, British F3 was enjoying one of its strong periods, with Mika Hakkinen, Mika Salo, Alan McNish and David Brabham amongst the front runners. (There was also, as it happened, a guy by the name of Steve Robertson who hasn't done badly as a driver manager in the intervening years....)

Many of the races I saw at Oulton Park were minor club events, but were none the less entertaining for that. The Slick 50 Budget Saloon Car championship guys could always be relied upon to put on a show with their Rover SD1s, Hillman Avengers, Talbot Lotuses, et cetera. The Star of Tomorrow FF1600 races were always pretty hotly contested. Amongst the front runners there was a certain Louis Di Resta, whose son hasn't done badly of late (actually, Louis still races at Knockhill himself, as it happens). These, of course, were the days before single-make uniformity overtook the club racing scene. One of these days, I will get around to writing an article explaining exactly what is wrong with single make racing from a spectator point of view, but take it from me - it's less entertaining (although there was a certain surreal 'what the fuck?' factor to be had from watching people racing Ford P100s...)

Every now and again, there is talk in the press that Oulton might be sold off to housing developers. From a distance, it has looked in rather better health since Jonathan Palmer's Motorsport Vision people got hold of the place. I only hope I am right. It's a place I would miss more than any other circuit in the UK.

Endnote: Regular readers may know that this week's column is a little late because of my participation in the madness that is 'national novel writing month'. It is to that which I now return.

Go East, Young Man

Back in the not so distant past, before Sheikh Maktoum and his cronies gave the world the mixed blessing that is A1GP, the Macau Formula 3 Grand Prix used to signal the end of the single seater racing calendar each year. In years past, Macau was a decidedly odd place to stage a race - a small down at heel Portuguese colony on China's East coast which must have felt like it was on the edge of the world. Certainly it was far from Formula 3's natural home of western Europe. Nonetheless, along with the sadly defunct Monaco GP F3 race and the Marlboro Masters at Zandvoort, it has long been one of the big races to win. A sure-fire way for an ambitious young driver to draw attention to himself.

Perhaps its the fact that it comes right at the end of the season. Thus, for many drivers, it is one last chance to make an impression on the movers and shakers in motorsport, particularly after a bad season. Equally, it is a chance to underline a year of remarkable achievement - to go out on a high. The list of previous winners doesn't do the event any harm either. Ayrton Senna won the event in 1983 and he was followed seven years later, and in typically controversial circumstances, by one Michael Schumacher. David Coulthard, Ralf Schumacher, Martin Donnelly and Takuma Sato weren't bad either, come to that, and if you include drivers who finished second, you can add Jenson Button, Robert Kubica and Jacques Villeneuve to the list of famous names who found success at Macau.

The track itself plays a part. Imagine Monaco with a long flat out section thrown in, just to confuse everyone and make car set up a nightmare. The place is very unforgiving, but the area between Fisherman's Bend and Lisbon corner is so quick that, unlike Monaco, a low-downforce set-up is a must. Thus drivers must quickly master an unfamiliar, and in places very narrow street circuit and get used to driving the slow stuff with far less grip than they would have available at, say Pau. Just to make their lives more difficult, the unique format of the weekend means that to win, they must survive a qualification race before they even get to the start of the Final. Which means that to win, one has to get round the ultra-tight first corner twice in a weekend. This time, all three of the front-runners from the first race failed to do this, after Euroseries champion Paul Di Resta screwed up his braking and eliminated himself, the inexplicably rapid Kobayashi and the similarly surprisingly fast Marko Asmer in one fell swoop. All of which handed British F3 champion, Mike Conway what he needed to come back from a rather unpromising 11th slot on the grid for the qualifier to win the event. For a full report on this year's race, check out Stella Thomas' report on Motorsport.com, Stewart Bell at Pitpass or Qwerty at Motor Racing Journal.

Strangely though, as motor racing has spread east, with Grands Prix in China and Malaysia, an A1GP race in Indonesia and talk of a race in India in the near future, the significance of the annual Macau race seems to have declined. All the more odd for the fact that where once Macau looked and felt like a forgotten, down at heel little place, surviving only as a place where the Chinese could go to gamble, these days the place seems to be booming (though the seedy feel hasn't entirely vanished - someone who was out there for the race this year remarked that the local Spas really ought to be labelled as either "brothel" or "not brothel" to save embarrassment for non-locals). Strange it may be, but it seems no less true for that. Kubica may have helped make a name for himself there last year, but the same can hardly be said of Lucas DiGrassi. A look through the list of recent winners scans like a list of almost-wases and nearly-rans - Alexandre Premat, Tristan Gommendy, Nicolas LaPierre, Darren Manning, Peter Dumbreck and Soheil Ayari, to name but a few. The really big F3 names seem to have taken to giving the race a miss of late. Last year, Lewis Hamilton dominated utterly the Euroseries, but feeling he had nothing further to prove, skipped the Macau race. Alvaro Parente, the British Champion had more straightforward budget problems and was also a no-show.

This year, though, had the strongest line up for some years. Perhaps because none of the major F3 champions yet have GP2 seats sorted out, even they felt that the race provided them with an opportunity to impress team bosses and potential backers. So Euroseries champion Paul Di Resta and much-feted runner up Sebastien Vettel were there. British series winner Mike Conway and runner up Oliver Jarvis were there, as was Japanese F3 champion and Euroseries refugee Adrian Sutil. Even Asian F3 champion Jamie Winslow put in an appearance. About the only significant absences were British F3 frontrunner Bruno Senna and Esteban Guerreri from over in the Euroseries. While Di Resta's appearance in the final was rather brief, Mike Conway's win just might help ease his path into GP2 next year. Kobayashi is probably thought of a lot more highly than he was at the beginning of the weekend too.

As Richard Asher points out in this week's Autosport though, what is really needed is a really serious international F3 race in Europe. The Monaco GP race has disappeared, and the fact that the Zandvoort Marlboro Masters runs on Kumho rubber puts non-Euroseries runners at a distinct disadvantage. What is needed is a race on neutral tyres to allow the best from Britain, the Euroseries, and the fast improving Spanish and German series to come together on equal terms. Somewhere a little closer to home and less expensive than Macau, fine race though it may be.