Up and Coming...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racing As Testing

Musing on the Finn's rather lacklustre performances at Ferrari last year, one F1 journalist asked "where is Kimi Raikkonen? If he can't take this seriously, why should I?". Watching the latest round of the GP2 Asia series in Qatar last weekend, I found myself asking much the same question of it.

Is it really a championship in it's own right or is it merely a glorified series of test sessions for the GP2 series proper? Take the three leading teams in GP2 at the moment. Champions Racing Engineering aren't doing the championship at all. ART have run no less than four drivers in their cars this year, with Champ Car refugee Nelson Philippe sharing the second car with prospective European series drivers Pastor Maldonado and Nico Hulkenberg while former F1 pay-driver Sakon Yamamoto continues his unsuccessful bid to revive his career in the lead car. ISport, meanwhile, have kept the same two drivers throughout the season, but Giedo Van Der Garde's team mate, Hamad Al Fardan, a man whose previous greatest achievement was finishing 3rd in the hardly hotly contested B class of the British F3 championship frankly makes last year's ART makeweight Stephen Jelley appear qualified by comparison. If even the GP2's leading teams are struggling to attract two good quality drivers, it doesn't reflect well on the series' credibility.

Further down the grid, things get even worse. Trident have had no less than five different drivers in their cars this year of whom only Chris Van Der Drift has a worthwhile racing CV. Fisichella MotorSport's Kevin Nai Chia Chen has taken part in all four races but has been so embarrassingly slow that it is a wonder he has been given the requisite licence at all. In Qatar he was 7 seconds away from pole!

The fact that, in spite of missing the opening races, Hulkenberg is within striking distance of the title is down, in no small part to the lack of serious runners doing all the races. That he will not compete in the final two races but will instead hand the car over to Pastor Maldonado merely goes to show that even the drivers themselves don't much value the series save as a useful training ground for the 2009 European series.

Part of the problem is that GP2 Asia is to my mind a fundamentally flawed concept from the start. Dazzled by Middle Eastern oil wealth, those behind the championship ignore the fact that the only Asian country with a serious racing history and culture is Japan - a country that the series doesn't even visit. Name a Qatari racing driver of any consequence... Or one from Dubai... The championship is aimed at an audience that isn't listening.

I do think though that there is room for a major winter single seater series, and the vagaries of weather suggest that Europe really isn't the place for it. Whether there is space for both GP2 Asia and A1GP I'm not so certain. What I do think A1GP have got right, which GP2's winter series would do well to emulate, is not sticking solely to Asia, but adding races in South Africa, South America and Australasia. Unlike the UAE, Brazil, South Africa and Australia all have a history in the sport, a significant motorsports culture and at least one past F1 champion each. Unfortunately, there's enough wrong with A1GP, that it's far from clear to me that either series will survive. It has been suspected that GP2 Asia was set up in competition with A1GP, but the end result may be that the two championships cancel each other out and both might be gone within a year or two.

It doesn't help either that, unlike the GP2 series proper, most of the races do not dovetail with Grand Prix weekends, and so drivers do not get an opportunity either to impress watching F1 bosses, or to learn the tracks that they might race on if they were to make the jump up to F1. All this might not matter so much if the series visited really top rate race tracks, but the brutal truth is that it doesn't. Take away the novelty of racing under floodlights, and there's no getting away from the fact that Losail circuit really is horribly mickey mouse. In daylight, it would look very uninspired. About the best that can be said for the place is that it is no worse than Dubai, and that unlike the race at Sentul, Indonesia, that it replaced on the calendar, the circuit at least didn't break up.

Whatever my reservations and doubts, though, there was a race last weekend and there were some points of interest and positives to emerge. Sergio Perez might have been overshadowed last year by F3 rivals Turvey, Hartley and Alguesuari, but the Mexican impressed me in the Barwa Campos machine, picking up two podium finishes (including a win) and comprehensively overshadowing his more experienced team mate Vitaly Petrov in the process. His move to secure second place in the feature race stood out as one of the highlights of that race.

The race also served as a reminder that the old GP2 cars were much more amenable to overtaking than the 2008-vintage machines with their more sensitive aerodynamics. The track wasn't exactly ideal for passing, but nobody seemed to tell Alvaro Parente, or the increasingly impressive Davide Valsecchi, who continues to get his Durango machine far further up the order than it really has any right to be.

Valsecchi is now Kobayashi's closest rival in the championship battle. Kobayashi's done his reputation no harm either. He's started picking up feature race wins (he was always something of a Sunday morning reverse grid star until now) and while he doesn't appear to be from the very top drawer, he's Japanese, part of the Toyota Driver Development Programme, and must surely have a covetous eye on the second Williams seat, which current occupant Kazuki Nakajima hasn't exactly done a great deal with.

Have we seen any pointers as to the form book for the season proper? Well perhaps. Remember, after all, that Romain Grosjean dominated the GP2 Asia Series last year, but proved rather less impressive in the European season. That said, though, there are ominous signs that Willi Weber's latest protege, Hulkenberg, could dominate next year in the manner of Hamilton a couple of years back. If anyone's to stop him, it certainly doesn't look like it will be Renault World Series champion Giedo Van Der Garde, on current form. I'd expected him to win races, driving for ISport, but as it has turned out, he has struggled even to score points, and lies a distant 12th in the title race.

It appears too that Campos might have made that last step forward to become genuine title contenders. Last year, had Lucas Di Grassi been there from the start of the year, they might have been able to give ISport and Racing Engineering more of a challenge. Last weekend, they looked very much the strongest team - with both Petrov and Perez finishing in the top 3 in both races. With Grosjean back for a second bash, and driving for them this summer, this might be the year for the former Minardi driver's team. With the creation of the rival F2 championship, and with leading lights from British F3 electing instead to race in the Renault World Series, GP2 might not be as strong as it has been, but I'm still looking forward to when the real action starts in Spain in May.

Quantity and Quality

This might seem like an odd thing for a motorsport fan to complain about, but I can't help but think that right now, there are too many racing series out there.

I'm not talking about the many hundreds of national club-level racing championships across the world. These have always existed for the enjoyment of those taking part and while they can provide entertainment for paying spectators (I make the trip to Knockhill for the SMRC's races from time to time and it's well worth the price of admittance) that is not why this championships exist. Rather, my concern is that there are too many serious sub-F1 single seater series in existence at present.

Why, you might ask, should that be a problem? Racing is racing, and the more of it the better from the fan's perspective?

I'm not convinced. For one thing, who has the time to follow the myriad single seater formulae now in existence? GP2, GP2 Asia, the World Series by Renault, Indy Racing League, A1GP, Superleague Formula and now, it would seem, GP3 and Formula 2? Even as avid a fan as myself simply doesn't have either the time or the inclination to keep track of all those. There simply aren't enough hours in the day.

And that matters, because several of the above series really depend on paying spectators and TV audiences to survive and thrive. GP2 and Formula 2 might subsist from the money drivers bring to the teams to pay for rides in the hope of making enough of an impact to break into F1, but the rest really depend on having a fan base to survive in the long term. And in that regard, all of those series are struggling to a greater or lesser degree. IRL is probably the best placed of them, attracting reasonable crowds thanks to the Champ Car merger and the emergence of names like Marco Andretti and Danica Patrick (not to mention, of all things, the success of front runner and alleged Lester Piggot copyist Helio Castroneves in Dancing With the Stars....) All the same, it is a mere shadow of the glory days of the pre-split Indy Car Series and is a distant second in the American public's eyes to NASCAR. A shame, because the IRL, with its mix of street, road and oval circuits, is a much more worthwhile racing series in my book.

Nonetheless, it is I think suffering from the perception, both at home and abroad, that it is not really a top-level racing series, but a dumping ground for those unable to break into F1 and into US stock car racing. It is at least rather stronger than A1GP is right now - to the extent that the organisers are trying to use Andretti and Patrick to attract some attention to the series. There have been problems with the new car which have led to the cancellation of the planned first round at Mugello and a depleted field turn out at Zandvoort, but that isn't the real problem. Fundamentally, the problem the championship has is that it has been entirely unable to attract any real star names to its driver line-up and racing fans have never been like football fans and aren't interested in supporting a team just because they share a nationality.

Talking of football, at least A1GP isn't quite the monumental folly that the recently launched Superleague Formula is. Try as I might, I really can't understand what the thinking behind this racing series really is. For those who aren't familiar with the concept (and it's had pretty well zero-publicity, so you could be forgiven for not having heard of it) this involves racing cars entered by major football teams competing in a one-make single-seater formula. Quite what is in it for the clubs I cannot fathom. Is anyone suggesting that football clubs really need to advertise their existence to the world? And if someone hasn't heard of Liverpool FC, for example, is there really any chance that he will become a Liverpool fan because he sees the club's name on the side of a re-badged Champ Car. And if it's not about advertising the clubs, what is it about? I honestly don't know the answer, but I suspect that it's either a vanity project for football clubs drowning in cash, or else the series organisers have blinded the clubs to common sense with the power of a good marketing presentation. Somehow,

A shame, really, because while I can't imagine the average football fan, or even the typical racing fan, is going to be all that excited by the idea of watching Tuka Rocha and Davide Rigon fighting it out around Zolder or Mugello, I caught a bit of the Nurburgring Race on Youtube and was actually rather impressed with the cars. Big V12 single-seaters which had enough power to be interesting and sounded absolutely fantastic. It would make a far more interesting junior single seater championship than the Renault World Series. While I couldn't care less what happens to Superleague Formula, it would be a shame if the cars and engines went to waste.

The other problem with the sheer profusion of championships has the unfortunate effect of diluting the quality of each of them. How much more interesting might GP2 have been this year if such as Giedo Van Der Garde, Bertrand Baguette and Salvador Duran were in the field, instead of Michael Herck, Carlos Iaconelli and Giacomo Ricci? Come to that, how much more competitive might GP2 as a whole be if teams like BCN Competicion, Fisichella Motorsports and DPR, who have shown little in the way of pace, were replaced by the guys from Tech 1, Interwetten and Carlin? There are only so many really clued up race engineers in the world, and having them spread across multiple formulae is bound to affect the quality of the individual series, just as having the best drivers in different series does.

Of course, cynics might reasonably ask whether the current set up actually quite suits certain young drivers and their managers. The other week, I reviewed Tommy Byrne's autobiography, in which it was suggested Senna deliberately spent a year in FF2000 to avoid having to go up against Byrne in F3. Whether there's any truth in the claim we'll never know - the only man who could tell us is long dead. Either way, there have been other drivers who have taken unusual career paths which, it has been suggested, are best explained by a desire on the part of the driver or, more likely, his manager (for racing drivers as a breed are not given to self-doubt, especially in their early years) to avoid going up against someone who is too good too early. All of which may be good for the driver in question, but it doesn't do much for the sport.

However, in recent weeks, it has been hard to avoid stories of trouble brewing in the world economy, and it is equally hard to imagine that this won't have an impact on the cash-hungry world of motorsport. It is therefore more than likely that some of the above series will go to the wall, which leaves only the question - which ones should we hope are left standing?

It doesn't take a genius to predict that Superleague Formula is unlikely to be long for this world. Race day crowds have been tiny, the drivers are largely unknown, and it is hard to understand what on earth the series is really for. I wouldn't be sorry to see the end of GP2 Asia either really. It is hard to see this as much more than an expensive extended test series for the summer series, and I can't help but think that the fact that one of the leading teams, ART, is selling rides in the series on a piecemeal, race-by-race basis suggests the championship isn't being taken entirely seriously. Its main function seems to be to destabilise A1GP, and in that, it is probably successful. Nonetheless, I'd be keen to see A1GP survive, not least because the new cars look rather fantastic. To do so, though, it really needs to attract a more worthwhile driver line-up than it has done so far. Thus far, there has been little sign of this, and I wouldn't be surprised if the series was consigned to the dustbin of history within the next year or two.

I've never really been able to understand quite where the Renault World Series fits in. It seems to be pitched somewhere between F3 and GP2, which doesn't entirely make sense, as the most promising F3 drivers usually move straight into GP2 anyway - budget allowing. That said, it provided a useful stepping stone for Robert Kubica, but I can't help but think that the cheaper Formula 2 category will probably destroy its reason for existing - that of providing a cheap alternative for drivers with the talent, but not the budget, for GP2.

The IRL, I hope, will survive. Unlike the other series I've mentioned above, it is much more clearly a professional race series in its own right, and not merely a stepping stone for young guys trying to break into F1. Post-reunification, it doesn't initially appear to have made great inroads into NASCAR's popularity in the US, but America has always had a homegrown professional single-seater formula and it would be a shame to see it go. Nonetheless, the brutal truth is that it wouldn't be quite the loss that it once would have been.

Time will tell which of the above series will survive in the years to come. I honestly can't believe they will all still be in place, even by 2010. However, I'm not persuaded this is necessarily a bad thing for the sport. If a little less quantity leads to a little more quality, that would be no bad thing.

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.

Awaking from a winter slumber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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