The End Of The Road

In the end, it was no surprise when the announcement was made that Super Aguri F1 are no more. It had been clear for some months that the team existed only thanks to the willingness of the Honda Motor Company to provide a line of credit to Aguri Suzuki's men, and that the Japanese manufacturer were becoming disillusioned with the idea of running two F1 teams. When Honda made clear they would not provide the financial support needed to keep the team afloat, their demise was inevitable. And so Super Aguri join a long list of teams - Arrows, Prost, Lola, Forti, Simtek, Pacific, and Lotus, who have fallen victim to the financial realities of F1. It would be easy to write off the disappearance of Super Aguri as largely irrelevant. They were, in their last days especially, tail end stragglers who had no realistic expectation of doing anything more than making up the numbers.

Me? I'll miss them. For one thing, they provided drives for two exciting, if not perhaps truly first-rate drivers in Takuma Sato and Anthony Davidson. More than that, though, they appeared to be a very down-to-earth squad of real racers - made up of people determined to do the best with what they could, and not simply there to cruise around at the back. As an F1 fan, though, what was most interesting about the Super Aguri story was what it told us about what is, and is not, important in determining the overall competitiveness of an F1 team.

When the team first emerged, rather hurriedly, at the beginning of the 2006 season, as part of a Honda PR-effort to find employment for Japanese driver Takuma Sato, whom they had recently fired from the works team, they seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. The news that they would be running a modified 2002 Arrows chassis, hastily adapted to take the 2.4 litre Honda V8 engine (it had been built around a 3.0 litre V10 Cosworth block) and further modified to bring it into line with 2006 aerodynamic regulations and crash-test rules did little to inspire confidence. What hope did a new team have running a modified 3 year old chassis which, even at the time it had been built, rarely made it out of the bottom third of the grid? I, for one, wondered if we had another disaster of Andrea Moda or Life Racing Engines proportions on our hands.

At the opening race, in Bahrain, Takuma Sato was six seconds away from Michael Schumacher's pole time. It was hardly encouraging, but given they were using an almost untested and hastily constructed car, built around a 3 year old monocoque, it could have been a lot worse. Sato was around 1.5s off the pace of Tiago Monteiro's Midland-Toyota, which was not much worse than Minardi had been doing the year before. Sato's team mate, Yuji Ide, it quickly became apparent, had no business being in F1, and was a further 3 seconds back. He did not last long, and was dropped in favour of Toyota tester Franck Montagny who himself was eventually moved aside for Sakon Yamamoto.

Faced with such an apparently impossibly task, it would have been easy for the new team to sink into a mire, and slip further and further back as the season went on. It quickly became clear, though, that the team were determined to do what they could with the tools they had to hand. The team produced several updates to the basic Arrows package through the year, and by the time of the season-closing Brazilian Grand Prix, they had come a long way from the inauspicious debut at Bahrain. They may still have made up the back row at Interlagos, but this time Takuma Sato and team mate Sakon Yamamoto were both within 3 seconds of Felipe Massa's pole time - a dramatic leap from the 6+ seconds the team were giving away at the beginning of the season. Aided by the fact that Bridgestone had very much the better tyres in race conditions, Sato ended up finishing ahead of both Toro Rossos, both Midlands and a Red Bull on race day, too.

One statistic which proves particularly telling is that Sato's qualifying lap in 2006 was just 0.3s
slower than Montoya's pole lap in 2002. That, despite the fact that in 2002, the cars had larger wings, 3 litre V10 engines and, to be blunt, Montoya's Williams was a good deal quicker than the Arrows driven by Verstappen and Frentzen. What this demonstrates, firstly, is that the Super Aguri team did a very good job of adapting and improving the basic Arrows design. More than that, though, it shows just how important factors other than the basic chassis design are in determining the performance of an F1 car. In particular, 2006 was the zenith of the very hard-fought tyre war between Bridgestone and Michelin (before the FIA called time on that by insisting on a single tyre supplier and control rubber for 2007). The Honda V8 and the gearbox, which the team also appropriated from the works team, were undoubtedly very well-engineered pieces of kit, but one can't help feeling that tyre development alone was probably responsible for as much as 2-3 seconds performance improvement a lap between 2002 and 2006.

The other thing that Super Aguri's performance in 2006 demonstrated is something which would already be apparent to anyone who has followed serious one-make formulae (like GP2, Champ Car, IRL) is that the basic chassis itself is only one factor among many in determining the outright competitiveness of a team. BCN Competicion and ART both work with the same basic Dallara-Renault chassis in GP2 and yet there is a very noticeable performance difference between the two teams which cannot be entirely accounted for by the relative merits of their drivers. Comparing, for instance, Dale Coyne Racing and Newman Haas in last year's Champ Car series leads one towards the same conclusion. Knowing how to engineer a car, how to dial it in to each track, can be every bit as important as having an outright quick car in the first place. To my mind, what the Super Aguri squad demonstrated in 2006, was that they got the very most out of a very basic (in F1 terms) underlying design. Enough to occasionally frighten teams with vastly greater resources and much more modern cars.

2007 was meant to be very different for the tiny Anglo-Japanese team. The team took advantage of the FIA's warming towards the concept of 'customer' chassis in F1 to run Honda's race-winning 2006 chassis, complete with minor aerodynamic updates and other modifications required to get it through the more stringent crash-test requirements. And so we were left with the question: Could the team who worked small wonders with an ancient Arrows in 2006 really frighten the big boys with access to a much more modern design and a serious driver line up?

In the end, the answer was inconclusive. The modified 2006 Honda was enough to ensure that the Super Aguri team no longer routinely propped up the rear of the grid. At the first race in Australia, both Sato and Davidson made it through into the second round of the knock-out qualifying system (something Super Aguri never threatened to do in 2006) and through the first half of the season, the team regularly ran in the midfield. In doing so, they more often that not outpaced the works Honda team, and conclusively demonstrated that sometimes, a team can take a step backwards in absolute, rather than merely relative, terms. Undoubtedly the highlight of the team's brief existence, though, was the Canadian Grand Prix of 2007, where Takuma Sato overtook reigning World Champion Fernando Alonso's Mclaren on the track going into the final chicane to snatch 5th place. OK, so he was only within striking range of Alonso because of a safety car, and he was only quicker because he was on the better tyre compound, and Alonso was nursing damage to his car from an earlier trip across the dirt. But still, a Super Aguri passing a Mclaren in a straight fight for a points position! Who would have predicted that when the team made its shambolic debut at Bahrain just 15 months before?

In retrospect, though, the nails were already being hammered into Aguri's coffin as the 2007 season went on. The team's new title sponsor, SS Oil and Gas, reneged on their deal and left
the team having to go to Honda for a bail-out, which is unlikely to have helped relations between the satellite team and the parent company. Cynics have suggested that the Honda team bosses were far from happy that a small team using their old car were outpacing the works squad (until a late season run of form for Jenson Button, Super Aguri led Honda in the constructors championship) and that perversely, their very competitiveness harmed their long-term future.

Myself, I rather doubt that explanation. I expect that Honda were simply relieved that something with a Honda engine and Honda stickers on the side, was running in the points from time to time. No, the real reason for Honda's change of heart about the support they were providing to Super Aguri was the FIA's volte-face over the legality of customer cars. It became quite clear that, in the long term, Super Aguri would have to develop their own chassis to remain in the sport. For as long as Honda had open the option of running two teams with the same chassis, the Super Aguri team was a sensible investment. Having access to four cars and the testing-mileage allowance for 2 teams instead of one could buy significant advantage. A similar logic lay behind Red Bull's decision to buy out Minardi and create Scuderia Toro Rosso, and the Prodrive/Mclaren link up that never happened.

When the FIA decided that it was not in the long-term interest of the sport to open up the possibility of customer F1 teams, with no car design or manufacturing facilities of their own (or, if you prefer, when the FIA were cornered by the smaller independent teams like Williams and Force India) these satellite teams no longer made sense. And so it is that Prodrive's F1 effort ended up stillborn, Toro Rosso is for sale, and Super Aguri have, this week, reached the end of the road.

Guilty Pleasures

Now here's a confession. I'd usually think of myself as a racing purist, but I really like the British Touring Car Championship. I know, I know. They use reverse grids, success ballast, rules that are arbitrarily tweaked to ensure parity between the manufacturers, and the back half of the grid is full of wealthy amateurs who really should have no place in a serious racing series.

But still, I like it. The racing is usually pretty close and there are a serious number of potential race winners in the field. There are the full works teams of SEAT and Vauxhall who will always tend to win out over the course of a whole season thanks to their considerably greater resources. Behind them, though, are a good number of semi-works and private efforts that can win races.

West Surrey Racing have been in the business seemingly forever. They ran Ayrton Senna in Formula 3 back in the early 1980s, and these days they run a very effective customer BMW touring car team. Lead driver, Colin Turkington has won on a number of occasions with their s2000 3 series, and even young ride-buyer Tom Onslow Cole has emerged on top on one occasion.




Team Dynamics were the only private team to win BTCC races in the Super Tourer days when manufacturers were spending serious money on the series. These days, they continue to impress as the only private team to have built their own race-winning s2000 car from scratch. Their Honda Civic Type-Rs might look decidedly odd, but they haven't half proved effective. Both Matt Neal and Gordon Shedden have won with them this year, even if they have not been able to repeat the level of dominance they achieved with their loophole-exploiting BTC-spec Honda Integras over the previous two seasons.

The series uses enough standard parts, and has enough restrictions in place on testing and development, that a couple of very small operations have proven quite successful at this level too. Mike Jordan, the late-fortysomething former GT racer, has run consistently towards the front of the field in a two year old ex-Team Dynamics Integra. SEAT Cupra champion Mat Jackson has won with a family-run ex Andy Priaulx BMW (in marked contrast to the complete lack of success enjoyed by Martyn Bell in another ex-Priaulx BMW, thus showing the importance of the driver at this level). Former Clio-cup front runner Adam Jones has also run near the front on occasion in an old SEAT Toledo run by WTCC privateer frontrunners GR-Asia. That's, by my count, about 10 potentially race winning cars. Really not a bad score by any count, and more than most series can boast. I suspect that only the WTCC and NASCAR do better on that score, and the WTCC only because they have a very silly weight penalty system in place and NASCAR because the caution-period rules leave that series a virtual lottery.



So it was with some enthusiasm that I jumped on an early morning bus to get to my local circuit, the 1.3m Knockhill track, to see the series 'in the flesh' for the first time in several years. For those of you not familiar with the eccentric Fife venue, Knockhill is a very short circuit, and even a BTCC car can lap it in around 53s but it is not without its challenges. The blind downhill switchback of Duffus Dip is one, while the 3rd gear slightly off-camber Clark (I refuse to call it Carlube Corner) can also catch out the unwary. Even the equally appallingly named Real Radio Hairpin presents its own difficulties. With the longest braking zone on the circuit, it presents the best passing opportunity the circuit has to offer, but with its steeply uphill exit, the correct line is far from obvious, and many drivers tried various different approaches over the weekend.

As it turned out, the three BTCC races were not absolute classics, and I usually seemed to end up stood in the wrong place to see the action. Knockhill is not the easiest place in the world to overtake (ranking alongside the Brands Indy circuit in this regard) but the racing was certainly close. Darren Turner took victory in the first two races, though Gordon Shedden looked threatening in race one until coming off the worse in a move at Real Radio which put him out of the race. The third race was a touch more hard fought at the front, with Honda drivers Jordan, Neal and Shedden shuffling the lead between them before the local boy took advantage of his circuit knowledge (he's a race instructor at Knockhill by day) to pull out in front. Down the field, there seemed to be almost nothing to split the SEATs (including privateer Jones), the Vauxhalls, the WSR and Jackson-MSport BMWs and Jordan's Honda. In short, the rule makers appear to have done a very good job of equalising the front wheel drive and rear wheel drive cars, the private BTTC-spec cars and the works s2000 cars.



As it turned out, one of the most hard fought battles of all was for the honour of not finishing last, with series-newcomer Alan Taylor and perennial backmarkers Martyn Bell and Fiona Leggate having their own private scrap down the field. Only the other Kartland MG driver, Jason Hughes, appeared to left entirely on his own with nobody to play with. In the circumstances, it was a shame that Chris Stockton's rather pretty Lexus (give or take a couple of Daily Sport logos, anyway) had blown an engine on Saturday and taken no part in the day's races.



So what makes this series work from a spectator's point of view? Firstly, I think, the relative simplicity of the cars provides something of a level playing field between the well organised privateers and the works cars. Secondly, costs have been kept down enough to allow a reasonably sized field to be put together (in stark contrast with the dying years of the Super Tourer formula). Thirdly, the fact that the series now runs to the same rules as the WTCC means that there are plenty of second hand S2000 spec cars around for those willing to try their luck (hence the massed ranks of Seat Toledos and Alfa 156s, although these were largely missing at Knockhill).



The other thing that the series gets right is that it realises that it exists mainly for the benefit of the fans. There are few other series where it is so easy to wander through the paddock and look in on the teams as they prepare and repair the cars. The three-race format gives the spectator plenty of value for money and the drivers are much more willing to interact with the spectators than in most other series of any note.

Downsides? They still haven't sorted out the support package. One make racing remains as dull and monotone as it ever was, and the BTCC support races are all one make races. At Knockhill, this was made the worse by a very sparse Porsche Carrera field and the absence of the at least reasonably quick Formula Renaults. There was one unexpected upside, though. As a keen observer of young talent coming up through the ranks, I really do think we're going to be hearing a lot more of double FBMW-winner, Marcus Ericsson in the years to come.

How to go Motor Racing

Peter Sauber's old boys are doing rather well aren't they. There's little doubt that, after the first 3 races, Ferrari and Mclaren are some way out in front of the field, but contrary to what might have been expected, it is BMW which is leading the chasing pack. Renault, Williams, Toyota, Honda and Red Bull would certainly be happy to swap their position with that of the Swiss/German team.

I have to confess that when BMW took over the Sauber team, I didn't think any good would ever come of it. I wasn't alone on this, either - Mike Lawrence confidently predicted that they would never win a race - save in the kind of circumstances which led to Giancarlo Fisichella's shock win for Jordan at Interlagos in 2003. The doubters had good reason to be pessimistic. After all, Mario Thiessen had spent six years trying and failing to win the world championship with Williams - a real racer's team which had won multiple titles with Renault, Honda and Cosworth. One got the impression that both parties were more interested in apportioning blame for failure than in seeking success. Certainly, there appeared to be a degree of resentment from Frank's men at what they saw as inappropriate meddling on the chassis side of things. The odds seemed against Thiessen achieving anything with the solid and respectable, but hardly front-running Sauber team. It looked for all the world that BMW's board had sanctioned a colossal ego-trip on the part of their motor-racing chief.

And yet it hasn't worked out that way. Maybe Thiessen was simply capable of much more when given complete control. Maybe Frank Williams and Patrick Head are simply out of touch these days. Maybe the shared Germanic culture of Sauber and BMW has smoothed working relations, but BMW have emerged as the front running full manufacturer team in just their second season of F1.

This begs an interesting question. If, for example, Volkswagen's board was looking at putting together an F1 programme, what lessons are there to be learned about how to go about it. More importantly, perhaps, what traps should definitely be avoided. Here are 6 useful pointers:

Resist the temptation to start from scratch

Formula 1 is a seriously complicated business these days. The balance of power between the teams may shift from one year to the next, but all are relying on a vast bank of knowledge and past experience. Toyota have spent perhaps more than any other team in establishing their Formula 1 team over the past five years, and yet still it has not paid off. BMW and Renault, on the other hand, have done well out of buying up a midfield team and injecting fresh capital. Chassis manufacture, in particular, remains something of a black art even now, and its better to buy in the experience of an existing privateer team. Going further back, Renault did everything in house first time around, and while they came close to winning the title in 1983, there is little doubt that they squandered a huge early advantage with their turbo engines because they didn't know enough about chassis building. Michiel Mol, and perhaps even Dietrich Mateschitz or Frank Williams could probably be persuaded to sell at the right price.

Leave the job to the racing people

I may not be Mario Theissen's greatest fan, but he has been around motor racing for a long time and he understands how the business works. Likewise, Renault have taken a very hands-off approach to the running of their race team. They have left the Enstone team in the guiding hands of Flavio Briatore, a man who may not understand what makes a car fast, but certainly knows how to manage racing people. By contrast, Toyota have always more directly involved their company's senior management, and recently, it appears Honda have begun to head down the same track. The task of building two fast racing cars is very different from that of building hundreds of thousands of reliable cars that people want to buy. Don't assume the skills are interchangeable.

Don't hire and fire

Surely nobody made a bigger mess of running their works Formula 1 team than Ford/Jaguar did. In the five years they were in F1, they got through countless team principals and managers - Neil Ressler, Niki Lauda, Bobby Rahal, Tony Purnell and Dave Pitchforth. Nobody was in the job long enough, or was given enough freedom, to turn things around. It's worth remembering, too, that top F1 people tend to come with massive egos and an unshakeable belief that they are right and senior management are wrong. Let them think that. When it comes to F1, they're probably right. Toyota and Honda are widely rumoured to have sacked Geoff Willis and Mike Gascoygne because they showed insufficient respect for company bigwigs, and look where that got them. Renault and BMW, on the other hand, have tended to be able to keep hold of their technical people.

Don't think an F1 team is just another corporate department

I've pointed out before in a piece about Toyota that running an F1 team as if it is a department in a large corporation is unlikely to work out. Recent anonymous articles from a Honda insider at Pitpass indicate that the same problem is infecting them now. I think it was Jackie Stewart who said that an F1 team should have a "corner shop" rather than a "big store" mentality. This means a degree of flexibility and a distrust of strict hierarchies that is uncommon in any large commercial organisation. Renault, in particular, seem to have done a very good job of maintaining this feel to their race team, and the result is that the best people want to work for them, even though they are not thought to offer the same kind of financial incentives as, say, Toyota or Mclaren.

Making sure that the parent company doesnt interfere with the operational decisions of the team for non-racing reasons is equally important. When Jaguar came into F1, they had a much greater budget than in their later years but it was squandered on things like ensuring that the computer systems were in line with Ford company procurement policy. Toyota's switch to Bridgestone tyres in 2006, long after the team had begun designing their 06 car around Michelin rubber was rumoured to be similarly motivated by corporate, rather than racing reasons (Toyota road cars come with Bridgestone, rather than Michelin tyres, apparently). The long and the short of it is that F1 is too cut-throat a business to allow for these kind of compromises.

Sort out the drivers

Getting the right drivers is a notoriously tricky business. As Patrick Head once said, the problem is that its always a bit of a shot in the dark. There are, however, some obvious mistakes to avoid. Don't pay over the odds for a driver who is clearly not from the very top drawer. There is really very little reason to pay more than, say £2m to any driver who is not Raikkonen, Alonso or (it would now seem) Hamilton. In particular, there really is no earthly explanation for why Toyota have made Ralf Schumacher the second highest paid driver in the F1 paddock. He's not necessarily a bad choice of driver for Toyota. He's competent and fast, if not quite from the very top drawer, and he arguably makes more sense than an unproven youngster, but there is no way he is worth what he is paid. Jaguar Racing, who made pretty much every mistake in the book, made an arguably even greater error in paying a vast fortune to Eddie Irvine to tool around in a series of awful Jaguars for 3 years.

Ask whether its really worth it...

I don't have the definitive answer to the question of whether "win on Sunday, sell on Monday" really holds true. I think that various marques have enhanced their image by their involvement in F1. This may have helped them to sell cars. It may not have done. It is entirely possible that advertising/branding itself is a great swindle perpetrated on the industrial classes by cunning arts and media studies graduates. That's for another time. What I do know is that Mercedes stick to building engines, and leave the racing car manufacturing to Mclaren. It saves them an awful lot of work, and right now, I'm not sure they're getting any less positive publicity than they would if the car was simply a 'Mercedes'. In fact, by being directly associated with a famous racing name like Mclaren, they might even benefit more. Did winning the world title as 'Renault' really do Renault any more for their image than winning it as the engine supplier to Williams or Benetton? Perhaps Toyota should sell the racing team and jump into bed with Williams...

Going Green?

First things first. On an F1 grid where grey, white, silver and red are beginning to dominate to a degree where, last year it was difficult to tell apart Spykers from Mclarens, or Hondas from Super Aguris from BMWs, Honda's striking new colour scheme will certainly make life a little easier for spectators.

Whether you see Honda's "we are the world" themed car as a tiresome marketing gimmick or a brave attempt to get the average racing fan to think about their impact on the environment and what must be done to tackle climate change probably depends on how naturally cynical you are. Personally, I see Simon Fuller, I see the man behind the Spice Girls and the promotion of David Beckham, I see school children in the press photos a la Michael Jackson in his creepy save the world phase. In short, I see an ocean of PR bullshit. Not everyone agrees, mind you.

That said, underneath it all, there is a question that is worth considering. With the reality of global warming accepted by almost all but a few free-market fundamentalists and their swivel-eyed fellow travellers, what, if anything, should F1 be doing to address climate change and (perhaps more importantly) oil depletion?

One perfectly valid answer is - nothing whatsoever. F1 racing's total contribution to world carbon dioxide emissions is negligible. The sport provides entertainment and enjoyment to millions across the world, and a whole season's racing uses less fossil fuel than a single transatlantic flight. In short, F1 provides a great bang for its fossil-fuel buck in terms of the number of people who gain enjoyment and pleasure, and environmental campaigners would do better to focus on more mundane, less high-profile, but much more important issues than a few guys in powerful racing cars.

That, of course, is not necessarily an answer that will satisfy everyone. Not least the car companies who are keen to be seen to be doing something about climate change without necessarily having to do anything practical or useful, like, say reducing fuel consumption on the cars they sell on an everyday basis to folks like you and I (well not me, actually - I don't drive - but that's another story).

With that in mind, the interesting question is: What could F1 do to help the fight against climate change when it is essentially a sport about getting to the finish line first - not doing so while burning the least fuel or producing the least pollution. Some suggest that F1 should follow the lead of IRL and adopt bio-ethanol. That, though, is gesture politics. Whether biofuels are worthwhile is much debated. Growing sugar-cane for fuel in Brazil appears to be energy-efficient - whereas processing corn for petrol in the US would seem to use almost as much fossil-fuel to produce as you get back from it in burning it. In other words, it is a waste of time.

If the F1 teams got into bioethanol, you can bet that they would be interested in improving its efficiency. That might sound like a good thing, but their idea of effiency is going faster. In other words, they would be looking at maximising bio-ethanol's energy density (how much bang you get for a given quantity) but would not be in the slightest bit interested in improving the efficiency of the fuel growing process. Saving on carbon emissions and fossil fuel consumption in the processing of the raw crop won't make the car in the slightest bit faster. So the teams, and their fuel suppliers, won't bother.

So what could F1 do? One option would be to open up the rules to energy-recovery devices, making use of waste heat and waste energy under braking. These improve the overall efficiency of a car by extracting the maximum amount of useful work from the energy present in the fuel - whatever it is. If they were allowed into F1, then the boffins would quickly work to maximise their efficiency. Of course, in F1, that efficiency would be used to go faster, not to conserve fuel. However the lessons learned and the advances in technology could be used to improve the fuel consumption, rather than the performance, of ordinary road cars.

This brings me neatly to a more general point. If F1 wants to act as a testbed for the development of environmentally useful technologies, it could go forward by going backward. Those of us old enough to remember the mid 1980s turbo era will recall the time when the teams had to get through the race with a preset maximum fuel load. In 1984, when the rule was introduced, the limit was 220 litres. By 1988, in the final year of the fuel rule, that limit was down to 150 litres, and yet the drive to improve technology, particularly around electronic engine management systems, was such that the cars actually went faster all the same.

The downside of such an approach, for those who remember it (and in particular, those who remember the fuel-limited sportscar racing of the late 1980s) is that it encouraged drivers to drive by the fuel gauge, rather than at the limits of their abilities (although part of the genius of Alain Prost was his ability to go quickly while using less fuel than any of his rivals). The answer to this, though, could be to encourage fuel efficiency not by a total fuel limit, but by a fuel-flow limiter, as proposed by the late, great Keith Duckworth, nearly 30 years ago. This simply limits the amount of fuel that can be delivered to the engine at any one time. No danger of drivers cruising round to avoid running dry - there would instead be a limit to how "fuel-greedy" the engine could be at any point.

Whatever the fuel of the future is, whether it turns out to be hydrogen, biodiesel, bioethanol, or something we haven't even thought of yet, improving energy efficiency is going to be of key importance. Rules which encourage the teams to seek the maximum performance from a given amount of fuel are surely the most sensible way of getting F1 to contribute to the search for more enviromentally friendly engines. Better that than the greenwash of bioethanol, carbon-ofsetting, and selling pixels on the sides of your car. So Max, the ball is in your court.