The New Boys

In last week's Autosport, Mark Hughes asked whether the current crop of F1 championship contenders might just be the strongest that the sport has ever known. Such a suggestion will inevitably raise the hackles of the beard stroking senior citizens who insist that nobody's ever really matched Moss, Fangio, Clark or Stewart but I think there just might be something in it. What, though, of the generation that will one day supplant them? Who will eventually do to Messrs Hamilton, Alonso, Vettel, Button, Kubica and Webber what Prost did to Lauda, Senna to Prost and, had Senna lived, what Schumacher might have done to Senna?

Is there anyone among this year's crop of F1 debutants who might one day be World Champion? It's too early to say, though I suspect that the answer to that question is 'no', but, as the season races headlong towards its halfway point, how are Petrov, Hulkenberg, Kobayashi, Di Grassi, Chandhok and Senna getting on?

The man with both the most difficult job and the best equipment of the bunch is Russian Vitaly Petrov. On the one hand, the Renault is, in Robert Kubica's hands has twice proven good enough for a podium, a car quick enough to enable a promising youngster to show what he is made of. On the other hand, he's having to learn his trade very publicly, and in Robert Kubica he has a team mate who's about as fast as anyone on the grid. And thanks to Lewis Hamilton's performances against Alonso in 2007, the F1 world is less inclined to give new drivers the benefit of the doubt if they are not immediately on the pace than might once have been the case.

At no time has Petrov looked like he would get on terms with Kubica, and while Kubica lies seventh in the driver's championship, Petrov has scored points on just one occasion. He has, though, shown flashes of real pace - scoring points in China and looking very quick there when it rained. Unlike almost everyone on the F1 grid, he didn't spend his entire childhood at the wheel of a go-kart and indeed, before he began racing in GP2 in 2006, he hadn't done much outside of the hermetic world of Russia's Formula Lada. As such, he might have more scope to improve than any of the other debutants. And if not, well, rumour has it he (or his father) is paying a lot of Renault's bills, so he might be given the benefit of the doubt.

Over at Williams, GP2 series champion and former A1GP star Nico Hulkenberg has been rather closer to his team mate's pace than Petrov has ever managed to be. On the other hand, in his 18th season in F1, I'm not convinced that Barrichello is quite the opponent that Kubica is, and thus far, the veteran Brazilian racer has generally had the upper hand. To be fair, it is almost certainly harder for a rookie driver to come in and trounce an experienced team mate in a slow, troublesome car, than in a really well set-up machine like the 2007 Mclaren but I still can't help thinking that if Hulkenberg were really the 'new Schumacher' then he would by now be outpacing his team mate.

That's not to say he might not establish himself as a solid GP driver in the mould of a Heidfeld or a Glock or, for that matter, a Barrichello. After a shaky start to the season, he qualified well at Monaco (though damage picked up at the first corner ensured he got no further than the tunnel come race day), was unlucky but quick at Montreal and was on course for a solid points finish in Valencia until his car packed up on him in the closing stages of the race. If, by the end of the year he's regularly matching Barrichello and if, crucially, he can keep his car out of the tyre walls, he will have done enough to show he belongs in F1, if not necessarily, that he's a future star.

A man who did look to have real star quality when he stepped into the Toyota vacated by Timo Glock at the end last year was Kamui Kobayashi. Immensely combative, what was all the more impressive was that in only his second F1 race, he was outpacing his highly rated team mate Jarno Trulli, and finished up with a very solid sixth place in Abu Dhabi.

This year, though, in a rather uncompetitive Sauber, Kobayashi has done little to remind us of those startling debut races. He's been outqualified 5-4 by veteran Pedro De La Rosa, a man who, at 39, is surely with the team more for his vast experience in car development and his testing skills than for his outright pace. Given that, before he was parachuted into Toyota last year, there had been little in his junior career to suggest he was anything more than a competent journeyman, having hardly troubled the front runners in what was not the most competitive GP2 grid the sport has ever known, dark whispers have circulated that the Toyota he drove in Abu Dhabi might not have been 100% kosher. That, anxious not to see another team pull out of F1, the stewards might have been prepared to look the other way. To my knowledge, there has never been any serious evidence to back up these claims, but equally it's hard to deny that Kobayashi has frequently looked a little out of his depth in F1 this year.

Again, though, there have been odd flashes of promise when the cards have fallen his way, or when the Sauber has been dialed into the circuit properly. At Barcelona, which places a premium on aerodynamic efficiency, and where a lack of low speed mechanical grip matters less, it was Kobayashi that got the Sauber into Q3 for the first time all season, and it was Kobayashi, too, who scored the team's first points of the season in Turkey.

His drive of the season, and it just might have saved his drive, came last weekend at Valencia. He qualified badly, but when the safety car came out after Webber's accident, the team rolled the dice and opted to keep him out on the harder tyres while everyone else took the opportunity to make their mandatory stop. He ended up third, and to my surprise (and surely that of most people watching) he stayed there, easily able to keep Jenson Button's Mclaren behind him. When he finally pitted, 5 laps from the end, he fell to 9th, but where everyone else struggled all afternoon to overtake on a circuit hardly conducive to it, Kobayashi, armed with new soft tyres, forced his way past Alonso, and then did for Sebastian Buemi's Toro Rosso at the very last corner to finish 7th. For the first time we saw flashes of that form which so captivated us when he made his debut with Toyota. A mercurial, intermittently brilliant Japanese driver who lacks consistency? A bit of history repeating...

The three drivers making their F1 debuts with the new teams have life much more difficult in one respect, and much easier in another. On the one hand, nobody expects that Karun Chandhok, Bruno Senna and Lucas Di Grassi will be able to achieve anything much in HRTs and Virgins that are the thick end of 5 seconds off the pace. But at the same time, it's hard to see what they can do to make a name for themselves.

Di Grassi is teamed up with Timo Glock, the man who beat him to the GP2 title back in 2007, and once again it has been the German who has generally had the edge, outqualifying his Brazilian team mate 8-1 so far . Di Grassi has often been as much as a second a lap off his team mate's pace. It's not clear, though, whether that's an entirely fair comparison. Virgin Racing is hardly Mclaren or Ferrari. They're not really in a position to field two equally competitive cars, and they've been desperately playing catch-up on the development front ever since they lost most of their winter testing to recurring hydraulic problems. They made life still more difficult for themselves by building a car with too small a fuel tank to go the distance, and developments to address these problems, as well as to improve the performance of the cars, have not always been available at the same time for both drivers. Glock had a long-wheelbase VR01 with its larger fuel tank from Spain onwards, while Di Grassi had to wait until Turkey. I don't know whether the same delay has applied in respect of various aerodynamic updates, but it may be that the gap between the two drivers is not as large as it appears. F1, though, is a harsh world, and as long as Di Grassi is being outpaced by Glock, he's unlikely to get a chance with a more competitive team.

Karun Chandhok and Bruno Senna were previously team mates at ISport in GP2 a couple of years back. Then, as now, it's Ayrton's nephew who has generally had the edge over the son of the former Indian Motorsports Federation, though as with Glock and Di Grassi at Virgin, it is hard to know whether this is a reflection on their relative pace, or simply the luck of the draw with a slow and unreliable car. To be honest, I've never been entirely convinced that either really has what it takes to be in F1, although they've both generally kept out of trouble and the HRT is such a dog that the credentials of those driving it is rather a moot point.

On balance, I don't see anyone among the current crop of rookies who is likely to match the drivers at the front of the field at the moment. That, though, is not necessarily a sign that the sort is in trouble. There are always fallow years: did anyone of any real note emerge between 2003 and 2005? But perhaps I'll be wrong. The second half of the season will give us a clearer idea.

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.