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.

New Kids On The Block

Last year, it seemed that the in-season testing ban, combined with the severe restrictions on race-weekend mileage imposed by the limits on engines and gearboxes that a team could use over the course of a season, had together frightened F1 teams away from hiring drivers without previous F1 experience. Doubtless, there was a fear that the lack of opportunity for drivers to get seat time in a Grand Prix car would seriously hamper any newcomers and Toro Rosso were alone in turning up at Melbourne last year with a driver who had never taken a Grand Prix start before - Sebastien Buemi. Others came in over the course of the year, as first Toro Rosso and then Renault became disillusioned with the drivers they had started the year with and replaced Sebastien Bourdais with British F3 champion, Jaime Alguersuari and Nelson Piquet Jr with Romain Grosjean, while Toyota drafted Kamui Kobayashi to fill in for an apparently injured Timo Glock but in comparison with previous years, last season was not a vintage one for fresh talent.

This year, though, there will be at least three drivers making their F1 debut in Bahrain in just over two weeks time, and possibly more if Campos, Stefan GP or USF1 defy the odds and make it to the grid this year. The three drivers who will definitely be there are the men who finished first, second and third in this year's GP2 championship, Nico Hulkenberg, Vitaly Petrov and Lucas Di Grassi.

Forced to pick one of these three as the man most likely to establish himself as a real star of the sport, I'd have to choose Willi Weber's latest protege, Hulkenberg. He is, after all, managed by the man who plucked one Michael Schumacher from obscurity, but more importantly than that, he won last year's GP2 championship fairly convincingly at his first attempt, despite the fact that most of his rivals were in their second or third year in the category, and comprehensively overshadowed his team mate Pastor Maldonado, who had been thought one of the fastest drivers in the series. He's also a previous winner of the F3 Euroseries, and helped Germany to the A1GP title back in 2006/07, while still a teenager.

The Williams seat looks like a good bet for the youngster too. The Williams FW32 should be competitive enough for him to show what he's capable of, but not so quick that he'll face the presssure of being thrown straight into a potentially title-winning team while he's still learning the ropes (although this didn't seem to do Lewis Hamilton any harm). In Rubens Barrichello, he's got a team mate who is vastly experienced, knows how to set up and develop a car, and who is fast enough that beating him will gain him credibility in the paddock, but who, crucially, is now going into his 18th season in the sport and who is almost certainly not quite as quick as he used to be. If Hulkenberg is really as good as his junior career suggests, he should be able to get the better of Barrichello from time to time, at least by the second half of the season.

The man whom he beat to the GP2 title, Russia's first F1 driver, Vitaly Petrov, will have a harder time at Renault. The Renault R30 is, on the balance of probabilities, likely to be about as competitive as the Williams, but if you were a young driver going into his first F1 season and you were given the choice, you'd probably prefer to be paired up with Barrichello than with Robert Kubica, a man whom many (including myself) see as being in the same league as champions Alonso and Hamilton. And that's before you take into account the fact that the second Renault has proven to have been something of a poisoned chalice. Add to that the fact that, unlike Hulkenberg or Di Grassi, he has little previous F1 testing experience, and he faces a very steep learning curve indeed. Perhaps the fact that Petrov Sr. is reported to be putting up £10m for his son's drove will ensure that he gets a decent shot.

But even if he does, is he quick? It's hard to say. When he arrived in GP2 back in the middle of 2006 he appeared to be a rich kid who was desperately out of his depth - perhaps not surprising when you consider that he had little single-seater experience beyond 'Formula Lada Revolution', whatever that may be. He stuck at it and learned the ropes, though, winning his first race in 2007, becoming a more regular front-runner in 2008 and finishing runner-up last year, something which suggests that, whether or not he's really from the very top drawer, he knows roughly what he's doing. And when you consider that he's a late starter, considerably less experienced than most racing drivers of his 25 years, he could yet turn out to be better than his junior career has suggested. There's no doubt he got the drive ahead of more obviously qualified candidates thanks to Daddy's millions, but it's now up to him to prove he deserves to be thought of as more than just a pay-driver.

Lucas Di Grassi wound up third in last year's GP2 championship and is the final member of this year's rookie trio. The Virgin VR01 is a rather less enticing prospect than a Williams or a Renault drive, but the vast pool of young drivers chasing a small number of race seats, an ambitious young hopeful would probably be well advised to take any seat going. And he might be feeling very glad he didn't sign for USF1 or Campos right now. Di Grassi has never struck me as being a really quick driver, a decent journeyman, but not someone whom I'd expect to see emerge as a regular race winner. In GP2 he's always been there or thereabouts, somewhere near the front, but even in the year he spent with multiple title winners ART, he never established himself as a regular winner.

It was a steady points-scoring approach that enabled him to come close to snatching the 2007 title from his Virgin team mate, Timo Glock, but the German driver always looked a good deal quicker, and frankly it would have been a travesty had Di Grassi snatched the title from under his nose simply because his ART machine never broke... He was reported to have been well respected as a development driver when he was a tester at Renault, though, and that could turn out to be more important than those last couple of tenths of outright pace in his new role at Virgin. On the plus side, the car hasn't looked too slow out of the box at Jerez, and it looks as though Nick Wirth's gamble on building a car without reference to a wind-tunnel just might pay off, but so far, the car has proven woefully unreliable.

If he wants to establish a long term future in F1, Di Grassi will have to do what he couldn't do in GP2 and get on terms with Timo Glock. In the first half of the year, he might be given the benefit of the doubt, but F1 is an unforgiving world and if he isn't matching Glock by the second half of 2010, he'll never be anything more than a journeyman in the eyes of the Grand Prix paddock. His task is the same as that facing Hulkenberg, and most dauntingly, Petrov, to get on terms with a much more experienced team mate. It's asking a lot, but since Lewis Hamilton rewrote the rules as far as what can be expected of a talented newcomer, anything less may not be enough.

The Incredible Hulk? GP2 In Review

Since its inception, I've been enthusiastic about GP2. Always making time to watch the coverage, first on Eurosport, and then more recently on ITV4. This year, though, I ciuldn't summon up much enthusiasm. Maybe it was the fact that the GP2 coverage had switched from Eurosport with its informative and entertaining team of Martin Haven and Gareth Rees, to the seemingly disinterested and certainly uninteresting bunch at Setanta. By the time Setanta had collapsed and the GP2 coverage had reverted back to its natural home at Eurosport, I'd cancelled my subscription so was reliant on rather patchy (Finnish language) coverage in one of the murkier corners of the internet to keep in touch with F1's leading feeder series, on those occasions when I could be bothered.

Maybe, though, it was just the sense that the 2009 GP2 series felt a bit of an irrelevance. The vast bulk of the field seemed to be made up of drivers who had been around in the series for a while, who had had their opportunities and been found wanting. Lucas Di Grassi was back for, what, his fourth season in GP2 with reigning champions, Racing Engineering, who went from having one of the prettiest liveries on the grid last year in their Repsol colours to one of the most jaw-droppingly awful when they were rebranded 'Fatburner Racing'. And Di Grassi did nothing in his fourth season in the category to suggest he is anything more than a 'nearly was'. His only hope of progressing into F1 must surely lie in how badly the other Renault test-driver is currently doing in the race seat. Talking of which...

...Romain Grosjean had the same kind of opportunity that Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton seized with both hands when he was signed with ART last year. He didn't take it, and while it lookd in the early part of the year that he was going to make amends for that with Barwa-Addax, it didn't work out that way. He was the class of the field in the opening races, though to judge by the fact his closest rival was team mate Vitaly Petrov, that might have owed as much to the old Campos team having got the car right as to anything the driver was doing, but as the season went on, he found himself increasingly being outperformed by Petrov, and after a dominant win in the Monaco Feature Race, he never won again.

Vitaly Petrov is, without doubt, the best driver yet to have come out of Russia. He didn't show badly this year in the GP2, winning a couple of races - feature races at that, but all the same, given that he was in his third full season in the category, nothing he did really screamed out "Future F1 star". He clearly has a lot of money behind him and isn't out of his depth in a powerful single seater, and a such, he might get a ride in one of the new F1 teams, providing at least one or two of them actually make the grid next year. I'd be surprised if he amounts to much when he gets there, though you can never be sure. He was, let's not forget, the man who finished second in the title race behind Nico Hulkenberg.

What of the champion, Hulkenberg? I'm not quite sure what to make of him. There's much to suggest that he might be a real talent. He won the title quite comfortably at his first attempt, though we'll never know for sure quite what might have happened had Grosjean raced the whole season. This was quite impressive, given that he was up against a host of drivers in their second or third year in the category. It will go some way to erasing the still-awkward memory of his lacklustre first attempt at the F3 Euroseries back in 2007. What leaves me a little uncertain about Hulkenberg's ultimate potential is that I never saw any sign of the kind of dominance that Rosberg and Hamilton demonstrated on occasion. A part of me thinks that a driver who is really the class of the field ought to be able to rack up more than 3 feature race wins over the season. On the other hand, Timo Glock didn't manage to, and he's looked at home in F1. And Hulkenberg was a rooki up against an awful lot of sophomores and seniors (the university metaphor seems curiously apt, anyone spending more than 3 years in GP2 is surely wasting his time and someone else's money.) We'll find out soon enough, if as is widely rumoured, he ends up partnering Rubens Barrichello at Williams next year.

For me, the disappointment of the year was the lack of pace from Hulkenberg's ART team mate, Pastor Maldonado. The Venezuelan has been the beneficiary of the state oil company largesse once showered on Ernesto Viso, and in the past had looked quick if rather wild. In the latter part of last year, at Piquet Sports, he seemed to find some consistency to marry to his prodiguous pace. This year, though, that once mighty pace seemed to vanish out of the window. About the one thing that can be said in his favour is that the second ART seat has been something of a poison chalice in recent years. Ask Michael Ammermuller... Or Luca Filippi.

Another man signed to a title winning team who failed to live up to expectations was Giedo Van Der Garde. At the start of the year, in spite of a rather torrid time in the sideshow GP2 Asia Series, I expected the reigning Renault World Series champion to be a serious contender in the ISPort car. As it was he was left scrabbling for reverse-grid wins, and only really hit his stride late on at Monza. Maybe it was simply that ISport have lost their way a bit - Diego Nunes was even less of a factor in the other car.


Of the rest? None really figured. Kamui Kobayashi never looked like repeating the form that took him to the GP2 Asia crown against admittedly hardly stellar opposition. Team mate Jerome D'Ambrosio figured early on in the year, but fell into something of a trough mid-season, from which he never really recovered. Alvaro Parente surprised everyone by winning a Feature Race - at Spa no less, with the team formerly known as BCN, but at 25 is probably already too old to make the break into F1 (though you never know). The likes of Luca Filippi, Roldan Rodriguez and Javier Villa continued to tread water, probably burning the family cash to be there. Davide Valsecchi never really lived up to his promise when he replaced Romain Grosjean at Barwa Addax and down at the back of the field, the lack of strength in depth in this year's GP2 grid was all-too apparent. Ricardo Texeira, Nelson Panciatici and Michael Herck all looked like men with no business racing at this level.

So, not a classic year for the series. If GP2 is to maintain its credibility as a feeder formula for F1, it is crucial that Hulkenberg gets on at Williams, if indeed that is where he winds up. After Grosjean and Piquet Jr, I suspect there may be an ever greater reluctance among F1 team bosses to hire on the basis of a good showing in GP2 alone. More to the point, when Red Bull's large junior programme all but entirely ignores GP2 now (its drivers being placed variously in British F3, Formula 2 and WSR) and when last year's British F3 front runners, Jaime Alguersuari, Oliver Turvey and Brendon Hartley all gave GP2 a miss, one wonders whether there is a risk that Bruno Michel's baby is fast becoming the new F3000

The Young Pretenders

It can't have escaped the many young drivers aspiring to make the breakthrough into Formula 1 next year that there could be a number of seats available in the near future. Nelson Piquet Jr, Sebastien Bourdais and Kazuki Nakajima have all underperformed thus far this year and questions have to be asked as to whether they will last the season let alone retain their seats into next. One wonders, too, whether Giancarlo Fisichella and perhaps even Rubens Barrichello are now into their final season of racing now. If all of the above go, that's five seats opening up, compared to the one this year, and of course there is always the possibility that the FIA's efforts to bring new teams into the sport will come off and USGPE, or ISport or whoever, could be looking for drivers too.

In recent years, the vast majority of F1 debutants have come up through GP2. There have been exceptions - most notably Sebastian Vettel and Robert Kubica, but all the same, if you are looking to get a Grand Prix drive, then the FOM-owned feeder series appears to be the place to be. All of which begs the question, with the series kicking off in Barcelona last weekend, who might be near the top of the F1 bosses' shopping lists?

Even ahead of a dominant display at the weekend, Renault development driver Romain Grosjean, who won the previous year's GP2 Asia series, had to be one of the title favourites. A pole, an error-free victory in the feature race and a second place in the sprint which perhaps ought to have been a win (Edoardo Mortara on one occasion at least played very fast and loose with the 'one move' rule in defending his lead) - it was a marked contrast to his performance at the opening round last year, where he looked the fastest man on the track most of the time, but threw away a possible sprint race win in a moment of impetuousness.

I've said before that, for a driver to really stand out, he needs to win the GP2 series at his first attempt, especially if he's with one of the top teams as Grosjean was last year. But I wouldn't write him off just yet. Last year, he had the pace, but made too many errors - if he can demonstrate this year that this was down to youthful inexperience rather than a fundamental character flaw, he could yet be in for a race seat at Renault in 2010. Perhaps the one thing casting doubt on his performance was that the hitherto rather unremarkable Vitaly Petrov was able to finish second in the feature race in the sister-Barwa car, suggesting that, for all that GP2 is supposedly a spec-formula, the team may have played as big a part as the driver in their success last weekend.

For Lucas Di Grassi, it may already be too late. He's now going into his fourth season in GP2, and his failure to win the title for ART in 2007 was probably enough to lead many of F1's movers and shakers to write him off as not quite the real deal. That said, he's not quite in the same boat as Giorgio Pantano, who took nearly a decade to win the title (he first arrived in F3000 in 2000...) If there are enough seats available at the end of the year, then a good run at the title in his amusingly-named 'Fat Burner Racing Engineering' machine (and to think, last year, the Repsol liveried Racing Engineering cars were the prettiest on the grid...) just might be enough to secure him a drive.

In GP2, you can never write off Frederic Vasseur's ART squad and it will be interesting to see what the highly rated F3 Euroseries Champion Nico Hulkenberg can do with them this year. He had an oddly anonymous weekend in Barcelona, though he was hamstrung by his failure to get off the line on Saturday afternoon. Still, it's hard to ignore the fact that in the Sunday morning sprint race, his team mate Pastor Maldonado looked a good deal more racy, climbing back up to 6th after falling to 10th away from the start, in spite of the fact that passing at the Circuit di Catalunya is notoriously difficult.

That though, may be a reflection as much of Maldonado's potential as any shortcomings on Hulkenberg's part. The Venezuelan driver has looked intermittently quick ever since arriving in GP2 in 2007 - he's particularly quick at Monaco and showed increasingly impressive pace through last year at Piquet Sports - his performance in the wet at Spa standing out in my mind. He's never been talked about before as an F1 prospect though, perhaps because of an erratic, wild side. If he can put all that behind him and win the title, it's possible the GP team principals will sit up and take notice, but now he's with ART and into his third season, he has no excuses.

What of the rest? Who else will be worth watching? The DAMS squad won the GP2 Asia series comfortably over the winter and while series champion Kamui Kobayashi looked rather anonymous all weekend, Belgian Jerome D'Ambrosio, the former Formula Master champion, looked a good deal more impressive. He may not quite have had the pace of the Barwa-Campos-Addax cars, but two podium finishes in the opening two races suggests that he could be a factor as the season goes on. Whether or not he's really quite F1 material I'm not sure, but he came on increasingly strong as the GP2 Asia series progressed earlier in the year...

What of 2007 Champions and rumoured F1 aspirants, ISport? For the second year running, I'm not entirely convinced by their driver line-up. Giedo Van Der Garde won last year's Renault World Series title, but has thus far looked all at sea in GP2, something I find hard to understand. Was last year's WSR field second rate? Were P1 Motorsport putting together a much quicker car than their rivals? Have ISport gone dramatically backwards since last year? Or is it simple a case of car and driver failing to gel? Sometimes it is hard to understand why a driver can be so quick in one series and so lost in another....

Diego Nunes looks a shade quicker thus far.He sometimes impressed last year in the unfancied DPR entry and was in a points-scoring position before becoming an innocent victim of the Di Grassi/Parente collision in the feature race. He looks like someone who can win races, but I wonder if a title might be beyond him....

Arden were once the kings of F3000, and with Heikki Kovalainen, they had a serious run at the very first GP2 title in 2005. Since then, the team appear to have fallen from their perch. Perhaps it's because owner Christian Horner has other things on his mind these days. Perhaps they've just not had the drivers to get the job done - although that Sebastien Buemi has looked pretty handy in an F1 car. This year, they've got Euroseries runner-up Edoardo Mortara and British F3 front-runner Sergio Perezat the wheel. And while Perez had a torrid time last weekend, Mortara was able to hold off Grosjean and win the reverse grid event in his first GP2 weekend (if you discount the GP2 Asia series anyway). I'd be surprised if he mounts a serious title bid, but he might just get the best of his old F3 rival, Hulkenberg.

Of the rest? There are a fair few race winners in the field. Andi Zuber is back for yet another year, but after failing to make a serious impression with Piquet Sports last year and never quite matching Timo Glock at ISport the year before I can't now see his career going anywhere. Luca Filippi was back on form at SuperNova last weekend, running near the front after a miserable and lacklustre year spent at ART and Arden in 2008, and he's teamed up with Javier Villa, who seems to have been around forever despite only being 21 years old. Karun Chanhok, having failed to get the measure of Bruno Senna last year at ISport, is unlikely to do any better teamed up with Alvaro Parente at Ocean Racing, the team that as BCN generally brought up the rear last year. Parente I once had a higher opinion of - British F3 Champion, Renault World Series Champion and winner of his first race in GP2. Since then, though, he hasn't really made an impression and his SuperNova team mate Andy Soucek usually got the better of him as the season wore on.

The bottom half of the GP2 series seems to me to be made up of those with few qualifications to race at this level beyond the connections or family wealth to pay for the drive. What Ricardo Texeira, Nelson Panciatici, Alberto Valerio or Michael Herck have done to suggest they have a future as professional racing drivers is beyond me. Come to that, even some of the aforementioned former race winners are probably still on the grid only because they have money and connections - does anyone really still believe Javier Villa is the next Fernando Alonso? Or that Andi Zuber will be picked up by an F1 team?

The shame of it is that while the bottom half of the GP2 grid is made up of makeweights, a number of potentially seriously quick drivers can't, or have chosen not to, join GP2 at all. Jaime Alguesuari, Oliver Turvey and Brendon Hartley, the three stand out drivers from British F3 last year, have all gone to WSR instead. And when one looks at the sheer cost of GP2, it's hardly any surprise. Why would Red Bull or Racing Steps Foundation (who pay the bills for the above three) pay perhaps three quarters of a million to place their driver in one of the weaker teams in the GP2 field? How much could any of them really do with a seat at DPR or Durango? How serious a measure of future up and coming talents is GP2 if it is restricted to the very best-funded young single seater racers?

To go back to the question I started the article with, I wouldn't be surprised to see Romain Grosjean make the move up to F1, and if Nico Hulkenberg lives up to the promise he has shown in F3, he too might find an F1 berth. But it wouldn't surprise me if, after a few years in which GP2 has been de rigeuer for would-be F1 drivers, we revert once more to the situation which had prevailed in the dying years of F3000, where the best drivers skip the category altogether and are plucked straight from F3, from the Renault World Series, and perhaps even from the new Formula 2 category.

If at First You Don't Succeed... GP2 In Review

When Giorgio Pantano made his F3000 debut, back in 2001, Juan Pablo Montoya was just beginning his Grand Prix career at Williams and Fernando Alonso was a fresh-faced teenager doing remarkable things with a hastily put together Minardi. Lewis Hamilton was still racing karts and F1's newest winner, Sebastien Vettel had not long turned 13 years old. Save for a single, rather disappointing season with the failing Jordan team in 2004, he's been plying his trade in F1's premier feeder category every year since.

Last weekend, at his 7th attempt, he finally lifted the title, and became the GP2 series' fourth champion. Pantano had been competitive throughout his time in F3000 and GP2, but had never quite looked like a potential title winner before. The closest he had come was all the way back in 2002, when he wound up second, behind Sebastien Bourdais though only after Enge was stripped of the title following a positive test for marijuana - a drug which it is hard to imagine could improve a racing driver's performance. The question is, though, did Pantano win because he finally came good, or because the quality of the opposition he faced was rather lower than in years past?

The answer, I suspect, is a mix of the two. Giorgio Pantano was undoubtedly, for the balance of the season, the quickest driver in the field. The fact that he was driving for Racing Engineering, a team which, until now, have not been true front-runners. His four feature race wins illustrate the point that, over the course of the season, nobody was as consistently quick as Pantano. But for misfortune in Spa and Valencia and a silly mistake exiting the pits at the final round at Monza, Pantano could easily have won 7 of the 11 Saturday afternoon races this year. He still continued to make those unforced errors though - at Spa, at Monza, at Valencia and at Monaco he cost himself points with moments of madness. If he were a young gun of 21 or 22, that might be understandable, but at nearly 30, it seems to point to a more fundamental limitation in Pantano as a driver.



Champion at the 7th attempt. Giorgio Pantano.


So who was he up against? Well, the answer to that question perhaps explains the degree of cynicism, at least among those who might otherwise sign up a GP2 champion for F1, that remains about Pantano. In fact, the only man to win more than one feature race all season was Brazilian Lucas Di Grassi, who joined the championship only at the fourth round, after Ben Hanley and Campos Racing had parted ways. After a 2007 season with ART in which Di Grassi proved slightly disappointing, he went some way to repairing his reputation, looking like a serious title contender for a while, despite missing the opening six races. On balance, he was my choice for driver of the season, not least because his team, Campos, were hardly among the front-runners in the past. While Pantano peppered his season with a number of small errors (including the mistake at Spa which cost Di Grassi any remaining chance of the title) it is hard to point to any similar mistakes on Di Grassi's part.

Of course, the man who did take the title fight to the final round was Ayrton's nephew, Bruno Senna. He's talked of as the man most likely to move up to F1 next year, though one can't help but feel that his name plays no small part here. Bruno didn't do a bad job in his second season in GP2, but didn't really stand out in the way that Hamilton, Rosberg, Glock or Kovalainen did. There were days when he was imperious - Silverstone in the rain on Sunday morning springs to mind - but in the end, he won but one of the 11 feature races, and was only able to add one sprint race to that tally. Given he was driving for ISport, the reigning champions and arguably the best prepared team on the grid, it seems fair to say that more would be expected of a potential F1 star. That said, unlike more or less everyone else on the grid, he didn't spend his teenage years in karts, and perhaps has more scope for improvement than most of his rivals.



Senna was too inconsistent to take the fight to Pantano.

Before the start of the year, I had predicted that Romain Grosjean would end up running away with the championship. He seemed to have it all. He had dominated the GP2 Asia series, and he was signed up with double champions ART. In the event, it didn't work out that way. The year started badly, with his qualifying down in 11th for the opening race at Barcelona. Come the race, though, he looked far and away the quickest man on the circuit, and despite the fact that the new GP2 cars were clearly not as conducive to overtaking as the old ones, he clawed his way up to 5th. The Sprint race should have been his for the taking, but following a safety car, he screwed up his entry to the final chicane, allowed Kamui Kobayashi a run on him and then practically had the Japanese newcomer off the road in retaking the lead. It was a stupid move which earned him a drive through penalty and cost him a points finish - probably a win. That was just one weekend, but it was somehow reflective of a season which yielded just two wins. He always seemed quick on race day, but his qualifying was erratic and there were just too many mistakes.

So what of the rest? I have to confess to being more than a little surprised to discover the unpredictable Pastor Maldonado had climbed to a comfortable 5th place in the drivers' standings by the season, snapping at the heels of such as Grosjean and Senna in the points tables. Sometimes he was anonymous, and other times, most particularly at Monaco and whenever he found himself on a wet track - his performance in the rain at Spa on Sunday morning springs to mind. Perhaps a sign that, while he may be mentally fragile, his innate car control is of the highest order.


Maldonado came on increasingly strong in the second half of the year.

Sebastien Buemi took over Javier Villa's role as the master of Sunday morning sprint race wins - he picked up 2 wins and another 3 podiums. He's talked about as a potential F1 driver, but in all honesty it's hard to see why he'd be a better bet than Bruno Senna. Arden may not be quite the force that they were when the scooped one F3000 title after another, but they're still a competitive race team, and I wouldn't hire a man who had never even won a GP2 Feature race.

Of the rest, Alvaro Parente showed himself, on balance, the most promising of the complete GP2 rookies (i.e. those newcomers who had not raced in GP2 Asia). He won the opening race, which turned out to be the highlight of his season, but intermittently, he ran at or near the front for much of the rest of the season. His greatest weakness seemed to be an inability to get to grips with qualifying on occasion - twice he made the front row, but twice he was as far back as 21st on the grid. Whether the lion's share of the blame lay with him or with SuperNova was never entirely clear. His team mate Andy Soucek's form was similarly up and down. Vitaly Petrov was the season's other Feature race winner, picking up the pieces after Pantano ran out of fuel in Valencia. He looked a much improved driver this year (as indeed his performances in the GP2 Asia series had hinted he might be) and certainly the best racer ever to come out of Russia. Whether he is potential F1 material in another matter.

If the above drivers were the cream of 2008, then there can be little doubt that nobody had a worse year than Luca Filippi. Widely touted (not least on these pages) as a potential title contender with ART, the wealthy Italian never really figured all season. He was unable to get any kind of a handle on Grosjean and parted ways with the team for Arden. There, he was scarcely any more competitive - only at Valencia did he get anywhere near the pace, and there he ended up disgracing himself by running his former team mate off the road and out of the race. If his family put up the money, it is possible he could redeem himself next year, but I would imagine the F1 teams will already have written him off. He ended the season 19th, with just 6 points to his name.


China will have to wait a little longer for a truly first rate race driver. Ho Pin Tung was an also-ran.


If Filippi was desperately underwhelming, Marko Asmer's year was worse still. The Estonian who had dominated the 2007 British F3 championship seemed utterly lost at Fisichella Motorsport when he joined the team mid-season. A BMW tester, he clearly knows roughly what to do with a racing car, and his inability to climb off the back couple of rows of the GP2 grid all year was something of a mystery, at least from the outside looking in. FMS may have looked a bit of a mess this year, but it is worth remembering that Adam Carroll was able to pick up a 2nd row starting position with the team in Turkey.

At the very back were the usual suspects. Christian Bakkerud appeared no more convincing than last year, and after injuring himself at Monaco, he made way for Andy Soucek at SuperNova. Michael Herck looked out of his depth at DPR, and none of the various lost souls who drove the second BCN Competicion car had any real business being in GP2.

I suspect that, in the fullness of time, the 2008 season will not be remembered as a classic year for GP2. In the first three years, the series had at least one - and in 2005, two standout drivers who looked like real F1 material. This year, one couldn't help feeling there was nobody in the Vettel/Hamilton/Kubica class, or even at the level of Rosberg or Glock, come to that. The racing wasn't helped by a new chassis which didn't seem as well suited to wheel-to-wheel racing as the old GP2 car had done, being too sensitive to turbulence and dirty air from a car in front.

2009 might be a different story though. The GP2 series organisers have shown before that they are willing to tweak the chassis rules, and one hopes that they might spend the winter working out how they can improve overtaking in the series. More importantly, though, there are some really promising drivers looking at moving up into the GP2 series next year. Niko Hulkenberg, F3 Euroseries Champion elect and the latest prodigy of one Willy Weber will be one to watch. Oliver Turvey and Sergio Perez, currently battling it out for the British F3 championship, both have tests lined up, and rumour has it that the man who beat Vettel to the 2006 Euroseries Crown, Paul Di Resta, might be returning to single seaters after 2 years marooned in the DTM. 2008 might not have been a classic year, but the average GP2 race was still the best place to see big powerful single seaters really racing. Here's hoping 2009 will produce a crop of real talent.

Trusting to luck

Its a cliche often repeated that "bad luck tends to balance out over the season". Its true as often as not. A driver may emphasise a misfortune in explaining away his failure to win a title, but all too frequently, the rival who beat him to the championship will have suffered an identical misfortune at another race. One might point to Michael Schumacher's engine failure in Japan last year, but that would be to forget Fernando Alonso's equally costly wheel nut disaster in Hungary. When a championship is particularly finely balanced, as is the case this year, it is possible for luck to play a decisive part in determining the winner. Usually, however, luck evens out, and other, more decisive factors come into play.

It isn't always so. The law of averages dictates that from time to time, someone is going to end up being repeatedly, and persistently unlucky. You don't have to give credence to voodoo, or witchcraft, or the idea that some people are just "born unlucky". Its just a logical consequence of the idea that misfortune is randomly distributed. Most people will suffer an average amount of bad luck, but a small minority will, by sheer chance, suffer a very high number of such "unlucky events". We see it from time to time in Formula 1. Remember when, in the early 1990s always seemed to be Johnny Herbert's Lotus that ended up broken by the side of the road? Or think about the sheer number of times that plain misfortune kept Chris Amon from winning a Grand Prix. Come to that, but for luck, might Kimi Raikkonen have been a double world champion by now? (I'm thinking 2003 and 2005, in case you're wondering).

Clive and Alianora have been having an interesting conversation about the GP2 series over at F1 Insight. I agree with much of what they say. Certainly, the category dies not seem to be producing a driver of the calibre of Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg or Heikki Kovalainen this year. What strikes me most, though, is that the championship appears to be developing into a fight between a very good racer who has had more than his share of bad luck, and a rather mediocre driver who has consistently had the cards fall in his favour.

Lets deal with Lucas Di Grassi first. The Brazilian comes with a rather uncertain pedigree. He arrived in GP2 last year with Durango having taken third in the Formula 3 Euroseries in 2005. Durango were thought of as one of the series' weakest teams, and Di Grassi's smattering of points finishes looked respectable enough and was certainly more than his team mate managed. A deal with ART for 2007 was therefore something of a make-or-break moment for the young Brazilian.

To my mind, its been a matter of his having been broken rather than made. ART have been the team to be with for the past two years. There's no doubt that their driver line-up hasn't exactly hindered them. Rosberg, Premat and Hamilton were all seriously quick drivers. Nonetheless, I think its reasonable to assume that if you can't win with ART, you probably can't win at all.

The problem is, Di Grassi hasn't been winning. His victory at Turkey last weekend was his first all season. Given he's a second year driver with one of the top teams, and given that the GP2 series has seen no less than 10 different winners, that doesn't exactly suggest he's been doing an outstanding job this season.

Nonetheless, that win was enough to haul him, briefly, to the top of the points standings. Why? Unlike almost all of his rivals, he's not been unfortunate enough to get caught up in silly accidents, and he's had impeccable reliability from his car while others have struggled with persistent gearbox woes (seemingly the fault of suppliers Mecachrome, rather than the teams themselves, for the most part). The end result is that he has been able to gather points by stealth, to the point where he is now the only realistic challenger to Glock in the battle to be GP2 champion. Of course, to a degree, the old saw is true, and you really do make your own luck. Di Grassi may not have been especially quick, but he has made few mistakes, at least until the sprint race on Sunday saw him hit Pantano, pick up a drive-through penalty and finish outside the points for the first time since the opening round in Bahrain.

In the end, though Di Grassi's position owes an awful lot to the fact that he has retired from just one race, while Glock has failed to finish on 5 occasions. The bare statistics indicate that Glock has won 3 of this year's 15 races. That figure really ought to be higher. Glock picked up steering damage at the opening corner of the opening race in Bahrain, and claims that only this prevented him taking the fight to Luca Filippi there. His performance in Barcelona suggests this might well have been more than mere bravado. The only front-running driver not to pit under the safety car in the opening laps of the feature race, he was left having to find 30+ seconds over his rivals. Despite this, he clawed his way back to beat all except Bruno Senna. He then promptly won the sprint race from 7th on the grid - just to ram the point home. Qualifying in Monaco didn't go quite to plan, but a steady, consistent drive brought a podium finish.

Then his season began to fall apart. Pole at Magny Cours came to nothing when his race ended in a silly startline collision with fellow front-row man and team mate, Andy Zuber. Neither were entirely blameless, but in my eyes, it was Zuber who must take the lion's share of the responsibility for the accident. Such was Glock's pace at the circuit, that it was still possible he might score in the sprint race, but a gearbox failure early on meant that we would never know.

The Silverstone race brought two further non-finishes. A likely podium finish in the feature race fell by the wayside when his electronics packed up, and a fantastic drive through the field from the back in the sprint race was ended by a braking error from Zaugg, which saw Glock punted off the road. There was more strife in Hungary, where again Glock looked far and away the quickest man on the circuit in the sprint race, but a wheel-gun error at his mandatory
pit stop sent him tumbling down the order, and he ended up spinning still further back, probably in sheer frustration.

Turkey brought a sprint race win, but it really should have brought a feature race win too. Again, Glock found himself a victim of a bad call during a safety car period, and was left with the difficult task of building up such a lead that he could afford a tyre stop and still retain his position. In the circumstances, his fourth place was a very remarkable achievement indeed.

There's one area, though, where this kind of misfortune counts for little, and that's reputation. People know that Glock is quick. Sebastien Bourdais reckoned that, had he stayed in Champ Car (where he made Rocketsports look like far more of a serious operation than in fact it was), Glock might have been the one man who could have posed a serious threat to him. He's bagged a BMW test drive, and Toyota are rumoured to be giving serious consideration giving the young German Ralf Schumacher's race seat next year. Di Grassi, on the other hand, shows no sign of progressing beyond GP2, even if he does luck into the title.

END NOTE: Something that's always bothered me about Blogger is the difficulty of producing a complete post index. I've decided to bite the bullet and create my own list here. All the previous Motorsports Ramblings articles in date order.