Nearly Was, Almost Ran....

Handbags at dawn. Thanks to Nelsinho Piquet's post-sacking outburst, we now know what many of us have long been pretty sure of anyway. That Flavio Briatore wouldn't know a diffuser from a differential. He was never a racer in the real sense. He started out selling clothes for Benetton and was brought in to run the clothes manufacturer's race team in the late eighties. He's in Formula 1 because he sees opportunities to make money, not because he's in thrall to the smell of Castrol GTX, the sound of a Ferrari V12, or the sight of an F1 car on the limit through Eau Rouge. All of which makes him a symbol of everything that has gone wrong with the sport.

It doesn't mean he's not good at his job though. Just as the CEO of an electronics company needn't have the first clue how to wire a circuit board, so long as he knows who does, in the modern era, an F1 team boss doesn't necessarily have to know the first thing about motor racing, provided he knows how to manage people who do. Having a team principal who knows how to play the political game with Bernie and the FIA, and who knows who understand the racing side of things is arguably more important. It's not an approach without its downside - arguably one of the root causes of the banking crisis was that so many of the men at the helm of the banks had little real understanding of banking, but the evidence suggests that Flavio knows who to hire and fire. How did Renault win two world championships on a fraction of the budget of Mclaren or Ferrari? In part, because Flavio ensured the team had Alonso and Symonds on the payroll - he might not have understood the intricacies of what either man does, but he knew their worth....

And whatever Nelson Piquet might say, I'm afraid I think Flavio made the right call in giving him the boot after Hungary. Now, you could argue that he has been treated unfairly. Yes, he was comprehensively outpaced by his team mate throughout his year and a half at Renault, but his team mate was double world champion Fernando Alonso. In the past, that might have been enough that he would have been cut some slack. Unfortunately for him, a couple of years ago, one Lewis Hamilton, the man who beat him to the GP2 title in 2006, showed the world that there was no intrinsic reason why a sufficiently talented rookie couldn't take the fight to even Alonso straight away.

Piquet's been about half a second a lap off the pace of Alonso this year, and has struggled particularly in qualifying, seemingly unable to unlock the pace he was sometimes able to find in free practice. With overtaking so difficult in Formula 1 these days, and with the field so close, being half a second off the ultimate potential of the car in qualifying is a tremendous handicap. Piquet's problems with nailing a qualifying lap suggest that the problems are as much to do with his response to pressure situations as with any lack of ultimate pace. The team might have been willing to forgive him this in his first season, but when he showed no real sign of improvement in his second year in F1, his head was never going to be far from the chopping block.

Nelson might have denounced Flavio. Calling him his 'executioner'... But I can't help but think that Briatore was simply learning from past mistakes. For two years, the team ran Fisichella, another driver who showed flashes of real pace but who struggled when the pressure was on. For a while, I at least wondered when he might come good. He never really did. With the constructors so evenly matched, the team simply couldn't afford to carry a sub-par driver any longer in the vain hope that he might one day come good.

Perhaps it might all have been different if Piquet had ever shown flashes of real inspiration. If there had been even one or two race weekends on which he had simply outpaced Fernando Alonso. Despite on occasion being able to best Lewis Hamilton in GP2, that simply never came. On occasion he finished ahead of Alonso, but that always owed more to the vagaries of fuel strategy and the impossibility of overtaking in modern F1 than to any genuine superiority of pace. In the end, he will go down as yet another driver who shone in the junior formulae - British F3 champion in 2005, runner-up in GP2 in 2007 - but who was found to lack that extra something at the very highest level.

In fairness to Piquet, though, he came into the sport at perhaps the worst time to be an F1 debutant. The multi-race engine and gearbox rules provided a strong disincentive to letting a driver do a significant number of laps during Friday and Saturday practice. The knock-out qualifying format puts extra pressure on drivers to make every lap count (how different from the days, many years ago now, when drivers got two shots at qualifying - an hour on Friday and another hour on Saturday, with no limit on the number of laps in either session!). And, of course, for some years now, there's not been a Sunday morning warm-up available in which to concentrate solely on running with race fuel. And then there's been the ever greater restrictions placed on in-season, and even off-season, testing.

It will be an even bigger problem for the man who will replace him in Valencia. Romain Grosjean has, despite being Renault's official test driver this year, had only very minimal time in an F1 car, and almost none at all in this year's R29. How will he fare? In truth, it's hard to be sure - you never really know whether a driver has what it takes until he steps up to F1. His career record to date is a rather chequered one. Way off the pace in the F3 Euroseries in 2006, he beat Sebastien Buemi to the title the following year. He followed that with victory in the GP2 Asia Series in 2007/08 and, driving for double champions ART, looked a shoo-in for the summer series title at the outset.

It didn't quite work out that way. He showed flashes of real pace, but made too many dumb errors, perhaps most notably the needless move on Kamui Kobayashi in the sprint race at Barcelona in 2008 which probably cost him victory and certainly second place. This year, with Barwa-Addax, he hit the ground running, and runs second in the championship, but has not been on the podium since Monaco in May. It's not clear that he will necessarily prove any better than Piquet.

But is there anyone obviously better? Anthony Davidson, I'd argue. But leaving him out of it, there's not any single driver in the junior ranks at the moment who stands out ahead of the others. Lucas Di Grassi? A solid enough performer, but he never looked as quick as Glock when they were up against each other in GP2 in 2007. Nico Hulkenberg? Maybe, but he's had a habit of binning cars when he's tested for Williams - who obviously aren't so enamoured of him as to give him their second seat ahead of Kazuki Nakajima. Bruno Senna, maybe? Perhaps, but I've never been entirely convinced. Haven't Renault had enough trouble with people with famous surnames from Brazil? What about Andy Soucek? He's been dominating Formula 2, and as the cars are all run centrally by Palmer's engineers, we know that it's not down to the brilliance of his race engineers - always a possibility in GP2. On the other hand, though, who exactly is he beating? Aside, perhaps from Robert Wickens, is there anyone in the F2 field who's really known to be quick?

I think the team have made the right move, though. Whichever way you look at it, Renault were going to need at least one new driver in 2010, and quite possibly 2. In an era of very limited testing, putting Grosjean in the car gives the team a chance to assess his potential, and gives Grosjean an opportunity to get some F1 mileage under his belt should the team decide he's worth keeping on for 2010. And if he doesn't make the grade? At least they find out now and can concentrate on giving other candidates seat time over the winter. Flavio might not understand motor racing, but that doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't understand Formula 1.

The Curious Case of Felipe Massa

So did you stay awake through the Spanish Grand Prix? I did, but I must confess it was something of an effort. After the first lap, there was, by my counting, just one 'on track' pass through the whole race, when Jarno Trulli made a move on Adrian Sutil into turn one, early on. The Circuit di Catalunya has never been especially good for overtaking (memories of wheel to wheel battles in the early years of the circuit's existence notwithstanding, but both the 1991 and 1992 races were wet). The current F1 cars, with their combination of high downforce, aerodynamic instability and relatively low power, merely serve to emphasise the problem.

The Spanish Grand Prix was, thus, the dullest Grand Prix in some while. It was, though, a soporific race which provided a very interesting story. Namely, Felipe Massa is beginning to emerge as Ferrari's lead driver and, perhaps, the favourite for the World Championship. I think its safe to say that pretty well everyone assumed that Kimi Raikkonen would emerge as the de facto team leader at Ferrari. The team were, after all, paying him perhaps as much as six times what they pay Massa. The Finn had built up a reputation during his time at Mclaren for being the outright fastest driver in the world. It was simply assumed that Felipe Massa would pose no serious threat. Even when Massa went quicker in testing, many of us (certainly myself) thought that this was indicative only that Raikkonen was sand-bagging. At most, we thought, he was perhaps taking a little time to get used to the Ferrari and to the working methods of his new team.

And yet here we are, 4 races into the new season, and, except at Australia, where Massa was handicapped by a one-stop strategy and a pre-race engine change, he has looked the quicker of the two Ferrari drivers. Perhaps this is nothing more than an anomaly. Perhaps, come the season's end, we'll be musing about Kimi Raikkonen's strange, slow start at Ferrari. Maybe we'll even be wondering whether this was what let Alonso, or even Hamilton, through to the title. But perhaps not...

I was scouring through Felipe Massa's resume, trying to find any hints that he was a potential front runner in the way that Raikkonen is. Its far from obvious. When he came into Formula 1, in 2002, he was occasionally quick, but wild and erratic. He scored 4 points, which in a 2002 Sauber was a respectable enough haul for a newcomer, but he was outqualified 12-5 by team mate Heidfeld, and ended his season with a sadly characteristic error at the Degner Curves at Suzuka.

He spent a year testing with Ferrari, during which time it is claimed he matured considerably, but when he reappeared with Sauber in 2004, I well recall one Autosport journalist remarking along the lines that "He's so wild he looks like he's going to have an accident at every corner, but his car control is so incredible, he usually manages to keep it to one every race. Which is still not much use." In 2004, he was back at Sauber and paired with Giancarlo Fisichella. He had matured somewhat since his wild opening year but still, he was usually outpaced by the Italian and scored only half his number of points. If one was looking for a potential future world champion, then a man who, after a full season of F1, and another testing with Ferrari, was still being blown away by perpetual underachiever Giancarlo Fisichella surely wouldn't be the obvious bet.

The following season, his third and final at Sauber, saw him paired with a returning Jacques Villeneuve. It was here that perhaps, in retrospect, we began to see signs of what Massa might be capable of. Initially, he considerably outpaced his former world champion team mate, and as the season wore on, Villeneuve was eventually able to get on level terms with the Brazilian, but never really established superiority over him. Having said that, I've always thought Villeneuve one of the luckiest world champions there has ever been, and that by 2005, he was probably some way past his best. It must also be borne in mind that Nick Heidfeld, on balance, fared better against him the following year when they wered paired at BMW.

So, on balance, Massa's 3 year stint at Sauber did only enough to suggest that he was a decent racing driver - a good number 2 for a top team perhaps - and no more. When compared to what Alain Prost, Michael Schumacher or Ayrton Senna were able to do in second rate machinery in their first season, it can't be said that Massa stood out as the kind of driver who might frighten Raikkonen and emerge as a serious title contender.

What, then, of his time at Ferrari, alongside Michael Schumacher? On paper, the qualifying performances at least, seem to suggest that he was really rather close to the 7 time world champion - much more so than anyone might have expected. However, Mark Hughes, a man who frankly knows his stuff, is pretty sure that, when corrected for fuel load, Massa was on average 0.4s a lap slower than Schumacher. By contrast, the fuel-corrected gap between Alonso and Fisichella was just 0.2s My own analysis of fastest race laps last year suggest a similar margin of superiority was enjoyed by Schumacher on Sunday afternoons, too. Perhaps the one thing that can be said is that a more nuanced analysis of their relative performances shows Schumacher way out ahead in the early part of the season, but Massa much closer to him later on in the year. I have seen this put down to a change of race engineer - with Rob Smedley seemingly able to understand what Massa wanted from a car in a way that his previous engineer could not.

And if there is an explanation, perhaps this is it. Rightly or wrongly, Massa has never struck me as the most technical of drivers. I could be wide of the mark, but he doesn't strike me as someone who would simply know what he wanted from a car. Perhaps in Smedley he has finally found someone who has been able to work it out for him - or at least work with him much more effectively. The two wins towards the end of 2006 have convinced Massa that he is capable of winning Grands Prix, and that confidence, combined with a car and team with which he is familiar, has enabled him to really raise his game this year.

I was trying to think of a precedent for what has happened at Ferrari. For sure, illustrious drivers have been matched or even outpaced by newcomers before. One thinks, for instance of Nelson Piquet against reigning champion Niki Lauda at Brabham in 1978. Or, with neat symmetry, of Michael Schumacher against three time champion Nelson Piquet at Benetton some 14 years later. Perhaps by the end of the year, we might be adding the names of Hamilton and Alonso to that list. Its something which happens from time to time. It might happen still more often if inexperienced drivers more regularly walked straight into front running teams.

But an established star being outpaced by a well established number 2, a known quantity? That is actually rather rarer, by my reckoning. In fact, Massa's performances remind me of a very different personality with a very similar reputation some 20 years earlier.

By 1986, Nigel Mansell had been knocking around F1 for several years. There was no doubt that he could be fast on his day, but he didn't seem to be really quick. He was, for instance, generally outpaced by Elio De Angelis, a good rather than great driver, at Lotus in 1984. He also had a reputation for bottling it when the really big opportunities came - most notably at Monaco in 1984. Towards the end of 1985, in his first season at Williams, however, he began to show real signs of promise. First came a mightily assured second place in treacherous conditions at Spa. Then there was his first win, at Brands Hatch. Two weeks later, he repeated the trick at Kyalami.

For 1986, though, he was paired with Nelson Piquet, a double world champion who had made the Brabham team his own over the past seven years. It was simply assumed that he would put the upstart Mansell in his place. Piquet had acquired a reputation for being the fastest driver in the world at that point, after all. Yet, that wasn't the way it played out. In the first part of the season, Mansell was generally comfortably quicker. And in the second half, Piquet succeeded only in closing the gap - he never established superiority. The following year, the gap between the two seemed even greater, and it is only sheer blind luck which gave Nelson his third and final title that year.

It is hard to think of two more disparate people than the sunny Massa and the perpetually sullen, chippy Mansell, but their remarkable similarities in their early careers. Neither was an instantly fast and consistent, natural. Both struggled to shake off a reputation for being fallible under pressure. And now I wonder if the comparison might be an omen. Because, of course, in 1986, Piquet eventually fought back against the upstart and began to take points of him. And that battle enabled a little Frenchman by the name of Alain Prost to sneak through and win the title. He, of course, drove a Mclaren....